The diesel truck stop that Noble Energy spent the spring trying to build on 86 acres above Batterson Park Pond is finished. Not voted down. Not approved. Withdrawn.
The end came, fittingly for a project that drew months of testimony, near the bottom of an otherwise routine agenda. At the June 17 meeting of the Farmington Conservation and Inland Wetlands Commission, where commissioners had expected to finally close a public hearing continued four times since April, there was no hearing to close. Conservation and Wetlands Agent Bruce Cyr told the board the applicant had sent, in his words, "a little short email" withdrawing not one application but two: the inland wetlands application, and the companion Planning and Zoning application.
"Do we have to close the public hearing?" asked Ned Statchen, the commission's chair.
No, Cyr said. The application was withdrawn. Asked whether the company had given any reason, he said it had not.
That is the whole of it, on the record. What changed Noble Energy's mind is not in the record. This is the kind of ending the Mercury is built to catch: not the announcement, but the quiet line in the record where months of argument simply stop.
What was being proposed
Noble Energy Real Estate Holdings wanted to put a refueling and diesel truck stop, a fuel pump station, and a warehouse on Lot 8261 Fienemann Road, an 86-acre parcel where the land slopes down toward Batterson Park Pond. The plan had already shrunk over the course of the hearings, as Noble Energy brought a smaller version back to the commission in April: the restaurant in the original application was dropped, and the warehouse was scaled back.
The pond is the reason a wetlands fight was a fight at all. Batterson Park Pond is a public water body the state is spending roughly $10 million to restore, and the truck stop's 86 acres drain toward it. A facility built for diesel trucks, sitting uphill of a public pond, is the sort of thing an inland wetlands commission exists to scrutinize. Noble Energy's team argued the opposite of what neighbors feared: that the project would help the pond, capturing and treating road runoff that currently reaches it untreated. The commission never ruled on that claim.
A fight that drew a crowd
By the time the application disappeared, it had collected the kind of opposition most local land-use proposals never see. The commission had granted intervener status to New Britain resident Stephanie Roman under Connecticut's environmental-intervention statute, and the hearings turned, at one point, into a contest over a single number: whether the project would cut flow to one slope wetland by about 5 percent, as the applicant's team maintained, or by 56.8 percent, as the intervener's analysis claimed. Noble Energy had also redesigned its stormwater plan around biofiltration units in an effort to answer those concerns.
The opposition was not confined to the wetlands commission. On June 9, Farmington's Town Council, which gets no vote on either the wetlands or the zoning application, weighed in anyway, issuing two unanimous negative referrals against the truck stop and a separate housing proposal.
None of that is why Noble Energy withdrew. The company did not say why it withdrew. But it is the ground the withdrawal landed on.
What the withdrawal undoes
A withdrawal is not a denial, and for the town the practical effect is the same in the near term: there is nothing left to decide. With both applications pulled, no truck stop application is pending before the wetlands commission. And the rezoning request the project depended on, a partial change from R40 residential to B1 business zoning, is gone too, which means the July 27 public hearing the Town Plan and Zoning Commission had scheduled is off. For readers keeping track of which Farmington board actually decided this, the answer turned out to be none of them. The applicant did.
For now, the 86 acres above Batterson Park Pond stay as they are: wooded, sloping, and draining toward a pond the state is still trying to clean up.
This coverage is supported by Farmington Storage, 155 Scott Swamp Road, the only storage facility in Connecticut with Museum air. Some things are worth keeping exactly as they are. Eighty-six acres above a pond, for one. Whatever you've got in unit 14, for another. 860.777.4001 📦
Jack Beckett has covered Farmington's wetlands commission long enough to know that the biggest land-use stories often end the quietest. He is on his second coffee. For once, the hearing ended early. ☕
*The Farmington Mercury covers the town nobody else is covering: the zoning fight that ran past 10 p.m., the police log that is technically public record but that you would never find unless someone typed it up, the commission vote that decides what gets built next to the pond. We publish slowly, deliberately, and without apology. Our motto is "Always last to breaking news," and we stand behind it: by the time you read this, the dust has settled, the facts are checked, and Jack Beckett has had at least two cups of coffee. Find us at farmingtonmercury.com and tell your neighbors. #WeAreFarmington 📰