The Farmington Town Plan and Zoning Commission voted Monday night to approve an exterior staircase at 6 Reservation Road, the access point for a small apartment a homeowner is building above his existing garage. Commissioner Josh Davidson cast the only audible no vote. The other six seated commissioners voted in favor.
The decision turned on a single question: whether the homeowner's garage is a non-conforming structure under current zoning, and whether a town attorney's opinion letter declaring it "attached" is enough to bring the project within the regulations now in force.
Davidson said it was not.
The structure is in the front yard. Its connection to the main house is a roofed breezeway, which counted as an "attachment" when the garage was built in 2002. The regulation has since been amended to require walls. The town attorney's letter, Davidson said, took those facts and concluded the structure was nevertheless attached — a conclusion he called illogical.
"If you follow his logic," Davidson said, "it suggests that any non-conforming building is essentially a conforming building, because at the time that it was approved, it met the regulations."
He went on to argue that approving an accessory dwelling unit in a detached structure in the front yard — which is what the apartment above the garage would, in his reading, be — bypassed the town's ADU regulation, which requires a special permit and a public hearing for detached units. "This to me appears to be engineered to be an end run around our ADU regulations," Davidson said.
The applicant, Ray Trabuzio, told the commission he had asked the planning department and his own attorney whether he needed a special permit and had been told he did not. Trabuzio said he bought the property in the 1980s. Senior Assistant Town Planner Bruce Cyr confirmed, when asked, that he had spoken with the town attorney earlier in the day and that the attorney "stands by his letter." The decision, Cyr said, was the commission's to make.
When Trabuzio addressed Davidson directly, he said the word "end run" had landed personally.
"I resent the fact that the term end run is being used with my project," he said. "I resent that because that's not the case. That's not who I am."
Davidson said the framing wasn't aimed at the applicant. "It wasn't necessarily pointed at you, sir."
Chair Liz Sanford voted with the majority. She described her own experience as the owner of a Farmington house built in 1850 — a property that has had its own set of zoning-edge questions over the years, she said, but that she and her husband had been able to work through without tearing things down. "There are ways for everyone to make sure that we are protecting the integrity of the town's rules and regulations but not getting too caught up in the fine points," she said. "That is my opinion. I'm not speaking for the entire board."
Commissioner David St. Germain, who made the motion to approve, argued during the deliberation that the commission was only being asked to act on the staircase — not on whether the apartment itself was permitted under the ADU rules. The apartment, less than 700 square feet, would proceed through the building-permit process regardless of the staircase decision; the staircase came before the commission only because zoning regulations bar street-facing exterior stairs unless the commission approves them.
The application carried.
The Recusal Motion
Davidson's role on the commission had come up earlier in the meeting.
Before new business began, Commissioner Robert "Bobby" Canto asked Davidson to recuse himself from the night's proceedings. "I would recommend or I'm proposing that Commissioner Davidson recuse himself from tonight's meeting and anything on the agenda based on findings, filings that were going on and postings and all that," Canto said. Pressed by Sanford for specifics, he cited postings on social media and what he described as an inter-office memorandum.
Davidson declined.
"I will not recuse myself," he said. "I posted only public information. Nothing that I posted was not posted on the town Farmington website."
Cyr loaded the planning department's web page on the dais monitor and confirmed that the document Canto had in mind — the agenda review with items to consider — was publicly available. Canto withdrew the recusal request but added a process critique: "as a moderator for the page, we don't know if anybody's being censored."
Davidson framed his social-media work as a transparency effort.
"Just because something is available on a website and in some arcane kind of hierarchy that is very difficult for the average resident of Farmington to find," he said, "does not make something easy to be known."
He cited Attorney DiCrescenzo's comments in the commission's initial training as authority for the posting practice, characterizing the lawyer's guidance as "absolutely proper for this type of social media posting to inform people about the agenda."
Commissioner Robert "Rob" Ingvertsen asked Davidson whether he posts the full agenda or specific items. Davidson declined to take that question up in public and offered to discuss it privately with Ingvertsen afterward.
The chair moved the meeting forward.
Pattern of Close Reading
Davidson was elected to the commission as a Democratic alternate in November 2025 and moved to a regular seat in January when a vacancy opened. Since January, he has built a record on the commission of close reading and detailed questioning. In February, during the meeting that approved a Big Y supermarket, a country club expansion, and a towing lot in a four-hour hearing, he spent an hour asking questions that traced gradual, undocumented growth on one site. In March, during the sign and stormwater hearing on 220 Farmington Avenue, he arrived with a different reading of Article 4, Section 7 of the sign regulation and a different definition of frontage than the staff report. Later that month, during the unanimous Morea Road extension vote, he pressed Carrier Group to limit model homes to the side of the development that had infrastructure in place.
Monday's vote was the first time the FM Mercury has recorded Davidson casting a lone no vote on the commission.
What Comes Next
The staircase approval clears the planning-and-zoning step. Trabuzio still needs a building permit and a sign-off from the town's building official before construction moves forward. The apartment itself proceeds under the existing accessory-use regulation and does not require a separate special permit if the structure is treated as attached.
Whether to revisit how the town's regulation handles non-conforming accessory buildings in front yards is a question the commission did not take up Monday. The next regular meeting of the Town Plan and Zoning Commission is scheduled for the fourth Monday of the month.