Meeting transcript
Planning and Zoning Commission - Regular Meeting
November 16, 2020 · Watch on YouTube · All meetings
And at this point, for roll call and seating of alternates, I see Scott, Susan, Leanne, and myself. And so Susan's our alternate tonight. She will be seated to round out the commission to give us four. Oh and there's Ann Crummey. Okay so we've got now we do have an Ann, an Ann and a Leanne so that goes well. There we go.
The And so Anne Cremay is seated as well. The additions or changes to the agenda, The only change that I would see at this point is I would like to have Larsen spelled with an O instead of an E. Okay. Anybody else have any changes to the agenda? Okay, hearing none, that will be that. Next on the agenda is public comment. And I see we have, I think one member of the public joining us tonight, listed as Jan. I don't know that that is your name. Do you have any comments for the Planning and Zoning Commission at this point? No. Okay, very good. With that in mind, I'll go on to old business, which is advertised last time around, I wanted to spend the majority of the meeting on. One other person I see trying to sign in. Somebody just joined the conference and I don't know who you are.
Doesn't look like they have audio. Jed, this is Leanne. It might be me. I wouldn't take the password the first couple of times. I had to go out and come in again. Okay. I don't know that it's not someone other than me, but I had to do I
don't think it's you, Leanne, because it's been going okay since we got here. But anyhow, the other person that I had invited to sit in tonight was Hillary. And I forget her last name, but she's a limnologist. And she is working with the Alcoa and Alma folks. And I thought having her input as we went through the late Greg's presentation would be valuable. So she might pop in at some point here. I went through this presentation with the commission a couple months back. And since that time, I gave it to the Inland Wetlands Commission. And then I gave it to Alcoa and Alma at their meeting. And I thought we'd circle back here just because I don't know that it sunk in with everybody the first time that we went through it. But we had two people with us tonight who I'm hoping will choose when we get to the next order of business to join us on the commission. We'll get there in a minute, but I thought it would be a good introduction
to them and then get some feedback from you folks on the way ahead. I think we're sneaking up on a final product here and that would be that. So hopefully we'll get to the end of the Lake Reg's insured order. But the presentation that I go through with you tonight is what I would plan to do at the public hearing when we have that for the regulations. So with that in mind, I'm going to try sharing my screen here and calling that presentation up. And Mindy, I need your help to be able to share.
I just made you the cohost, so it should work.
Okay. And so this is the new and improved. Amanda helped us put a couple of pictures on the cover slide. So it's starting to look like something. And what I would like to do if people have comments as we're going through the presentation, talk about it here. What I'm hoping to do is get regulations that Jim can execute and execute faithfully according to the guidance we give him. And he needs to understand that we should understand what we're asking him to do. So the first slide here, proposed regulations and the goal, as we've said before, is to improve the quality of the water at Andover Lake.
Some people would say, some people might ask, do we need this? And as we heard at the AlpoaAlma meeting, yes it is. Had, Hilary was one of the people who were doing lake sampling this summer and I think I said she's a limnologist who's out studying lakes and what makes those up and all those good things. I think she's working on her master's over at Yukon. And her master's project is going to be on Andover Lake, I think. So that's why I think she would be a real good resource for her here. Oh, nice. But when she was out sampling, her report back to Alma was that she was shocked at the amount of weeds and algae growing in the lake this year. And so that's not what we're looking for. Nobody in the Lake District is looking for that. And so we do need to do something to go with that.
Does she have prior experience with the bleeds and the like?
I don't know if she had been doing that sampling. She gave a presentation to us a year or so ago and she's been working on it since then. So I do think she has some prior experience with us. But there was a lot of weeds in the lake nonetheless and it surprised her. So that wasn't the report we were looking to get. The other thing that we had talked about is that if the lake continues to slowly degrade in conditions, the Department of Energy and Environmental Protection could ask the town to put sewers in. That'd be very costly and not something that we're looking to do right this minute. So I think we all have an interest in getting the lake cleaner than it is that would be good. These regulations are modeled after the regulations that Columbia has in effect. And one of the things that we got from John Valeni and I did a spot check with a couple of people that live on Columbia Lake is that not only do the residents support the regulations, a lot of people, they do have they have taken ownership of the quality of the water in the lake, and they're out there doing above and beyond what the regulations require. And so that's a good thing too. And that's really what we're looking for. We would like the people around the lake to do the supplementary voluntary actions to get the lake better. And these regulations and the actions that we'd ask people to do will make the lake cleaner and healthier.
And that's what we're all looking for. How do we get contaminants into the lake? The rain comes down, it can pick up contaminants through the atmosphere as it's fallen to the earth, and it either goes into the lake or it goes onto the land and runs off into the lake, and that gives even more opportunity to pick up additional contaminants. The ones we're looking at most here are the phosphate and the nitrogen, which help the weeds grow. The other contributor to contaminants in the lake is from the septic systems. And most people that that I think might know something about the lake and contamination, they think that the septic systems are probably the major contributor to what's going on in the lake. I don't have any percentage what that is over the stormwater runoff, but septic is an item of concern. And certainly the Alma and Alcoa folks were most interested in what we were doing there.
It's interesting, did review Columbia's regulations to see how they compared with what we were doing. And Columbia didn't tackle the septic system issue. I haven't seen John Felleny to ask why not. I don't know if that was a problem over there. They could be on sewers for all I know. I don't know. The words we put in on septic systems are our own words in, so that's that. And so I'm thinking that maybe Kevin, you know, we'll talk about Kevin and Ann who are trying, we're looking to join our commission. Kevin's got a civil engineering degree and so maybe he can help me understand some of the stuff when we start talking about those septic tanks. Here's our map of the area again. The blue line outlines the Lake District. The red line outlines the watershed. And we're dividing dividing our watershed Lake District area up into four overlay zones. The area right around the lake in yellow is what we'll call zone A. That's where we're looking to get a 10% reduction in contaminants going into the water after any improvements to the lot are made. The light blue is Zone B. There we'd be looking at a 7.5% reduction, a little further away, not as crucial that we make as much a reduction is we do with the Zone A folks.
And when we get into the septic tank discussion, that will only impact Zone A and Zone B. The purple is zone C, that's the rest of the Lake District outside of zones A and B. And then the brown over in this area, that is outside of the Lake District, but still within the watershed area. So those are the four areas that we're looking at here. Last time we got together, you know, I was concerned about a spot like this here. It didn't look like it was much in the watershed. Maybe it's got a little bit down here at the edge, but most of it's outside the watershed area. Would those guys feel that we were picking on them maybe? And the answer is that if somebody feels their property is outside the watershed, they can go talk to our zoning agent. Zoning agent concurs in that in the actions
that we would expect if somebody in that zone would not need to be complied with. So that eliminated one of the concerns that I had last time we put this map up here. Any questions on? This is John Benda. I'm on the AMA board. Yep, John.
Linda Derek, our president, has no power so she cannot be present tonight. Hillary Kenyon had something come up so she won't be present. Okay. Thanks
for letting me know, John. That'll make the meeting shorter. I did have some comments from Hillary on the wording. We'll probably not go through that tonight. We'll save that for the next meeting, but we'll discuss that on the way ahead. So anyhow, now we'll start talking about the stormwater runoff mitigation. And one of the thoughts that we had was if you're making significant improvements to your property, we would ask that one of the improvements you make should be to improve the quality of the water running off your property into the lake so that we can all make the lake a little bit better. How much of what action needs to be taken will be determined by a nutrient allocation worksheet. We'll talk about that in a minute. And as we've already said, for Zone A, we're looking at a 10% reduction. And that's a reduction of where you are before you start your improvement. So you take the lot where you are today. We would expect the final water to be built into the lake to be 10% cleaner than it is today before we actually start putting our building on there. We said zones B, seven and a half, zone C, five, and zone D, no worksheet would be required. And I hear I'm going it sounds like there's feedback on the line. Is that am I the only one hearing that or are you guys hearing that too? I heard it also, Judge. Yeah,
I'm going to try and turn my volume down just a little bit, see if that I believe it was Leanne. I muted her. Okay.
Very good. I will put myself back up just a little bit then. So anyhow, that tells us what we're looking for is the final answer. We also say all zones must infiltrate the first two inches flush of storm water or volume. So if we get a two inch storm and you've increased the imperviousness, which means the quality of not allowing fluid to pass through it, soak into the ground, like you put, you know, one of the examples we're going to use is the partridges over on Lakeside Drive are going to put in a 400 square foot shed. We would expect that two inches off of the shed gets infiltrated into some mitigation measure going through that in addition to the 10% reduction. And then lastly, we can make minor improvements, which would be, you know, 100 square foot or less for Zone A, 200 for Zone B, and 300 for zone Z may not require a worksheet but still require the mitigation of a two inch rainfall runoff. So that's what we're looking for for stormwater runoff mitigation to help out the lake. I haven't shown you what a what the nutrient allocation worksheet is yet, but let's talk about when it's required. And if you're building a new building on the lot, you've to do a nutrient allocation worksheet. If you're improving more than 50% of the structure square footage within a ten year period, we're going to have a nutrient allocation worksheet for that too. We don't want somebody incrementally improving their house
and then all of a sudden they end up with a new house and they haven't done anything to improve the leaf. We're trying to avoid that. One of things that I had in mind for a question for myself is what does improve mean when you're improving the square footage? That could go almost to a total renovation to a coat of paint. And so Jim, he's the guy that has to do this. My thinking is that if you pull a building permit for an improvement, that's an improvement. If you're doing something like painting or putting up new paneling, new sheetrock maybe, but not changing any of the layout of the house that you don't need a permit, then that's not an improvement. So anyhow, that's still a little fuzzy in my mind but so be it. Increasing the floor area and again, it's Zone A, it's by more than 100 square feet, Zone B, 200, Zone C, 300. I think that's the one that's going to get most people anyhow, so I don't know this improvement of more than 50%, that's not redundant because we're going to get, know, all the action is going to come out of this increase in the floor area by more than 100 square feet. If you add an accessory structure addition, again the 100, 200, 300 square foot rule implies there that
if you're putting up a shed, that would be an accessory structure that would you know, get us into the nutrient allocation worksheet. That was
put in there, Jed, because if somebody does an incremental change over the years and doesn't fit into the square footage over a period of time, they would fit into the square footage. I gotcha. Yep. This catches it.
Sounds good, Scott. And I know we were talking at Elma and Alcoa about their similar words, but it talked about improving more than 50% with an increase in square footage for redoing the septic, were concerned about, okay, so you tear down a building, you don't make it any bigger, we still want you to comply with the improved septic requirements here. So thanks for sharing that with me, Scott. And then the last one on here is the increasing the impervious surface. And that would be, you know, somebody's putting a patio in their property, paving a driveway, something like that, we want to mitigate the runoff from that. So those are the conditions where we would get that nutrient allocation worksheet.
Okay, so here's, now we get into the nutrient allocation worksheet and a lot of stuff here. What I want to focus on is in the Watershed District, we're going to put 151 Lakeside Drive, that's Partridges, they're putting up the 400 square foot shed. That's in Zone A. There are lots 10,890 square feet for a quarter of an acre. So you plug in right now, I took these numbers off of Zillow, but they had a seven sixty eight square foot house. I looked at their driveway and said, yeah, that looks like about 600 square feet of gravel. And so I took the rest and put it in his lawn there, add those all up, and that comes out to their total lot size. And that gives us a total estimated load of 0.258 pounds of phosphate per year that they're putting into the lake. We said that for Zone A we want a 10% reduction, so we see that 10% of that number is 0.0258, and so that would give us the maximum load after
proposed construction is 0.2322. So the first page is just telling us what the final answer is supposed to be. This is how clean we want the water after all improvements are made on the property. Any questions on that one? Okay, we'll go down to the next one here. Now that we've got that, I've added 400 square feet to the roof because we've got 400 square foot shed there. I left the driveway the same and we reduced the amount of lawn by 400 square feet. So the footage is the same. Now we have an estimated load of 0.261 and the maximum load we're wanting to get is 0.2322. That tells us where we need to get down to. So that's all that this page is doing is this has given us the new load number that we're going to use on the next sheet to work our reduction on. Okay, so now we've gone into, and this is allowing us the different mitigation measures. And so if we're going from lawn to a mulch bed or lawn to garden, those kind of things, that will give us some reduction. What I'm most interested in is the paved surface. Step back. So in this case, to mitigate the increase, what we're going to do there is we're going to take 2,100 square feet of lawn and run it into a detention pond that will accept a half an inch rainfall event. And that gives us, you know, a minus 0.6 reduction in the phosphate load. That was the difference? Was took amount from a roof and you put it to lawn, well, let me go back up. Don't want to get myself confused on that. So we were roof 1.3. No, son of a gun. So I went through this thing and I thought I had myself
all fixed up and now it doesn't work as good like I thought. I thought I could take this number, subtract the other one and get the number over there. But if I go In this case, it's not working. So I'm gonna have to go back and do a little homework on that before it makes sense. But that is what I thought was if you took your roof or lawn to retention pond or whatever, you take that difference and that's what it is. I don't see that one point zero point. So it should be 0.8 and here we're seeing 0.6. No, I don't have the answer for that one, Scott. I'll have to go out and take a look at it.
But essentially, what we did on this is you know, if you put a number in the green area here, it updates automatically, it goes through the formula, it comes out with the answer for the reduction over on this side. This is a screenshot that I put into PowerPoint, so I can't redo that and get it to automatically update. But we, by trial and error, came up with 2,100 square feet of lawn would give us the amount of reduction that we were looking for. So that would give us 0.2319. I think we were looking for 0.2322 or something like that. We've reduced it to more than we're required and we're good to go. So that gets you to the end of the worksheet. One of the things that I whoop, somebody have a question? This is Susan. I
have a question. What is the basis you used for coming up with the different factors Okay. For determining the nutrient load.
Yep. And so those factors, we came up with those because we plagiarized this worksheet from the town of Columbia. Columbia did have a little research going on over there. And so when we started off, know, let me go back. So one of the questions, you know, that we were working on, oh my, I'm all the way to the end. Let me get back. Something happened here. I went to the twilight zone. Here we go. Back to the Andover Lake, we say 0.32 pounds of phosphate per year per acre. That's based on a study that was done on Columbia Lake. I don't know if that's exactly pertinent to our lake or not. That's one of the things that I'm looking forward to getting Hillary's assessment on because she is much smarter on this than I am for sure and I would like to have some kind of knowledgeable scientific basis for the numbers that we're using. What With I these factors here, they're just plagiarized right from the Columbia worksheet. I did go look in our regulation on stormwater runoff and we had one or two things in there. I think we had something at the high end, they were all about one, then we had one other area at the low end.
And it might be possible that somebody just fudged in these numbers based on how bad they thought it was as far as allowing the water to soak into the ground or having it run off into the lake tried to make it look right. I don't know. But I do know that if you do these reductions, you will end up with significantly cleaner runoff water going into the lake, and that's the goal. So my thought was the science may not be exact, but the result will be what we're looking for. And I was pretty happy with that. No, no, I agree on that. I just was concerned,
especially when you go to present it to town meeting or any kind of meeting that there is a scientific or some sort of researched reason for using the numbers that you're using, not just that. Well, Susan, and that's why I've got to get,
I need to have somebody more scientifically knowledgeable on this than myself. I think I might have an in with somebody through Megan Lowley who's the wetlands chair. She's gonna try and get me hooked up with this fellow that's a UConn professor in his area of expertise is stormwater runoff.
And so I'm hoping to have this run by him before we go to public hearing. Okay. No, I just wanted to make sure that we were as sound as we could be before we go to public hearing.
Right. And if I'm only as sound as Columbia did the study, this was Columbia's, that's what we borrowed, I'm okay with that. I would like to have more and I would like to have somebody else at that public hearing standing there with me to defend it if need be. That's where we are today. Thank you.
Columbia ever get their allocation worksheet operating so that when you plug the numbers in it all works.
Not that I know of And again, one of the things when we were working with John Valeni, he was not all that fluent with the worksheet. And I thought he was the guy that designed the worksheet, but he did not. Somebody else was over there doing the worksheet, and then he would take the answer and he would go out in the field and he would make the mitigation measures so that we got the reduction we were looking for. So that's what I'll say about that. So what we did, and you probably don't remember, but there was on Columbia's worksheet, you would plug in this zone up here, LA in this case, and it was supposed to give you the 10% reduction, zone B would be 7.5 and that, so on. We couldn't figure out how to make that work and when I say we, that was Amanda worked with Jim and I one day trying to figure out how to get this so that we can work it. And we couldn't make it work the way we were looking to. I'm sure that it can. But what Amanda did do for us was, so now we've got all three answers down here. So if it's in Zone A, we've got the answers, Zone B and Zone C, and we just have to pick the one that we're going for and subtract it off to get the final answer. So the worksheet could be better, but we have it so that it does work now. And Jim, who's the guy who's going to have to take it out in the field and come up with the answers, knows how to do that.
That's just the important thing. The worksheet is fine, but as long as we get the reduction
That's what it's all about. And again, one of the things that we all need to be doing when we're working this over, especially with the wetlands group, is if somebody's doing something that's going to have some excavation work in Zone A or Zone B, we should be encouraging them to put in some mitigation measures above and beyond what might be required by these. They've got, you know, 90% of the cost is getting the excavator down there to do the work and we'll go from there. So we should encourage those voluntary extra measures as well. But anyhow, we do have the worksheet so that it works for us. One of the things that, as we were going through this, the question came up, well, what is a rain garden? And so I just put a little picture in here of a rain garden. If you walk around the lake, might see one down across from where Kurt Dowling lives on the lakeside the Lake Road there. But it's just a little depression in the ground where the rain can collect. They put some
plants in there and those plants are supposed to help absorb the water out of the ground so that it's dry and sucks up a lot of rain. But it's just a depression that you would put in there. So that's what a rain garden's all about. The one on Lake Road's very small. I don't know that it gets you a lot of mitigation effect, but at least it shows you what a rain garden looks like. This one's going into Puget Sound, so Puget Sound.
Well, the next, you know, when we were talking, the last time that Jim and I got together and we were going through our numbers, you know, we were talking about what's a detention pond? And when we get to the sample calculations I have, when John, Jim and I were talking, we thought a detention pond was you excavate out a depression or a trench, can fill it full of rocks and that would be a detention pond and that sort of thing. When I look online, for examples, the detention pond can either be a dry detention pond or a wet detention pond, and it's just a rather significant sized depression that collects the rain when it goes into it. And your storm drains, your runoff can run down in here, it collects it, allows it to soak into the water. So that's when I look online to see what a detention pond is, that's what I came up with there. The next thing that we talked about and I'm really, this is my favorite now, is a dry well. And so there's people that, you know, they take the runoff from the roofs, run it down through a gutter, run the gutters to a downspout and into a dry well. And there's a couple of different ways you can do that. But what a lot of people have are just these things. And I don't know if anybody
knows what a Quonset hut is, but they are the old temporary buildings during World War II that are just kind of semicircular metal that you put two ends on and people lived in did all kinds of things there. Well, this looks like a little quonset hut that you put in the ground and you run your downspout into it and it's sitting on a bunch of crushed rock there, but it gives a spot for all the water to go and it slowly sinks into the ground. And these can be covered up, grass grown over it, you don't even know that it's there.
Another example of a dry well that I saw online looking, you would dig a big cylindrical hole into the ground and you would line it with the cinder blocks. Again, the storm water runs into the dry well, it soaks into the ground through the holes and all the cinder blocks and it disperses that way. And two things that all this rainwater mitigation does for us is not only does it keep the pollutants from going into the lake, it helps keep our water table healthy. So it goes down into the ground, the pollutants are attacked by the bacteria that are in the ground, so that gets rid of that. And the water sinks down into the water table and maintains a healthy environment for all our wells around the lake. So anyhow, those are examples of what we're looking at for these different mitigation areas here. Now we're gonna head back to the end of the worksheet and what does the answer mean? And so we said what we were going to do is take 2,100 square feet of lawn and run it into, equivalent from a one half inch rain event into a detention pond. And so the first question we need to ask is how much is a onetwo inches of rain on 2,100 square feet of lawn? And so you multiply the 2,100 square feet times a half inch of rain with a conversion factor, one foot is 12 inches, and that comes up to 88 cubic feet of rainwater. That's what we've got to collect, that's what we've got to mitigate.
Then we also said we were gonna take that two inches of runoff from the roof. So I took 400 square feet of roof times two inches of rain, again times the conversion factor to get it all into feet, and that comes out to 67 cubic feet of runoff water. Add these two things together, we're looking to mitigate 155 cubic feet of rainwater. So that's the amount that we've got to do something with. Now I got myself into the trench because I started working backwards from the line in our regulations that said if we were gonna do 100 square feet or less of added roofing or patio or whatever, we didn't need to do the worksheet. We could just dig a trench and fill it full of stone. So I said okay, and I asked what's a retention basin? And they said well that's this, you just make it bigger. And I said, okay, well under the shed we will excavate down so that we can put a bunch of crushed stone in to get the volume to
accommodate this 155 cubic feet of water that we're looking to store. If fill the excavated storage reservoir with crushed stone, we figure we reduce the volume by about half. So if we want to get 155 cubic feet of water, we need to have three ten cubic feet of storage reservoir filled with stone so that we can accommodate that. I looked at the stone pad area for the shed being about one foot larger than the roof, so it goes all the way around that we put the shed on. So I took 22 feet by 22 feet, and that comes out to four eighty four square feet area of the stone pad that we're going to put the shed on. Then I said, well, just to make the math easy, if we dig the storage reservoir nine inches deep, let's see what we get. So I took my four eighty four square feet times threefour foot because that put the nine inches to 12 inches conversion factor in there for me and it comes up with three sixty three cubic feet. Bigger than three ten, so we're happy. We're storing enough water underneath the shed. And so that's what Jim has to do when he's going out in the field to work with the guys to implement the improvements that we came up with by using the worksheet. There might be places if we didn't want to put all the water under the shed, maybe there's places like on the side of your driveway. I've got on my driveway where water comes running down like crazy, runs down a hill and into the lake. Well, would be a good place to put
a storage reservoir, dry well, something like that. So that's up to Jim working with the applicants to figure out where's the best place and the best method to mitigate the water runoff.
So the whole area under the shed is the reservoir.
Right. In this case, and I thought that would work. I know the last time we were going through this, there was some concern that it might rot out the timbers that you're sitting the shed on. And my thought was, well, we dig it. Stack the stone a couple of inch higher than the surrounding area so that the water would never get up that high, you can protect it. But again, a lot of different answers, this one seemed to work pretty good for this particular thing, especially when the applicant was looking at putting the crushed stone bed down to put the shed on anyhow.
So that's how we use the worksheet to come up with the mitigation for the stormwater runoff. Any other questions on that process? Okay. There are a couple of special cases on this. And one of them is what if you can't meet the rules? Your lot is whatever size. It's so small and there's just nothing you can do down there. Now that I understand dry wells a little better, I'm not sure that that would ever be the case, but if somebody comes up with one, the regulations give us the latitude that they can fill out a special permit, bring it to the Commission, that's the most cumbersome of all. But if somebody's saying, I can't comply with your regulations, they would come to us for
what we could do to help them out on their behalf. Hopefully we won't get many of those. What if the land to be developed is not in the watershed? We talked about that earlier. They go to Jim. Jim agrees that, yep, I agree, it's not in the watershed. You don't have to do any of this stuff there even though you're on our map for being in that area. One of the things that we started tackling before we held the Lake Regs in a bandage last time was there are a couple of lots around the lake that are wooded lots that haven't been developed at all yet. Since the wooded lot is the best lot there is, it's soaking up rainwater, minimizing that runoff into the lake, how are we ever gonna get 10% better than that? We can't. And so my thinking was, well, we talked about it. At that point, John came up and he was looking at, we will give them a credit of 2,000 square foot of roof, 3,000 square foot of paved surface, and 10,000 square foot of lawn. And my concern at the time was we've got all different sizes of lots. And so maybe if you've got a quarter acre lot or smaller, 2,000 square feet of roof, 3,000 square feet of driveway is a little much.
I thought that was too generous in that behalf. Maybe that's good for the bigger one. So what I tried to do here was go through and I put if lot to be developed is less than a half acre in size, I used as an example 151 Lakeside Drive. And I said, Okay, we'll give them credit for seven fifty square feet of roof, 600 square feet of driveway, and 7,500 square feet of lawn. Anything above that, you have to go and mitigate. I just ratioed the numbers up by put one half acre to an acre, one to two acres, and greater than two acres. So my recommendation to the commission is that we use this sliding scale to accommodate those lots. I went looking around the lake right now, the two lots that have for sale signs hanging on them. One is in Zone B, it's across the street on Lake Road and it's 1.9 acres. The other is on Lake Road, on the lake, and it's 2.6 acres. So those are both pretty good sized lots, pretty good sized credits. But I think there's some smaller undeveloped portions yet that are down in the small lots, I wanted to make sure that we resulted in significant mitigation if you're building on those little lots. So that's my recommendation.
Aren't those two lots that are for sale both in Donate?
So I went on realtor.com and Zillow, and I can only find one lot that's for sale there. I don't know if one's under contract or what the story is. Yeah, one is contingent but they're next to each other and they're another And in so I only put one because I can only find one listed now. So yeah, there's two and my recollection is they were both about the same size. So I think the other one's probably over two acres in size two if it's there. I just couldn't verify that that was still for sale or anything. I know there's still the for sale sign out there on the road. And I think what about an undeveloped lot? I think that's the same as above. I must have had some thought there as I was trying to work my way through this stuff here. And I will eliminate that from the presentation. So that's that. And that's all the runoff stuff. I did put something in here on voluntary actions. And we put in our current regs, way they're written out, it says don't apply fertilizer within 20 feet of the lake or the stream. And I said, if I had my way, people on the lake wouldn't use any fertilizer at all. And so that's what I'll ask for, don't use fertilizer. If you must, don't apply within 20 feet of the lake or the stream.
But anytime you're putting fertilizer on the lake, it's not going to help the lake. And I don't care if it's the organic stuff, whatever. If it makes your grass green, it makes the lake green too. And that's not what we're looking for. One of the items was only use non phosphate fertilizer. I think the only fertilizer you can buy now is non phosphate. That's true. And so one of the things that when we wrote our regulations, talked about nitrogen and phosphate. The other ingredient that's still in fertilizer is nitrogen. And so again, I will update the words to put low nitrogen fertilizer on there with that. And one of the things that would be nice to get from somebody smart is what are the best fertilizers to use if people need to because I can't give that. If John, you're still with us there, one of the things that became clear to me is I learned a lot living on the lake that I didn't know about helping the lake is we need a education process for the folks that live around the lake. So when we send out that semiannual newsletter, maybe we ought to have a sheet that goes in that with voluntary actions we can take and start educating the folks on what they can do to help out. Are there people at the lake that are fertilizing?
There's a couple, yeah. Yes, the answer is yes. And there's nothing we can do about it from a regulation point of view. We can't go around and be the fertilizer police. We just have to appeal to people's better natures to go out there and not put fertilizer on it. You look at my yard, you can tell that I do not put fertilizer on my grass. It looks like it. Totally agree. You can have that be the badge of honor.
This is John. I totally agree with what you just said. Okay. Thanks, John. Yep. Sending out a letter to Lake Lake District people to not use fertilizer and the reasons why. Yep. And
maybe when you find this person Jed that's gonna help you with what you can use to green up your lawn, maybe there is something that they can use that won't harm the lake.
Maybe, Jose, I don't know. One of the persons that I was, who will remain anonymous here, but I know she's very enthused about keeping the lake clean and she said she does fertilize her yard. I said, what are you doing that for? I said, well I use this organic stuff that they say is lake friendly. And I said, come on. And she said, I know if it makes the yard green, it makes the lake green too. And that's where I got that light from. And so we just got to reduce that as much as we can. We're going to move into septic system at this point. Again, this was not in the Columbia regulations. I don't know where this exactly came from, but I know it is true that the Lake District has a lot of small lots with on-site well and septic, and it makes it hard to put your septic tank exactly where you would like to. And one of the things that, you know, I had sent out an email to Thad King, who's the sanitarian for Eastern Highlands Health District, asking him a couple of questions and I hadn't got back from him yet. But we'll get there in a minute on couple of issues with that. But when I emailed him the first time asking him how far from the wetlands
the septic tank needed to be, his answer was, well, we don't regulate for the wetlands. We require 50 feet from water. And then if it's one of these old small lake lots, the number is 25 feet. So that's what I know about that at this point. The majority of the septic systems were installed prior to 1980. I thought that that probably meant that they were starting to get old. I do know, and we haven't got in here how to take credit for it, is that septic tank design, there have been a lot of improvements in the design of septic systems over the last several years. And for instance, what used to be a three bedroom cottage on the lake, you can now make it a year round because you can get an approved septic system down on the small lot there. So I know the septic systems of today are much better than what they used to be.
We say septic systems are undersized, not meet the minimum separating distance to groundwater required to renovate septic effluent residential waste. And I'll talk about that more on the next slide where I've got a little picture in there. I got schooled on that recently. Existing septic systems are often located in the water table. That's not good. And the new lake regs would apply only to zone A and B for the septic systems.
In the ground to water, what was that that we put in the regulations? Was it 12 inches or 18?
We put 12. My recommendation is that we go with 18 because 18 is what the health district code is today. And so why shouldn't we expect it to be 18 inches? It makes it a lot easier. And so my thinking is that we should expect somebody to comply with the existing health code standards for their septic if they're doing this major renovation. Yeah, right.
Okay, so anyhow, found this little diagram that shows the wastewater coming out of the house, goes down into your septic tank, the water runs down, and it goes into your leach field here where the water leaches out into the surrounding ground and then the bacteria in the ground can eat up all the contaminants in there and make, do away with all the septic stuff that's coming out of your house, and it gets it before it gets down into the lake, or down into the groundwater for that matter. Because if it gets down to the groundwater, then the bacteria doesn't eat it up so well, doesn't have time to do that, and it can flow downhill and run into the lake. So when we're talking about leach fields, we show it being above the groundwater. That's where we want it to be, and it's possible that some of the septic systems around the lake are in the groundwater now, especially in the spring and that sort of thing. So that's what we're looking to do. Conditions requiring a new septic system. Any increase in use requiring a B100 approval under the Connecticut Public Health Code, that's what we
show the health code what we're doing and they determine whether or not we need a new septic system for doing that. If we increase the net floor area of a principal building by 20% for zone A or 30% zone B, you have to upgrade or put in a new septic system. And that's a change I need to make is put to upgrade. Not necessarily a new septic system if we can get you to where you're as good as the requirements for today, that's what we're looking for. The next one down is a little different. It talks about overall footprint of the principal structure exceeding 25% or 30% for all structures. That's where you add a shed and it exceeds 40 or 50% of what you had before, we're going to take a look at your septic system. I thought we had it more strict than that. Nope, that's what was there. And again, there's a difference, the 20% for Zone A on the net floor area, the 25% for increasing the overall footprint. But that's what comes out of the zoning regs that
we were looking at. Additional one or more bedrooms. And here's where we were talking about when greater than 50% of the principal square front principal structures square footage read real. It used to say and an increase in square footage. I took the increase in square footage out of there because if you're essentially tearing down your house and rebuilding it, want the septic tank to be working good. And this regulation is cumulative as of the date of adoption. I'm going go way back up for a minute because all of a sudden it dawned on me one of the things And as fast as that thought went in my head, it it drifted out again. So I guess, well, I waited too long. That shows, that those thoughts, are fleeting. Let's talk about who doesn't need to upgrade their septic system when they're doing all those things on the preceding page. And we use the word exemption here, and I know exemption is a bad word on zoning regs. You know, there's probably a better word in there. I know that the last time we had our lawyer take a look at it, he said, okay, you've got enough
specifics in there that maybe it's not an exemption. It's just something else, but he didn't give me a better word than exemption. So we'll call it that for now. But you get a Connecticut registered professional engineer, analyze your existing system, and certify all of the following. In the existing system greater than 18 inches above max high water table, that's where our current regulation, Scott, used to say 12. I think it needs to be 18. That's what the Connecticut health code is and I'm comfortable with that. Yep. Greater than 35 feet to the high water mark at the Andover Lake or tributary. I'm still struggling to get a good understanding of this. So let me go use an example. A lady in one of the small lots on Lake Road just down the street from me had a new septic system put in within the last year. So the plan that
was approved was keeping it 25 feet from the lake. And that was what was requested by the Eastern Highland Health District. Somehow in the review by environmental, the state DEEP or whatever, there was some reason, and I'm not sure the technical issue behind it, but we ended up putting the septic system in 21 feet from the lake. And I didn't understand that. I wasn't a civil engineer, wasn't smart on septic systems at the time, know a little bit more, but I still don't know why that had to be there.
And I don't know how that jives with 35 feet. Is there a grave problem or what happened that it's so close to the lake?
I don't recall. And Jim, you might remember a little bit, you might not. All I know is we said that the state agreed with it, the health district agreed with it. Who were we to disagree with it? And in my thought, they were putting a new state of the art septic system in. I thought that was much improved over the failed septic that they had in there at the time. So I said, okay, I've got my vote. I remember the meeting, the wetlands meeting. Yep.
And so I'm looking for some help. Kevin, this might be up your alley. I don't know if you've got any knowledge on septic systems or not, but I struggle with how we can require that when we're putting in brand new septic systems down within 25 feet. Anyhow, I'm I'm okay with those words there. The last time we were together, Eric Anderson was sitting in with us and he's as smart on these regs as anybody is. He was instrumental in getting them to where they are now. He was comfortable with 35 feet saying, well, if you can't get 35 feet, you don't get to build your house any bigger, you know, and do any of that. But I don't know. I
am not sure about that one yet. Are you sure on the 35 or do you think it should be more than that? I think it should be less than that.
If the state health code requires 25 feet for a small lot on the lake, how can we go with more than that? And I guess we can because we're trying to protect the lake, but I'm not sure that you can get there on these small lots. And maybe that's one where it comes back to a special permit. I don't have it. I'm sharing with you folks that I don't have the answer to that. When I go to public hearing, won't brag about not knowing the answer. But I put that out here in case anybody's got a good thought on that. And I'm going move on to the last one because that doesn't make sense to me either, but I know it's consistent with the public health code. It says exceeds 50% of the size requirement for new septic for a new principal building equivalent to the proposed building. And I said, I want 100%. Why don't we want it to be as big as a new septic would be? And so I went back to the Connecticut state regulations. And that's what it says, 50%. So I've asked Thad King for a little help on understanding that one and he hasn't got back to me with the answer yet. So I'm not there. Don't know. That's kind of
odd, isn't it? It is kind of odd. I know that that is right out of the Connecticut state statutes. So on the top one and the bottom one are per the Connecticut statutes. I'm not sure that that's a state statute but I know it's bigger than Eastern Highland Health Districts when they approve a septic tank. But that's where we are on that as of now. I put in some voluntary measures here once again to ask for some help. We would expect the people to pump out, frequently pump out their septic tanks. The last time I heard that was, we'd like people to do that every three years. Consider installation of a septic tank effluent filter. Don't know how to do that yet, I know that's something you can do. I've
seen that several places listed on voluntary measures you can do. I don't think it's very expensive. I guess that one and the next one use sand materials with a phosphorus attenuation capacity. When we on the inland wetlands are looking at septic systems for approval, I now got a couple of things that I can ask the contractor when he's in there talking about septic tanks, have you thought about this? And see what they say. Right.
Design leaching field geometry to maximize dow gradient soil contact volume and avoid intersecting septic groundwater plumes. Sounds good, don't know what it means, and Hilary did have a comment on the reg saying it sounded like she knew what it meant but she didn't know how you would ever know.
How would you ever know, really? And so Looks like from two different in there, but we could all say that we're doing that one, I guess. From two different septic systems, it looks like you're saying, trying to say.
The next one is the one I had a question on avoid the use of septic system additives. Know I keep seeing the advertisements on TV put Ridex in your septic tank. I don't know if that's the kind of additive they're talking about.
I know the guys that pump them out say not to put that in.
Funny you mention that because the guy that pumps mine out says no I don't use that, I put yeast in it. So maybe you don't put RIDEX in your septic tank, I don't know. But if anybody can help me out on that, I'm looking for a little bit on that too. And I added one more, used innovative designs for septic replacement or repair. When I look at the leach field components, know, as I'm walking around the lake, these new leach field things are putting in are amazing looking little things and I think they do a great job of mitigating the water to allow the ground to have the bacteria help it out. Anyhow, those are all voluntary measures. Those aren't what we would be enforcing. And that's all that there was on the septic system. What's left to do? I was looking for a little concurrence, I guess, on using the tiered approach for allowance for new construction on wooded lot. I do know that there's a small lot over here on Lake Road. The tragedy was a house burned down, but it's a small lot. I'm sure at some point somebody's going to rebuild on that. I'd like to compensate them a little bit for what was there before, but I don't necessarily give them 2,000 square foot a house to do it. Because if you have a
two story house, now you're really talking about with 2,000 square foot of roof, you're talking 4,000 square foot a house, which there's not many of those around the lake. One of the things that, this is the fleeting thought. I knew I put it in there somewhere, here it is. As a homeowner on the lake who one day says, maybe I would like to have a bigger shed. I don't want to put any mitigation measures in place now because I may need to do it later after I put my bigger shed there. I would like to have these regulations have some wording in it that we can allow the homeowner to put in mitigation measures and we will give them credit for a future improvement on his lot if they weren't used to pay for the improvement on a previous thing there. So I could go off, put mitigation measures in now, then if I want to go put my bigger shed out there,
I can tell Jim I already did all these things before, and that would be that. I think we should be encouraging other people, and we should be removing impediments that would be in the way of helping people want to go out and improve their runoff. Right,
while they're doing, making one they can make increase it for future use. That's a good idea, Jed. Yep, and so
in fact we were out doing a sidewalk this weekend where somebody was, going to put a patio on the back of the house. And so we started talking about the neighbor's house with the dry wells he's got for all the runoff for his downspouts? And the guy said, yeah, got a lot of runoff. They go right down in the lake. And he said, well, if you're putting in this patio, how about figuring out if you can put in a dry well? We can't force him to do that because it's not part of the regulation yet. But if he wants to help out the lake, maybe there's something he can do. And he's off taking a look at that. Ensure the mechanisms in place to trigger use of worksheet. Part of this may go back to education again. I think there's an awful lot of well intentioned people who do not get permits to do things that they should get permits for because they don't know
they need to get permits. That's from cutting down a tree to digging out a stump to any of those things. I know until I got involved with these commissions, would have never dreamt of asking somebody permission to go pull a stump out of my yard or whatever. So we've got to let people know that when they're putting in a little patio or they're peeping their driveway or putting in a shed, you got to go over and get a permit for that. And then there's some minor corrections with regulations. We've talked through some of those here, but I think we're getting close to the end and we'll talk about the way ahead here in a minute. So that's what I think there's left to do. Timeline, I guess because Hillary is not here, I was going to call up some of her comments tonight on the actual verbiage because I'm not sure I understand the comment, let alone how to fix it. So we need some of that work, but I figured we would do that in our December meeting. So we've gone through the concept. Everybody should have a feel for that. There are a couple of remaining questions outstanding. I'll do the best I can to get answers to some of those in the intervening month, but I'd like to go through the comments that we had from Mark Brandt, our attorney, and from Hillary on her review of the regulations
at the next meeting. One thought I had was, should we go to public hearing at the next meeting and I said to myself, no, I'd really prefer to have another go through with the commission to make sure we got the words right before we go to public hearing. And then in our January meeting, hold a public hearing on the regulations. And my thought was that to get through the regulations, I would use the same presentation that we're doing now and describe those. There's a place on our website where we can put pending regulations, put the verbiage and the presentation so anybody who's out there can take a look at it. And then after the public hearing, we would implement the regulations. So that's the way I see the way ahead. I think that's doable. Again, a lot of the work on the intervening last couple of months is
Jim and I trying to understand what the regulations were all about so that, one, I could talk to you about what we're trying to do and he could go out in the field and help the homeowners or the landowners you know, put the actual regulations into effect. And I think we're there now.
Maybe with the new homes, Jed, all the all the roofs, driveways should be mitigated at a minimum. Wouldn't you say?
I would say. And one of the things that I should have said back when we started talking about the regulations is regulations have a dirty word, dirty connotation to them all by themselves. Nobody likes to be told what to do. Right. I would hope that we could encourage the property owners to do all these good things and with the help of Alma and Alcoa, we're really helping them on this. We all work together to encourage good mitigation. But yes, if you're going to go through the work to bring in an excavator to do a driveway and all that stuff, that's the ideal time to figure out where is it all going to run off and have it run off into a dry well or a detention pond Right, or at a minimum that That's our best job of getting it done. Impervious surface Yep. Should be So we got to be nice to them to encourage them to do more than that we actually need, but at minimum we'll get what our regulations require and that's a fair amount too.
Well, we can't put that in as a requirement. We're struggling with that one issue. It's been we've been struggling with it for two years. But at a minimum, that that should be in the regulation. So it's only gonna be two or three more lots, I think. Maybe four or something.
So, okay, so let's ask the question there. We talked about, let me go. Here's the special cases slide where the proposal was to give somebody credit on one of these lots for 2,000 square feet of roof, 3,000 square feet of driveway. Again, I looked at my driveway using it as an average driveway. It's much smaller than 3,000 square feet. So I said, that's too big in 10,000 square feet of lawn. Quarter acre of lawn. Maybe
we're being still too generous here. We don't give a guy credit at all. And we just say exactly what you just said, Scott, is that we expect you to mitigate your downspouts in the runoff from your driveway. Exactly. Period. That's what we expect. And I don't think that that's a big deal.
Again, there's not a lot of lots that goes into effect. Anybody else have a thought on that? Okay, well, we'll get to talk about this again next month when we go through the actual regulations that put all these good thoughts
into effect. Well, you add that before we get to see it next month? Yep, I will.
Will you be sending us a copy of the draft regulations before the meeting next month? I will. And they will also,
as soon as Well, I'll get my most recent, and I've been tweaking on them a little bit, working on comments from different people. So Jim does not have the most recent, but I will one, send them out to everybody here. And two, I want to make them available on our website so they are available to the public. Because I'm worried a little bit about catching the public by surprise with all these regulations we put into effect. One thought that I had was to invite the River East reporter to this meeting here and I said no, we won't do that one, but certainly before we go to public hearing, it would be nice to have a story in the River East that talked about what we were doing so that we could have nobody say I didn't know this was going on and head that off. I do think that we go to public hearing, we will have hopefully several people from Alma and Alcoa showing their support of the regulations as they did at the last meeting where we gave the presentation. And again, the feedback from over on Columbia Lake, John said he got no pushback from anybody on asking them to do these things they were happy to do. And the one guy I talked to about the improvements he made to his lot over there, he wasn't doing any improvements on his house. Just,
he went out and bought a new car and his wife said, if you're doing that, I'm doing this. And that was the end of the discussion and they got all kinds of mitigation measures in place there to help out the lake. Wow. Nice.
John's punchline was always on this, you know, people think development's a bad thing. And with putting these mitigation measures in place, the more we develop, the more we improve the quality of the water going into the lake, the cleaner the lake gets. And that's what we need. This isn't a silver bullet, it's not gonna make the lake clean overnight, but it should stop it from getting any worse and eventually start making it cleaner, which is what we're all looking for. So my story and I'm sticking to it. Okay, so that's all of that. Any thoughts anybody has on the way ahead that not a good plan?
No. I'd really like to congratulate you Jed in in doing and going through this and getting it all done. I'm I'm really impressed. Not done yet. I I know, but it's getting it's getting closer. Yep. Well The only problem is that allocation and no allegation worksheet, nobody's works anyways. As long as we get the data that we need, that's that's really all we need. Yep. And now we're putting it all, you know, down on paper, we can make a regulation. This is a big deal.
Thank you. It is and certainly we've spent a lot of time trying to get Jim and I to understand what's their good product. Just, I couldn't explain it. And if I can't explain it, that doesn't put me in a good position. I'm trying to sell it. So we're getting closer. Right. Okay. Well, that's all we will do on this tonight. So next time, I will get out to everybody, both the presentation and the words, and we'll go through those. I think this actually on Zoom works out easier than going to when we used to do it on the the laptop, to put it up on the screen because everybody gets a little bit better presentation. And I can update it right as we're going through it to sharing it all with you. So that that will hopefully work out good. I'm going to move on to the next item on the agenda, which is filling of Commission vacancies. Since. Since we met last, Jim sent me Ian Blanchard's letter of interest and resume. I think we are so fortunate for
so many reasons to have her at least express an interest. Did everybody on the commission get the information on both Anne and Kevin? Yes. Golly, I couldn't ask for a better applicant on both Kevin and Anne, both from different perspectives. Anne's coming at it from a little experience with the zoning issues and in the legal approach. And Kevin's got, well Kevin's story was, I reached out to him, I said Kevin you're probably not enamored with the results we came to over there on 12 Webster Lane, but you sure convinced us. You taught me a lot about what's in our regulations and I would be ecstatic if you consider joining the group too. So and he said he'd consider it and he sent off, he's got a master's in mechanical engineering and a bachelor's in civil engineering and so that brings a lot of complementary talents that we need. I joined the commission, I didn't have any of those skills and so it's nice to have some people join that can help me out on those areas where I'm not as knowledgeable as I should be. Ann, I'm gonna let you tell us just in your own words why you would I hope you still want to join. I hope what we've done so far tonight hasn't turned you off and it's something that you feel you could help the town out with.
Hi, Jed. Hi, everyone. I'm Anne. I grew up in Coventry. So just a few miles over. I just graduated from law school in May, and I took the bar. So I'm just awaiting my results, which is what he mentioned. I'm coming at it from a legal background. I have I was a realtor for a while, so I have dealt with a lot of land use issues. And it was a few quite a few classes and my focus in law school has been transactional and real estate and land use. That is kind of what sparked my interest when I saw the posting for the vacancy. So I figured I would apply and see how everything shakes out. But that I find all of this very interesting. And I think that there are issues that a lot of people think are mundane, but it's something that actually needs to be dealt with so.
Right. Thank you, Anne. And Kevin, I reached out to you but certainly you expressed a willingness to join us and like Ian I hope what you've seen so far tonight hasn't turned you off to that any and that you would still be interested in joining the Commission.
Yeah, I'm definitely still interested. As you said, it wasn't, it's funny how it all happened. It didn't go as we were hoping, but you know my fiance and I moved to town two years ago and going through the 12 Webster Lane process was a lot of eye opening for like looking through all the regulations and understanding everything and after all that even though we didn't get the result we were hoping for, I thought it would be valuable to help future residents understand regulations and hopefully walk them through the process so people either aren't surprised or have a better understanding of why things happen the way they do and just offer any insight that I have. You know, my when I graduated college, I went and worked for a civil firm for a few years and doing that in that I was doing a lot of bridge work. So I don't have a ton of experience doing septic work and site planning, but I understand it all. And then now I work for a mechanical firm and I do mechanical design work. So between the two of those, hopefully I can assist you guys where where I can and see where it goes.
Again, was absolutely thrilled with with both the experience bases that these two individuals would bring to us. So with that, I was wondering if somebody would so the way the process is going to work is we are going to I'm going to ask for a motion that we bring each of these individuals on as an alternate commissioner. And then pending a second to that motion, I will present a letter. I think the process is supposed to go that the Board of Selectmen approve all of our nominations to the Commission. So I've got a letter drafted up that I will send off to our first selectman so they have their next meeting here early in December, the second Monday of the month. And I would think that there would be no issues there. But by the time we meet again well, so after we get through the approval of the Board of Selectmen, then you have to get sworn in and then you would be an alternate commissioner. And you can get sworn in, you just go down to town hall and the town clerk will take care of that. Just takes a minute.
I emailed back and forth with Susan a little bit. She is an alternate now, and I asked her if she would like to go fill the current vacancy on the commission and she said that she was interested in doing that to finish up the term of I think she would be going into Bob Hamburger's billet. And I don't know exactly what his position expired. I didn't see his name on the list that you sent out, Jim. So I don't know if he was expired in 'twenty one or 'twenty three. But Susan expressed an interest in filling that. And so that's what I would expect we would do. I hadn't thought whether or not I need to send a letter to the Board of Selectmen to
put Susan in that position. But I guess I got the letter ready to go. All I have to do is change the name on it one more time and send that in with the bunch, but we can do that and make that you got any thoughts on that Scott? No, I think that's good,
Jeff. You can't be wrong, yep. So that's the way I would approach that. Then I guess the last interesting part is that all commissioners and alternates are on the ballot for the election. Both Anne and Kevin as alternate commissioners, I think you would be on the ballot for your respective party when we go to our town election next May. I know George Knox came on as an alternate. He said, this is a lot of work. He chose not to continue on at that point, but I do remember his name being on the ballot as an alternate. So that's where my knowledge on that goes. So that would be adding that to the little process there. But any questions from Ian or Kevin on how that process works? Not at this time. Okay.
Then the work is mine to do to make it official. And first step of that is I would hope to get a motion from one of the other commission members that we nominate Anne and Kevin to alternates on the Planning and Zoning Commission. So moved. Okay. Thank you, Scott. I second.
Thank you, Anne. Any discussion before we go to a vote? No, they seem perfect. Better
than perfect. I couldn't be happier. So with that, we'll do a roll call vote. Anne? Aye. Scott? Aye. Leanne? Muted right now. Muted?
Yeah. Yep. Mindy, if you could unmute her for just a minute there.
I'm asking her to unmute now. I think she has to accept it.
While she's working on that, I'll go to Susan. Aye. Okay. Leanne, we're trying to get an input from you on the vote there.
Might be because since I muted her earlier since she's on her phone, she's unable to unmute herself again. I'm not sure.
Well, I guess we will have to have an abstention. So the motion passes four-zero-one with Leanne abstaining. Unless before we get to the end of the meeting, which is coming up shortly, we get her unmuted and she can vote here. Hearing none, at that point, I'll move on to well, I'll close say again, Scott? Do we have to do Susan? Oh, yeah. Okay. Good point. Yep. I was just going to pencil her in that spot, but there's probably a better way. So once again, I'm looking for a motion to appoint Susan to the regular commission vacancy. So moved. Thank you, Scott. I'll second that. Thank you, Anne. Any discussion? Don't think so? We just barely have a quorum now. So because I think it's Susan. Well, we'll let you vote. I don't think you vote against yourself. We'll start with Anne. Aye. Scott. Aye. Susan. Aye.
Leanne? Still not there. I vote aye as well. So the motion passes four-zero-one with Leanne abstaining due to technical difficulties.
Yeah, she just logged off, so she might try and get back on. Okay,
very good. And thanks for keeping me honest on getting the motion that we move Susan up to the regular spot there. The next item on the agenda is new business. And I have no new business for tonight. Anybody else have any new business they want to discuss. Next item is approval of the minutes from 10/19/2020. Can I have a motion that we approve the minutes?
I move we approve the minutes of the last meeting, the October meeting. Thank you, Susan. Second.
Thank you, Scott. Any discussion on the minutes? And I had none. Mindy, once again, I thought you did a superb job of getting all that down there. Way more than what's required, but I like it. Thank you. Very good. Anybody else have any comments? Nice job, Mindy.
Hearing none, call for a vote. Anne? Aye. Scott? Aye. Susan? Aye. Leanne? She might be back. Leanne, are you there? Yes.
Okay. So I'm going to get you on four votes here. I don't know if that's legal or not, but we're still in the open meeting. So right now, we're voting on approval of the minutes. Yes.
Okay, thank you, Leanne. So the minutes are approved, five-zero-zero. And we had two motions that I did not get your vote on. I don't know if you heard them, Leanne. One was to nominate Anne and Kevin as alternate members to the Commission. Was going to I put you heard a yes. Yes. And then the last motion is for Susan England to be appointed a regular commissioner in our vacancy. Yes. Okay. Thank you, Leanne. So those two motions are changed to 500.
I had a comment. Unfortunately, couldn't get through, but just a routine comment about the election process. These
alternates can unless the election process has changed, I'm not as active as they used to be, but I believe they'll be recontacted, I don't know what party either one belongs to, to reconfirm that they want to continue. They probably will because they're just joining now and the election isn't far away. But I mean, I believe they'll be asked again if they want to commit to another term.
I believe you are correct. I wasn't going to put Anne and Kevin on the spot, but since we listed on our website what your political affiliation is, I guess we can because the person in charge of the party
No, I'm not saying that we should do that now at all. I'm simply saying that it's not automatic.
It is not. Certainly, head of the Republican down party reached out to me to invite me to all these meetings, but just to make sure that I still wanted to run. They did Is that recent you mean recently or last No, that was back before the election two years ago. Okay. Okay. Yeah. So is Jim. Just wanted to the process works.
This is Jim. I just wanted to weigh in on that. Say again, Jim.
Yeah, just wanted to weigh in on that. Two things. One is even though the elections in May, the process at least starts in January. And two, if either Kevin or Anne are unaffiliated, just reach out to either party, believe. And probably the best place to get information for that would be town clerk, Crowley, when you take your office. When
you get sworn in, they will ask you what party you belong to. And then it will show up on our website for everybody that you know. That's how that goes. Okay, any other questions, Leigh Ann, while we got you back hooked up with us? No. Okay.
Next item is correspondence. And I have no correspondence. Jim, any correspondence there? No.
Okay. So we'll go on to item nine, the administrative report from the zoning agent.
Okay. There's there's it used to be a fair amount of activity, additions, etcetera. I happen to do a lot of refinancing, means there's a lot of appraisers asking me questions. I have no resolution to the application on Hendy Road, waiting to hear from the owner. 57 Hendy there was the issue with the living in Flood Plain and I know there's been some inquiries about an application coming forward for two lots subdivision in Pine Ridge and that has not been committed to wetlands. There's a couple of enforcement activities. One is on Mills Road, It was 40 Mills Road and it was complete. And just for anybody who's not familiar with the property, it's the old bomber property used inspect from the 50s for various various things. Septic system. All our septic system. Manufacturer banks. Property sold and it's currently a small trucking company. I had a complaint and I have reached out and I'm trying to resolve that. Somebody's living on, I'm sorry, specific complaint, somebody's living on the occasionally on the property, you know, immobile and working for a resolution of that. They have another an accessory apartment for Wales and. It's being advertised houses for sale and it's advertised. That was never permanent. I'm working on that as well. Other than that, things are going Okay.
Okay. Jim? Jim, you have anything new about the Extramart?
The gravel pit? Yes. No, I've I did speak to Hank Rooner today trying to follow-up and seeing what his issues were with the turtles and the restoration. And he was concerned about the health. His concerns didn't really they involved a springtime activity. And I'm still working with the owner to try and get a restoration plan in place.
And that's what mean last spring or this coming spring?
Next, he's not worried about the turtles until springtime migration, moving around on the site. So next spring, spring of 'twenty one.
Okay. So he's not going have anything from his point of view right now for what he was asked to look out for? No, he's Okay. Did you go say ahead.
No. He's okay with what's what's and so what's happened today? Did
you say it on our last meeting that the new wetlands agent hadn't met with Was it anybody from the project yet, or was it with hadn't met with Chris Bell? Or
was it one the with Chris Bell. He went out there with me, I believe just prior to the meeting. And we just took a look around the site.
Has Chris had met with him since then, or has there not been much of anything to So
he hasn't met with him since then? He has not. Yeah, there's not a lot of wetlands. Wetlands Commission did not have a lot of concerns about that particular property. Planning and zoning is much more. It's very much to the. The conditions, etcetera. The monitoring is is more through the Planning and Zoning Commission.
Okay. And just do you do you wanna add anything else about that? From your perspective? To be Yes. Am I coming across here okay? You're breaking up. Up just We're little bit. Things
are going okay. Am concerned about getting a restoration plan in place, Concerning about cooperation with the owner. It used to be, but I'm working on it. Hopefully, I'll I'll have a better handle on it by the end of the week. So you're worried about cooperation with him?
Yeah, I'm just concerned that I haven't don't have a restoration plan in place. As of this moment, but they I have spoken to their Chris Bell, their engineer. You said there's a new owner, Jim. No.
No, I'm. The new manager of the property people, the folks that I or the gentleman that I was dealing with is is no longer on-site on a regular basis. His two brothers. Each brother is one of them works out of Berlin or Berlin, I believe the other one is out of state at the present time, but I had been dealing with him early on. And which one's which? Which one So is there's new faces. Sorry.
What? I'm sorry. Which one is now out of state?
Joe. I mean, still his his son actually is on on-site on a daily basis, and he acts with him. So he's not he's not he hasn't disappeared. Different. That's the other brother.
She got the. And Bill that own it. It shows son. Brandon. Is it Brandon who's on-site every day? Yes. Okay. And he's Joe's son? Lisa. Yes. Okay. Thanks. Welcome.
And can I just go back to one thing not to do with this that you said a few minutes ago about, something about an accessory apartment in a house for sale? Cause you did break What's up a little the issue there?
There it appears that there's a an accessory apartment being marketed part of it. Going with the whole that is is on the market and is not permanent as such. That's on Whales Road? I'm just
down the corner of Wales And Route 6. Thank you. With it. It was a small antique store. I believe it was got a special permit years back.
Okay. Thanks. They sell antiques that and now they're selling it as an accessory apartment? Well, it's advertised as accessory part, yeah. Okay.
I guess I'll talk to you later, Jim, and see what we need to do about that, if anything. Something doesn't sound quite right there, but we'll get there.
What are you thinking that you're gonna What's your thoughts on that, Jim?
Well, I was gonna fire off a letter shortly, and if I wasn't getting cooperation, I was gonna speak to Mark Grants about filing something on the so that if somebody's there's a a record of down action. Just a notice of, I'm not sure what you call it. It's not, best of my knowledge, not being utilized as an accessory apartment, but unless it seems like if the town's aware of it, it would be nice to to a potential owner. Be aware of it or at least town. Make an effort. Put the get that information out there. Simple enough to file a notice of the land records. I'm not sure that I have the right to do that. Would go through grants on that.
Because last I knew that little antique shop was for sale as a separate piece of property. Right. I was aware of that. No, I never looked up. It just had the for sale sign out in front of that.
It was for sale for was zoned commercial or something. Right. Was for sale for two or three years, right? I think. Yeah, think at least. Yeah.
So it something sounds fishy. Okay. More to follow on that one. The Commission discussion, I just wanted to say that I did attend the recent online training last week for how to hold a legal meeting and correct meetings. Easier said than done, but we'll keep working on it. I think we got most of the legal technicalities in there. From the Inland Wetlands side of the house, there will be an application coming our way at the property at one hundred twenty nine Hebron Road. They'll be wanting to put in a swimming pool and an accessory apartment. Both of those are zoning issues. As you run up Hebron Road, that's the one where they're building the big stone fence. They got stone pillars in place in the fence. So there's a lot of interest on the residents around that area, what's going on there. And I wanted to ask, is there anybody on the commission who was on the commission last time we developed the plan of conservation and development? Yes. I was. Okay. I was.
That's great news. Because I know that 2025 will be here before we know it and that's when the next one comes out. And I look at the magnitude of the task there and that looks pretty significant. I don't know how much the Commission actually did there. When I talked to Eric about that, he said we go out and subcontract a lot of that work out to somebody else. But I'm sure there'll be plenty for us to be involved in that as well. And so I would encourage Anne and Kevin, know, you have spare time over the winter here, I think you've both been to the website and seen all the stuff there and in the same section where our regulations exist is the plan of conservation and development and that's a pretty good document and it gives us a lot of guidance on how we should be taking the town and that sort of thing and probably worth spending a little time getting familiar with that.
And I guess last part of the Commission discussion, I can't remember if I said it before, but I sure thought it to myself. Thank you, Anne and Kevin, for your willingness to help us out with the Commission here. That's wonderful news. So that's that. Anybody else for Commission discussion at this point? Hearing none, I think John bailed out on us after we finished up with the discussion on the lake regs, so I don't think there's any public comment. Anybody from the public here? No? So with that, I guess we move on to adjournment. Do I have a motion that we adjourn? I'll move to adjourn at 08:59. Thank you, Leanne. I'll second that. Thank you, Scott. Happy Thanksgiving.
You too. Same to you, that's coming up fast. Yeah. Back at Thanksgiving to everyone. I got to make the motion official here. Any opposed? Hearing none, the motion carries five-zero-zero. And I wish you all a happy Thanksgiving as well. We'll be meeting the third Monday in December, right before Christmas, I think that comes out to being. And that's a week after the Board of Selectmen meet. And so we should be able to officially welcome Kevin and Anne to the Commission at that point. But thank you all for joining us. That's it. Great. We're signing off. Yep. Good night, everybody. Thank you. Night.