The Planning and Zoning Commission (P&Z) has postponed until next month what is expected to be the last installment of an ongoing public hearing on The Preserve at Newtown, a 23-lot residential subdivision proposed for a 167-acre site in Dodgingtown.

P&Z Chairman Robert Mulholland announced at a January 15 session that the public hearing will continue at the P&Z’s February 5 meeting.

“Unfortunately, KASL, LLC, will not be heard tonight,” Mr Mulholland said at the January 15 session.

The P&Z had not yet received from the developer a report of the archaeological significance of the property, he said. Thus, the hearing would be continued until February 5 for the receipt of that required report.

In 2009, the P&Z created a set of regulations that require developers to have the archaeological aspects of properties proposed for subdivisions and resubdivisions reviewed by archaeological experts. Such reviews are intended to preserve any significant archaeologic, historic, and cultural features of the land.

The Dodgingtown project is proposed by developers KASL, LLC, and IBF, LLC. The firms are represented by local developer/builder George L. Trudell II.

At the most recent public hearing on The Preserve, several Scudder Road area residents stressed they fear that their already unreliable domestic well water supplies would be diminished after new homes are built in that area and start drawing up subterranean water through new wells.

The developer has responded that there will be sufficient underground water in the area for its current residents and new residents at the proposed subdivision.  

Other issues that have been raised include increased traffic flow and proposed relatively high construction densities in two housing clusters at the site.

The developers propose two clusters of single-family houses on the 167-acre site, where about half of the acreage would be designated as “open space” for passive forms of recreation under the provisions of the town’s “open space conservation subdivision” (OSCS) regulations.

In conventional large-lot subdivisions, the P&Z requires that at least 15 percent of the site be kept as open space, while the OSCS rules require that at least 50 percent of the terrain remain as undeveloped open space.

The Preserve at Newtown is the first subdivision application to reach the P&Z under the terms of the OSCS rules, which the P&Z created in 2004. The rules are intended to limit suburban sprawl.

One housing cluster of nine dwellings would be located along the southeast side of Robin Hill Road #2, which is a dead-end street extending northeastward from Rock Ridge Road, near Rock Ridge Country Club. The other housing cluster would be built along a proposed quarter-mile dead-end street extending southeastward from Scudder Road, south of Ferris Road.

The OSCS rules provide an incentive to developers in the form of a “density bonus,” which allows ten percent more building lots to be created in an OSCS development plan than would be allowed under the terms of the land use regulations covering conventional large-lot subdivisions. The developers are employing that density bonus in the Preserve proposal.

The Preserve proposal gained a wetlands/watercourses protection permit from the Inland Wetlands Commission (IWC) in November.

The developers’ applications to both the P&Z and the IWC are available for public review during regular business hours at the town Land Use Agency offices at Newtown Municipal Center, 3 Primrose Street.