Wrong Project,

Wrong Place

To the Editor:

Driving down Church Hill Road last week, I was struck by the quaint beauty of Sandy Hook Center. Colonial homes line the street leading to a bustling center of brick and clapboard buildings. New sidewalks and lighting grace the area. Here is an example of old-time New England, a landscape that is rapidly disappearing.

Now, we have a developer, Guri Dauti, who owns a small parcel of land on Church Hill Road, a piece of land that looks more like a gully than a building lot. This developer would like to shoehorn 23 condominiums onto this marginal space. What happens to the water that forms in this gully when you replace earth and trees, which naturally reduce runoff, with concrete and tar? Water in basements, runoff freezing on the roadway in winter. There are several examples in the area of underground water that has been diverted by development, leading to ice slicks on the road. Have you ever noticed how condo projects are like cancer on the landscape? Phase I starts and building progresses until it has filled every available inch of space. Drive down I-84 and see the eyesore that is on Mill Plain Road. Drive through Fairfield Hills and look out on the Walnut Tree Village project. A once-lovely hillside is now scarred by building after building.

It is obvious that Mr Dauti’s attorney, Ryan McKain, has never driven in Sandy Hook Center during rush hour if he believes there will be no impact on traffic. All four roads into the Hook can become a congested nightmare. You can sit through several lights before you move through the center. As I-84 empties its flow onto Church Hill Road a half mile above the center, it seems the addition of 40 more cars to that mix would mandate a traffic study. Mr McKain, how would you react to 23 condos added up the street from your house? Would those cars impact your commute? Of course they would, as they will on Church Hill.

This is the wrong project in the wrong place. Why not a couple colonials — on a scale that fits the neighborhood? Oh, silly me, I forgot — developers believe they have a guarantee of outrageous profit, to hell with the impact on the landscape.

“They paved paradise, put up a parking lot.” —Joni Mitchell

Laurie Borst

Beechwood Drive, Sandy Hook   February 15, 2006