Conservation Panel Approves

Commercial Building In Aquifer District

By Andrew Gorosko

The Conservation Commission has determined that local businesswoman Judith Volpe’s application to build a commercial building in the town’s environmentally sensitive Aquifer Protection District (APD) meets the town’s aquifer protection standards.

Commission members February 9 decided Ms Volpe’s application to construct a 6,065-square-foot retail-office building on a 1.7-acre site at 224 South Main Street, on the corner of South Main Street and Bryan Lane, has no significant impact on the Pootatuck Aquifer.

Ms Volpe proposes construction of the two-story, Colonial style building on a 1.7-acre site near the Pootatuck River, just north of Sand Hill Plaza.

Conservation Commission members had reviewed three development proposals for the property from Ms Volpe during a two-year period. They rejected two larger, more intensive versions of the project for environmental reasons, before approving a wetlands construction permit for the current scaled-down version last October.

The aquifer protection approval granted to Ms Volpe by the Conservation Commission February 9 is a new aspect of the town’s land use review process for properties within the APD. In that process, the Conservation Commission reviews a project’s potential environmental effects on the aquifer and makes a recommendation to the Planning and Zoning Commission (P&Z).

The P&Z was scheduled to resume a public hearing on Ms Volpe’s development application February 17, after the deadline for this edition of The Bee.

The current Volpe development proposal involves no construction in the floodplain of the Pootatuck River, a significant difference compared to previous plans.

Ms Volpe scaled down her development project after the P&Z approved stricter aquifer protection regulations for the APD in June 1999. An earlier version of the project proposed a 9,500-square-foot building with 53 parking spaces. The latest version proposes a 6,065-square-foot building with 35 parking spaces.

Ms Volpe reduced the scope of the project keeping in mind its proximity to wetlands and to United Water’s public water supply wellhead, which is just across South Main Street from the site.

Avance Esthetiques, a day spa that Ms Volpe owns at the nearby Sand Hill Plaza, would not be relocated in the commercial building. Ms Volpe’s previous plans to relocate the day spa to the proposed commercial building proved a stumbling block in past applications to the Conservation Commission. Commission members questioned the use of various toxic chemicals by the spa in an environmentally sensitive area across the street from the United Water wellhead. United Water opposed previous versions of the development proposal on environmental grounds.  United Water has endorsed the latest version of the development plan.