Woodstock CT Café

THE DISRUPTORS AND THEIR AGENDA – “A handful of individuals – with the usual support of the disruptive CPS clowns – working with a key officer of the Planning Commission to derail a 2-year effort to develop a basic set of land use regulations.”

Well, the shenanigans at the scheduled special meeting of the Planning & Zoning Commission continued the other night.

This special meeting was called to begin a series of working sessions to review new proposed Zoning Regulations. As explained by commission member Ken Goldsmith, the proposed zoning document does not change the town’s current zoning for various uses, but does address the poor organization and chronic language gaps so as to improve the town’s ability to enforce the rules already in place. Apparently, this enforcement problem has been highly problematic for many years according to current and former zoning enforcement officers Delia Fey and Terry Bellman because of the vague language of the current ordinance. Second, as explained by commission member Mr. Breen, the “Special Permit” structure is the only guide to commercial development in the town, and its requirements are so vaguely written, that the Planning Commission has little ability to manage growing and critical issues into the future relating to larger-scale commercial development projects.

Based on past discussion, the Woodstock Planning Commission recognized the need to upgrade its zoning regulations for many years, but chose first to revise its Subdivision Regulations, which guide residential development in the town. The new Subdivision Regulations continue and broaden the policy of setting aside conservation land in most residential developments in the town. Once these regulations were completed and enacted two years ago, the Planning Commission reassembled as a new commission after the last election and established its next most important priority – upgrading its Zoning Regulations as the “foundationâ€? for managing land use in the town.

None of this was controversial until the other night, Read the rest of this entry »

“Let’s worry LESS about protecting the individual property owner in their quest to maximize their land values, and let’s worry MORE about balancing the needs of our community.”

Folks,

The Republican members running for P&Z are typically pro-development, hiding within the language of “protecting property rights of owners”. I will follow up more later but REPUBLICAN FRED RICH (previously on P&Z, but not re-elected last election; his wife is also running for re-election as Woodstock treasurer unapposed) & Republican Dexter Young (currently on P&Z running for re-election; his son excellent engineer also a principal of CME Engineers, a local company working with many developers) voted to approved the Pulpit Rock Development, which included nine (9) amendments by the P&Z board!?!? Pulpit Rock Road was a flagrant example of the “good old boy” network trying to push a completely unacceptable development through PZC when development applications were obviously flawed. It was not so much a question of needing new P&Z rules as it was a question of FOLLOWING THE EXISTING RULES!!

Some examples of past Republican Control of PZC are:
(1) incomplete developer plans being accepted for review,
(2) accepting LATE applications,
(3) NEVER forcing the developers to completely address or answer citizen’s comments and/or outside engineering comments,
(4) utilizing/hiring “weak” consultant engineers to review developer plans for P&Z – allowing questionable development to occur,
(5) allowing public safety concerns with traffic to NOT BE ADDRESSED, and
(6) attempting to approve incomplete and flawed plans by “offering amendments” rather than having the developer/engineers rework/re-submit their complete plans and suggesting that these issues could be managed sufficiently well through the Woodstock inspection system. Read the rest of this entry »