An appeal filed by the would-be developer of a rejected Ansonia subdivision was tossed out of court this month.
The city’s Planning and Zoning Commission had rejected the proposal — to build a 23-home subdivision off Castle Lane — in November 2011, after residents raised concerns about traffic and water use at a public hearing.
The next month, Castle Lane Developers LLC appealed the PZC’s rejection at Superior Court in Milford, saying the commission “acted illegally, arbitrarily, and in abuse of the discretion vested in it by law” in denying the controversial proposal.
But John Moran, a judge trial referee, disagreed in a 23-page decision issued May 8 and posted below.
A message seeking comment was left May 15 with the lawyer representing the developer.
Background
The development was originally proposed in August 2011.
The next month, about 50 residents of the neighborhood showed up at a public hearing on the proposal to raise worries about increased traffic, well usage, and other concerns.
Article continues after video of residents detailing their concerns to the PZC at the hearing.
In November 2011, the PZC voted to deny the application.
According to the minutes of the meeting at which the application was rejected, Planning and Zoning Commission members raised concerns about traffic and public safety on nearby Castle Lane Road, as well as comments made by Oswald Inglese, a consultant to the commission, in a memo dated five days before the denial.
In its appeal of the PZC’s decision, the developer argued that its application would have complied with the city’s zoning regulations if the PZC had granted requests for waivers it had submitted as part of the proposal.
The waivers, the developer said, would have resulted in improvements to traffic safety and less impervious road surface in the subdivision.
The developer also said the application should have been approved because it had submitted alternate plans that would have made the waivers it asked for unnecessary.
But the commission argued that the alternate plans were a “substantial deviation” from the application and would essentially be a new application altogether.
Decision
Moran upheld Ansonia’s denial.
“It was not an abuse of discretion for the commission to disapprove Castle Lane’s subdivision application rather than approve it on the basis of one drawing submitted at the last public hearing when that drawing deviated substantially from prior submissions that had been evaluated for over two months,” he wrote.
The developer also challenged the PZC’s reliance on a section of its zoning code to deny the application because, it said, a copy of the regulations the company got from City Hall was outdated and didn’t include the relevant section.
That regulation, 320.5, says any land that has slopes steeper than 25 percent grade can’t be counted toward the lot size in a subdivision.
As a result, the Castle Lane subdivision plan featured under-sized lots.
Moran wrote that “there is very little evidence in the record that could support Castle Lane’s contention that it received a defective set of regulations.”
Article continues after Moran’s ruling.
He said that though the developer’s representatives argued that Section 320.5 of the zoning regulations was not within a copy of the regulations it bought from the town clerk, “Castle Lane did not enter its copy of the regulations into the record either during the hearing or at any point thereafter.
“Indeed, the only copy of the zoning regulations within the record contains § 320.5,” Moran went on.
Moran wrote that at a hearing on Castle Lane’s appeal in December 2012, the developer “could neither provide the date on which these allegedly defective regulations were purchased nor a receipt demonstrating that date.”
Moran also wrote that the developer’s claims of being “unjustifiably blindsided” by the regulation didn’t add up because, prior to buying the property, the developer was alerted to regulations regarding sloped properties by PZC Chairman Bart Flaherty during an informal meeting with the commission in October 2010.
Although Castle Lane last year filed a notice of its intent to sue the city over the zoning regulations mix-up, no lawsuit has yet been filed.
Moran also ruled that the PZC was within its rights to require the developer devote more open space in the application, a requirement Castle Lane had disputed.
