The company developing the Oxford Greens presented plans to the Planning and Zoning Commission Thursday to build 146 homes in the next phase of the sprawling community.
Earlier this month the commission approved a revision of the master plan for the development from Timberlake Development Partners, the developer of the entire 806-acre parcel.
Though Timberlake has filed an appeal asking a judge to rescind certain conditions of that approval (Click here to read a story from Oxford Patch about the issue), the company that designed the next stage of the development, New Haven-based TPA Design Group, brought plans forward Thursday knowing the commission wouldn’t act on them that night.
“We’re just here to present the overall plan,” David Golebiewski, TPA’s president, said at the beginning of an 60-minute presentation on the project.
As new “phases” of the project are built out, Timberlake sells parts of the development to another company, Pulte Homes of New England, who builds the houses at the age-restricted community, then markets and sells them to home buyers.
There are currently 341 homes built in the first three phases of the development. The plans presented Thursday would bring the total to 447 and result in about $691,300 in new annual tax revenue, a consultant told the commission in December.
The next section to be built consists of 146 homes within 57 new buildings — 25 duplexes and 32 triplexes. The units would be between 1,657 and 2,270 square feet. The current single-family homes built at the development are between 1,587 and 2,470 square feet.
Reid Blute, vice president of land acquisition for Pulte Homes, told commission members Thursday that the company has “very optimistic” expectations for selling the homes and expects this phase of the development to be fully built out in five to seven years.
“We’re anxious to get going,” he said. “We would like to get started right away.”
Commission members didn’t have many in-depth questions about the proposal Thursday, but one point of future contention may involve the wastewater management plan for the site.
Commission member Wayne Watt criticized the plans for not incorporating permanent electrical generators to run water pumps in the event of a prolonged power outage. He said the current practice in such an event — shuttling a portable generator to different pumping stations throughout the site — hasn’t worked.
“I would like to see permanent generators on all the sites, that’s just my view,” Watt said. “To see that this plan went through all these years and that was not addressed is deplorable, it’s unacceptable, and it’s an outrage.”
Joe Rasberry, an alternate member of the commission, echoed Watt’s sentiments, saying residents of the golf course community couldn’t use their toilets or get water in the aftermath of last October’s snowstorm and subsequent power outage.
“These portable generators didn’t work,” Rasberry said. “If the people were down here, they’d be screaming bloody murder at you right now.”
As it happened, not one member of the public was at Thursday’s meeting by the time the proposal was brought up, and the commission took no action after the presentation.
Members discussed the possibility of having a public hearing on the plans in April but ended the meeting by tabling the matter without setting a specific date to take it up again.