Op-Ed: Old Lyme Zoning Commission’s Vote Against Halls Road Overlay District Proposal is Potentially a Vote “for Decay”

“We owe it to ourselves and to those who come after us to … meet the challenges of our own time. If we do not, we will have voted for decay“

On March 27, the Old Lyme Zoning Commission voted 3-2 in favor of the Halls Road Overlay District (HROD) proposal, with two alternate members casting the negative votes. Because the Planning Commission had previously given the proposal a “negative referral,” a vote of 4-1 was required for passage, and the measure failed. 

The problems the HROD was designed to address still exist. We believe the proposal is a viable response to those challenges, and that its rejection was a set-back for Old Lyme. 

The new overlay district would have created an alternative to the commercial-only C30-S zoning along Halls Road, while leaving that older zoning intact. The HROD was aimed at promoting the creation of a walkable, bike-able, mixed-use shopping street along Halls Road—a new town center for Old Lyme that took as its model Lyme Street in its centuries-long role as a living, mixed-use town center. 

The HROD is a significant piece of zoning regulation. It takes some effort to understand how it works, and to comprehend the implications of its detailed requirements. Those of us who worked on it spent years talking with local residents, business owners, property owners, town officials, regional regulators, developers, and land use lawyers to create the document we presented to Planning and to Zoning. After hundreds of hours, we understood it well. 

Planning took a few hours to consider it, and flatly refused to allow HRIC the opportunity to answer any of their questions. The Zoning Commission held two public hearings totaling a few hours, then held its final vote after two more hours of deliberation in which no new fact or evidence of any kind was allowed to be introduced, even by Commission members. From the comments in each body’s final deliberations, it is clear that several of the participants had only the vaguest understanding (and sometimes a total misunderstanding) of the document. This was not a reasonable way to arrive at a good decision on a measure of this importance to Old Lyme’s future. 

HROD was an attempt to meet the changes now shaping our economy, and to secure our town’s main business district in that new environment. Failing to pass HROD does not make those changes go away. It just leaves us relying on 1950s approaches to 2030s conditions. 

Without HROD, there will be no one to bid against those who see Halls Road as a truck stop. There have been three proposals for gas stations/convenience stores in the last couple of years, and no proposals to build anything else. 

Without HROD, there will be no mixed-use, walkable town center where people can live, work, shop, and enjoy the sort of human contact the Internet can never provide. 

Without HROD, smaller-scale housing—if it comes at all—will be spread over the few remaining open acres, dotted here and there, and we will lose the opportunity to create a vibrant, living, mixed-use neighborhood in the heart of our town. 

Without HROD, our main shopping district will lose the support that a mixed-use neighborhood provides for retail—the pedestrian traffic and walk-in trade that makes such neighborhoods the one bright spot in retail investment. 

Times are changing, as they always do. In the middle of the last century Old Lyme made radical zoning changes to meet the future they saw then. We owe it to ourselves and to those who come after us to do likewise and meet the challenges of our own time. If we do not, we will have voted for decay.