To the Editor:
There’s been a lot of wild talk about Halls Road and the plan to make it a neighborhood in our town center rather than a highway services plaza. The people behind this raft of lies and exaggerations fear change, and preach that by doing nothing, we can prevent change. They are dead wrong.
Doing nothing will allow Halls Road to become truck stops: the best investment opportunity under current zoning. In the last several years, nearly all of the investor interest in Halls Road has been for new gas stations: three proposals, narrowly fended off. There will be more, and we cannot fend them off forever under the current commercial-only C-30s zoning.
The best thing we can do is to provide optional zoning that will allow Halls Road to become something better and something that serves multiple, significant needs of the town.
The Halls Road Overlay District (HROD) proposal does that, providing better returns for investors than they get from gas stations and convenience stores. It also allows the creation of a mixed-use neighborhood with smaller-scale housing and retail that faces Halls Road, not buried back behind empty parking lots. A walkable, mixed-use neighborhood with real neighbors is the best encouragement to businesses that serve the town, not the highway. We need these different types of housing, not just for older folks down-sizing, but also for new families moving in. Our emergency services are all-volunteer. We need younger people to keep them staffed. Smaller-scale housing is crucial to serving their needs.
Of course, those who hate and fear all change are spreading wild exaggerations and outright lies about HROD. Everything you read in their posts is nonsense. Because they’re not really interested in the truth, they feel free to make things up with crackpot logic and nightmare fantasies. It’s easier than reading the actual HROD document (available online) and doing the hard work to go through the regulations in detail to understand what the real limits on development are.
If you do the math (and I have done it) the various limitations and requirements (e.g. parking) in the HROD proposal mean that, in 20 or 30 years, there may be as many as 400 apartments or condos in all of Halls Road, along with a shopping street that runs for perhaps a third of its length. The density of dwelling units per acre at full development is within the range already long-established in Old Lyme zoning for multi-family residential anywhere in town. The hysterical numbers and idiotic cartoons are all fantasy.
Note that my numbers are based only on the HROD regulations, and do not consider all the other constraints on development, such as septic and environmental, which must certainly be considered in any new construction.
People who came to Old Lyme from towns that were grossly over-developed are particularly prone to think that allowing any development will be the thin end of the wedge. I remind them that we in Old Lyme are firmly against suburban sprawl. That’s why we suggested putting the much-needed smaller-scale housing in a place that is already covered with paving, and where it can help keep our local businesses profitable. Doing so spares the last bits of open space. If you forbid it at Halls Road, you may be sure you’ll find it built out in the countryside, where it will do less good and more harm.
HROD is good for Old Lyme, and the folks telling lies to terrify their neighbors are harming the town.
Sincerely,
Mark Terwilliger,
Old Lyme.
Warned that their own plans – by their own timeline – envisioned bulldozing the current shopping district and evicting the current tenants in 5 or 10 years (to Planning) or as long as 15 years (to Zoning) and replacing the relatively affordable rents for small businesses with mixed-use retail at two or three times the cost, Terwilliger showed no concern. As he told members of the community two weeks ago, his interest was not in “year one” (i.e. the current small business owners of Old Lyme) but in the decades to come, and those he imagines will come to replace them.
“Smaller-scale”? It’s a big plan they are proposing, that with its 60,000 sf limits and parking garages looks nothing like the model – Lyme Street – that they are claiming.
The new Hartford Health building next to Pasta Vita is 117 feet long and 64 feet deep and 35 feet tall, excluding the cupola, and at 12,742 SF it’s only half the size of the buildings their plan would allow directly on Halls Road.
And the reality is that even if we accept Terwilliger’s estimate of 400 apartments – at 10% “affordable” housing, the Town of Old Lyme would not move one step closer to fulfilling Old Lyme’s obligations under 8-30g — that would take another 400-500 units, according to estimates made by the Affordable Housing Commission.
As for gas stations? The Halls Road committee has had a decade to propose a change in Zoning to address that. Like sidewalks and shrubbery, that Terwilliger claims to care about, the fix is simple enough and doesn’t require an overlay, countless wasted dollars and time.
Are the 700 signers (and counting) of the petition who oppose this kind of development on Halls Road, all just liars, idiots and fools as Terwilliger claims? You decide.
Fyi…that paving you refer to is parking required by zoning for the uses in place. Perhaps thats were the proposed district would allow a parking structure to compensate for loss of required parking with a vertical structure and allow more land for development…imho