Op-Ed: Tuesday, November 4th & the HROD

Editor’s Note: F.B. (Rick) Drake of Old Lyme submitted this op-ed to us. He is a career architect with national and international design experience in the creation of small towns.

Some candidates in the coming election are taking credit for the defeat of the HROD [Halls Road Overlay District], an easy claim to stake. After all, the most controversial debates and the final vote on the proposal took place during the current Administration’s tenure in Town Hall. Whatever was wrong with the Overlay must by association at least, if not by direct action, have been their fault, right?  Maybe, but the subject’s worth at least a slightly closer look.

The Halls Road Improvement Committee (HRIC) was created in 2015 and labored for 10 years through changing memberships and five different town administrations, three Democratic and two Republican, to produce the proposal that was defeated earlier this year.  Each of those administrations no doubt influenced the committee, but none made it law. The ultimate authority to accept or deny the proposal resided with the Zoning Commission.  That’s certainly how events unfolded in 2024 and ’25.  The HRIC was allowed to complete its work without undue interference from the current administration. Ditto the Zoning Commission, which was allowed to consider and vote on the proposal also without interference. In fact, contrary to the claims of some, the current administration acted appropriately in January not by voting to approve the Overlay per se but by voting to approve its submittal to the Zoning Commission for its consideration and conclusion. Absent that vote, the decade long process would still be ongoing and a structured opportunity to stop, reassess and reconfigure it would have been postponed yet again. Forwarding the Overlay to the Zoning Commission for a vote was the opposite of controlling the process. It was allowing that process to operate as it was meant to.  

That said, the importance of an administration’s influence can’t be entirely discounted, and  there are good examples that reinforce that point.  

• While the current administration refrained, as it should have, from directing the HRIC’s work, it used its influence in a positive way to arrange meetings between HRIC leadership and some of its most vocal critics. This author knows this to be true because he participated in some of those meetings as a critic. But even then, at the end of the day, the administration allowed the system to function and the HRIC to incorporate – or to set aside – its critics’ concerns as it, the HRIC, not the Selectmen, was charged to do.
• An earlier administration’s influence, however, actually had a more direct and profound effect. One analysis of the HROD attributes many of its shortcomings to the hiring of a lead consultant put forward by that earlier administration, a consultant that was arguably unqualified to do the work. Whether the earlier administration failed to grasp the technical challenges of the HROD and/or the lack of qualifications of the consultant it put forward or not, a case could reasonably be made today that the shortcomings of the HROD were ultimately more the result of that consultant’s hiring than of many of the decisions rendered by the HRIC’s lay members, themselves.

Credit for defeat of the HROD, however, is, itself, worth a closer look. Without a town-wide vote, the party affiliations of the HROD’s opponents are unknown. Claims of credit for its defeat, therefore, or inferences to that effect by any group other than “the Citizens of Old Lyme” are unfounded and, more to the point, misleading. Opposition to the HROD, or support for that matter, crossed party lines. This author is just one of many who criticized the Overlay on technical grounds, not political (Drake letter to the ZC 2/18/25).  Furthermore, an examination of the vote taken by the Zoning Commission reinforces the fact that the Overlay faced multilateral opposition. Of the four negative votes cast, two were in fact Democrat or Democrat endorsed and two were Republican. Any single group’s claims of unilateral credit for defeating the measure, therefore, or inferences of same are at best unsubstantiated if not disingenuous during an election cycle.

In time, the community may come to realize that the greatest shortcoming of the HROD experience was not the number of its housing units or the length of its buildings but rather the unwarranted politicization of the effort, an unfortunate outcome for which neither the HRIC nor the current administration is responsible. The Administration shepherded the HROD to a majority vote decision by the Zoning Commission after HRIC members had contributed incalculable numbers of hours of time and myriad personal sacrifices in an effort to improve our town. Critics might agree that some of those efforts were imperfect, but claiming they were politically motivated requires proof not innuendo. The town and the committee members in particular deserve better.  

F. B. Drake

Editor’s Note: This op-ed was updated with a revised headline.