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Make Their Views Known

Guilford’s Planning and Zoning Commission (PZC) has spent three years in a comprehensive attempt to revise the town’s zoning regulations. I commend that effort, but some of the revisions, as proposed, will create unintended—and unacceptable—consequences that will severely alter the face of our community. At public meetings and through the submission of letters and documents, many Guilford residents have already identified several of these risks for the Commission, which rightly decided, at the conclusion of the public comments portion of the last hearing, that it needed to give these concerns further study.

Among the issues that worry many Guilford residents are the absence of any formal limitation on the size of big-box developments in the newly created Post Road Business (PRB) and Business Mixed Used (BMU) zones along the entire length of Route 1 and the potential for extraordinarily large and high-density multi-unit housing developments for which the use of the special permitting process to obtain approval would not be required before beginning construction. The regulations would permit, as of right now, for example, a store as large as 1,100,000 square feet (that is 10 times the size of the former Guilford Walmart) and 600-unit four-story apartments. The regulations should instead, in order to fully evaluate the implications of any proposed Route 1 construction, require that proposed projects along the entirety of Route 1 be considered on an individual basis, subject to the special permit procedure, rather than allowing automatic site approval of such huge developments, as the current draft would allow.

At the conclusion of the May 7, 2023, PZC hearing, many Commission members recognized that the public had indeed raised issues that needed to be addressed. I encourage anyone who shares these or other concerns about the proposed regulations to make their views known.

Jonathan E. Silbert

Guilford