For the second time this year the Planning & Zoning Commission (PZC) will hold a debate on proposed changes to the contractor storage yards. There will be a virtual public hearing on Monday, Dec. 7 at 7 p.m.

The amendments are being proposed by the town itself and the PZC’s Regulations Committee has been debating changing the regulations since the summer. Initially, the town first brought controversial proposed amendments to a public hearing in August. However, it was pointed out that the hearing was improperly noticed and the proposal was withdrawn. The regulations committee continued to hold meetings to try and come to a consensus on what any new regulations should say.

Some of the contractor storage yards in Clinton are in sections of the town that abut residential districts, which means the tricky issue for the commission has been finding regulations that are fair for the businesses that use the yards and also protect the surrounding properties. Consultant planner John Guszkowski explained to the Harbor News that the earlier submitted and withdrawn proposal was more “permissive” and reduced some of the regulatory charge on the contractors.

Guszkowski said that the current application is more of a middle ground between allowing businesses to operate fairly and protecting the abutting properties.

“The version we marked up and proposed currently tends to try to strike a bit more of a balance between protecting abutting properties from the impacts (visual, noise, lighting, etc.) of a contractor business and recognizing that contractor businesses need to be able to do contractor things to succeed,” Guszkowski wrote in an email.

Under the current regulations, the yards require a 50-foot buffer from residential districts and residential properties and a 14-foot-high fence that encloses outside storage. The original proposed amendments relaxed those requirements. The current proposal keeps the 50-foot buffer and reduces the fence height to six feet. The new proposed regulations would expand the hours of allowed operations to 6 a.m. to 8 p.m.

Proposing amendments to the regulations that govern contractor storage yards in Clinton has become a thorny issue for some over the last 18 months. In 2016, the PZC narrowly passed amendments that relaxed the rules for storage yards and were subsequently sued by the Clinton Taxpayers Association over the failure of a then-commission member to properly recuse himself.

In May 2019 a judge in Middleton Superior Court ended three years of litigation when he ruled in favor of the CTA due to the failure of the PZC member to recuse himself and as part of the ruling the amendments from 2016 were nullified.

The proposed amendments submitted and withdrawn earlier in 2020 were the same amendments that were proposed in 2016; the Regulations Committee argued that the amended were overthrown on procedural grounds not the contents of the text.

That move drew the ire of the CTA members, some of whom attended the August public hearing to speak against the proposal. CTA President Pam Fritz warned the PZC members at that meeting that if the town further pursued proposed contractor storage yard amendments that did not protect neighborhoods the CTA would again sue the PZC. The first lawsuit against the town cost Clinton taxpayers nearly $12,000 fighting the case.

At a public hearing all attendees have the right to be heard. At the hearing the commission can either vote to keep the hearing open if it feels more information needs to be presented or it can close the hearing and rule on the application at its subsequent meeting. A link to the meeting will be posted on the town’s website clintonct.org.