Special Report: Make Up or Break Up? P&Z and ARB to Meet Tonight

Tonight, the Planning and Zoning Commission will hold a special meeting with the members of the Architectural Review Board/Village District Design Advisory Committee to discuss “report and work product, expectations.” The discussion comes after years of simmering tensions between the two entities and complaints from business owners and developers who have found their projects caught in the middle.  

This evening’s meeting was initiated after a brief discussion during the Feb. 12 meeting of P&Z when the commissioners declined to act on an agenda item to reappoint the members of its advisory design board, whose terms expire on Mar. 1.

“I’m not comfortable reappointing until we have spoken to some people on this board because what we are getting is not — as someone who was on the board when we enacted ARB — this is not what we anticipated,” P&Z Vice Chair Melissa-Jean Rotini said. “I think that there needs to be some discussion on rules and what we’re going to get before there is any appointment.”

Chair Rick Tomasetti went a step further and seemed to imply that he was exploring dissolving the VDDAC in favor of hiring an outside architect or planner to handle design review. Referring to Town Planner Michael Wrinn, Tomasetti said, “There is potential… what did you call it, Michael? To do this through consultants.”

What is the ARB/VDDAC?

The ARB/VDDAC is an unusual joint entity. The Village District Design Advisory Committee has been in place for many years. Connecticut State Law requires towns that have established Village Districts to either name a contracted design professional to review applications within the districts or designate a standing Village District Design Advisory Committee. Wilton’s Village Districts are Wilton Center and the commercially-zoned areas of Cannondale.

The Architectural Review Board is a relatively new institution. In 2019, at the behest of Scott Lawrence, who was then chair of P&Z, and Tomasetti himself, who was vice chair at the time, the Board of Selectmen approved the creation of a Wilton Architectural Review Board. Many nearby towns, including Westport, Ridgefield, Darien, and Norwalk have ARBs advising their P&Z Commissions.  

Although the two entities must be appointed separately (with P&Z appointing VDDAC and the BOS appointing ARB), the idea from the start was for the same set of members to serve in both capacities. Effectively, the members of VDDAC, which already oversaw design review for applications within the Village Districts, would now take on the same review role throughout the town. The meetings of the two groups are held back-to-back on the same evening, generally once per month.

While ARB is merely an advisory body reporting to P&Z, it has an explicit mandate to review architecture and aesthetic design. P&Z does not have that same charge. In the initial June 2019 presentation to BOS calling for the creation of an ARB, Tomasetti said that when P&Z has pushed back on applicants from an aesthetic and architectural perspective, it is “a little out of bounds, you could argue, for the P&Z. We’re really there for land use perspective and not so much for the architectural review.”

Town officials have repeatedly cited the building that houses the Learning Experience preschool at 213 Danbury Rd. as one particular impetus for the creation of ARB. In that review process, P&Z found at the time that it had little influence over projects that they find to have aesthetic flaws but are functionally allowed by Wilton’s zoning regulations. This is due in part to Wilton’s lack of formal design guidelines that would allow developers to anticipate the town’s architectural expectations at the outset of a project.

Tomasetti included the development proposed for 300 Danbury Rd. as an example in his presentation to BOS back in 2019. He outlined the way P&Z was able to lean on VDDAC to help improve the architecture of the proposal. This was only possible at the time because 300 Danbury Rd. fell within the bounds of the Wilton Center Village District.

At the time, then-chair Lawrence cited the soon-to-begin POCD process as underscoring the need for formal architectural review of projects in town.

With the creation of ARB — the theory went — P&Z and the members of the now-joint ARB/VDDAC could bring that same collaboration to bear on projects all across Wilton.

But five years later, that relationship seems to have soured and disagreements abound about what the role of ARB is exactly, and what power the group actually has. GOOD Morning Wilton looked into three recent applications where the two entities clashed with one another.

Case Study 1: LDS Meeting House at 241 Danbury Rd.

In June 2022, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints submitted an application to the Planning & Zoning Department to redevelop the long-vacant lot that sits across from Wilton Town Hall as a meeting house. The applicants were referred to ARB and participated in a friendly but extensive architectural review process that saw every element of the project from plantings to windows to bricks analyzed. After multiple revisions over the course of three months, the collaboration concluded in August on a high note, with architect Rob Bergheimer thanking the ARB for their time and insight throughout the process.

“Honestly,” he said, “This is a much better project today than where we started.” ARB had scheduled a special meeting during its usual summer recess in order to ensure that this application and three others were ready for P&Z review in September.

The mood would soon sour when the project eventually reached P&Z on Oct. 24. Commissioner Pagliaro critiqued the window selection and other design elements of the proposal and seemed unaware that the architectural elements of the proposal he was seeing had already been debated at ARB.

“Bear with me,” Bergheimer said, seeming bewildered. “We spent a lot of time with the ARB getting to this point. This was something we thought we had thoroughly vetted, but some of the things you’re talking about are the same things that were talked about, presented, and dismissed already. We’re kind of going full circle.”

Rotini responded to his confusion, “They are a board that reports to us. They are non-binding. They serve through and by this board. They are not an independent body who makes any determinations. We have very qualified architects on this board… as I’m sure you can imagine, opinions sometimes differ.”

The discussion concluded with the architects for the meeting house agreeing to communicate this new round of design review to their clients at the LDS central church in Utah. However, when the application returned in January, Bergheimer presented a series of final design changes, which addressed the window materials concerns Pagliaro had voiced, but not his concerns about window sizes.

However, the project’s other architect Robin Benning explained that this fifth round of design revisions was the final one the church was willing to pursue.

“We’re sort of at a loggerhead, and I think the bottom line is we’ve made significant revisions to the site and to the building. … at this point, our client has asked us to please take this forward as an up or down decision,” Benning said.

The commissioners balked, with Pagliaro calling the tactic bullying. The hearing concluded with the commissioners directing Wrinn to draft a denial resolution and research what specific grounds they had to deny the application, in order to make sure they didn’t violate the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act (RLUIPA.) This law protects houses of worship and religious institutions from “undue burdens” that may be imposed by land use regulations.

But in a surprise twist at the next meeting two weeks later, P&Z voted to approve the application.

“I was having a difficult time putting a denial one together based on window size,” Wrinn later explained to GMW. “In the clear light of day, you say, well, is this project going to get denied for one foot on a window? And can we defend that if we go to court?”

Case Study 2: 12 Godfrey Place & Wilton Center Master Plan

At times, the two town entities have commented directly on each other’s conduct in public meetings, even at times in front of applicants. On April 24, 2023, ARB/VDDAC called a special meeting to deal with several urgent applications, including the controversial proposal to redevelop 12 Godfrey Pl. in Wilton Center. Two months earlier, P&Z moved to reject the application, saying that it would not consider the development until the master plan for Wilton Center had been completed. Developer Rich Granoff then made good on threats to convert the project into an 8-30g affordable housing development, with an additional fifth story added and several more expensive design elements like stonework eliminated.

“I assume you followed this story,” Granoff said to ARB/VDDAC, after outlining the changes to the project. “One P&Z member insisted the master plan was going to be approved in two or three weeks. We’re six months into that statement now, and it’s probably [going to be] another six months.” Granoff’s prediction proved correct: the master plan process would indeed continue for another six months, finally concluding in October 2023.

Rob Sanders, Chair of ARB/VDDAC, did not mince words when commenting on the actions of the Commission.

“We feel your pain,” Sanders replied. “Planning and Zoning promised to have its new regulations on the books in a short timeline, and that doesn’t seem to be the case. And I’m not blaming anybody or castigating anything, but we appreciate that the wheels of development and people’s money move on.”

“Let this be a lesson to us,” he concluded.

A few months earlier, in a meeting on the master plan process itself, Sanders expressed disappointment in a comment made by Tomasetti during the project’s kick-off meeting.

“We’ve heard several people including the chair of P&Z saying [to master plan consultants BFJ] ‘we want your vision, we want your vision.’ In some ways, that statement is an abdication of the town’s responsibility to have a vision.”

Tomasetti would later clarify that what he meant was he wanted them to be visionary, not that he was relying on the consultants’ vision for the area.

He added, “We as a Commission saw fit to actually form the ARB and those of us who were around at the time were proponents of it. I think it’s a good thing we have it but we have a ways to go to understand how they can support us.”

Case Study 3: Rise Doughnuts

Confusion over the role of ARB/VDDAC reaches down the staff level as well. In 2021, Rise Doughnuts received a special permit from P&Z to open a permanent restaurant at 28 Center St., the building that formerly housed Lang’s Pharmacy. Weeks from opening, ARB/VDDAC was looped in on plans for an accessible wheelchair ramp that had been approved by the Building Department months earlier. No one in the Building Department or P&Z staff had informed the applicants that the addition would also need to be reviewed by VDDAC, per State regulations governing Village Districts.

“I don’t know what to say about you having a building permit for a project that hasn’t been reviewed by our committee,” said Sanders. “We have authority on this district and that should be part of the building permit approval.”

“We need to find a way to do this better when a business owner like you arrives,” he conceded.

Once ARB/VDDAC saw the proposed plans, which featured a ramp intersecting and impeding the pedestrian walkway in front of the restaurant, they refused to approve as submitted. The updated design — a wrap-around ramp that hugs the outside perimeter of the outdoor seating area and doubles as a screen blocking mechanical space behind the property — was applauded as a significant improvement on the original. But this last-minute correction came with a cost.

“Part of my confusion, to be totally candid, is we were already approved by the Building Department for the ramp where it is and we’ve already poured the footings,” Rise owner Hugh Mangum said at the time. “We can’t handle [further changes] monetarily until we get open — the key here is we need to get open. We’ve done everything in our power to submit this early. We’ve played ball.”

The restaurant would open on a temporary certificate of occupancy, with a permanent COO issued once the ramp had been completed. Mangum said of the experience, “It’s apparent that the Board wants what’s good for Wilton. If there’s an investment to be made, it’s just in providing clearer information online for a new business coming into town.”

Looking Ahead

The special meeting between P&Z and ARB/VDDAC is scheduled for this evening, Wednesday, Feb. 21, at 7:00 p.m. It will be held electronically via Zoom at the link provided in the meeting agenda, but no public comment will be heard.

GMW reached out to Town Planner Michael Wrinn, Chair Rick Tomasetti, and Vice Chair Melissa-Jean Rotini for comment ahead of publication but received no response.

On Feb. 2, ARB/VDDAC met to discuss goals for 2024, including an improvement to its relationship with P&Z. A central question remains about when in the review process ARB/VDDAC is meant to be involved.

Speaking to GOOD Morning Wilton for this story, ARB/VDDAC Chair Sanders explained that his understanding was that applicants were meant to come to ARB/VDDAC first. “At the very least,” Sanders said. “We would like to be concurrent.”

This seems to line up with comments made by Lawrence and Tomasetti in the original 2019 presentation to BOS about ARB’s role.

Lawrence explained in 2019 that the goal of creating ARB was to improve the process, set expectations, and reduce the cost of applications both for the town and for applicants, by avoiding applications that need to be withdrawn, redesigned, and resubmitted.  

“By the time [an application] comes to [P&Z], we require them to be fully designed and fully engineered,” Lawrence said in a BOS meeting on Oct. 21, 2019. “This [creation of ARB] allows an experienced board to basically have a first look and get on the radar of the town. That accomplishes not only setting up the application for the Commission but also for the applicant.”

However, just this month, P&Z praised an applicant for coming to the Commission to fine-tune design before consulting with ARB. Kimco‘s pre-application hearing on Feb. 12 for the redevelopment of its Wilton Center campus was the fifth visit the company has made to receive design feedback from the Commission ahead of submitting an actual application that would take the project before ARB.

“Can I just add that I appreciate that they came here first instead of ARB so that they got our take on what we were saying about materials and things that I know ARB will be looking at?” Rotini said after the presentation.

“We did that with intent,” Kimco’s attorney Casey Healy replied.

Back in 2019, then-First Selectwoman Lynne Vanderslice pressed Tomasetti in his initial presentation to the BOS about the need for an ARB and whether he and other architects on P&Z would be able to refrain from design input once applications had been through ARB.

“You don’t want the applicant to go through this whole process and then the architects on P&Z say, no, we want you to go in this direction…” she noted.

Tomasetti responded, “Speaking for myself and the other architect on the Commission, believe me, we don’t want to be the architecture police. If one day we do, we’ll segue over to ARB.”

GOOD Morning Wilton has made multiple requests for comment to Michael Wrinn, Rick Tomasetti and Melissa-Jean Rotini, but has not received a response.