Two years ago this week, on Oct. 21, 2021, the Board of Selectmen approved a $130,000 contract for consultants BFJ Planning to work with the Planning & Zoning Commission on a Master Plan for Wilton Center and nearby segments of Danbury Rd. At the time, multiple members of the BOS underscored the need for a robust public engagement process, one that would, in the words of Selectman Ross Tartell, “help [the public] feel like they’ve been heard.” The Board was assured by Town Planner Michael Wrinn that there would be multiple occasions for the public to participate in the process.
Over the last month, GOOD Morning Wilton learned that, in the rush to finalize the project ahead of the Commission’s post-election transition in December, the Town planned to honor just one of the three public hearings originally outlined — the one that was held 18 months ago, before the master plan had even been developed. The second public hearing has been eliminated entirely. The third public hearing, coming up this week, had — until yesterday — been recast as a discussion about a series of zoning regulation changes driven by the master plan.
These zoning changes are founded on an assumption that the master plan’s vision, goals, and trade-offs have already been approved. They were crafted across more than 20 subcommittee meetings over the last two years, all but one of which was led by an agenda that begins “No public comment will be taken as it is not a public hearing.”
How could P&Z hold a hearing on a set of zoning reforms inspired by a planning document it had never voted on, and which the public had never reviewed? Town Planner Michael Wrinn told GMW on Monday, Oct. 16 that “counsel” had confirmed a vote was not necessary — nor was a public hearing.
But by Tuesday, Oct. 17, after inquiries from GMW, plans had changed again, as indicated by an agenda released by the town — but that still leaves some unanswered questions.
Two Years of Internal Discussion, with Little Voice for the Public
This characterization was a far cry from the public process outlined for the BOS and the public at the outset of the effort in December 2021. The project timeline submitted by BFJ Planning, which remains on the homepage of the town’s master plan website as of 7 a.m. on Oct. 18, indicates that three public hearings will be held on the master plan itself.
Also called “workshops,” they are depicted as green squares in the second to last row of the grid schedule below. The intermediate public hearing, originally forecast for Month 7 of what was expected to be a 10-month process, was never held. Instead, the effort has stretched to 22 months and counting. A narrative preamble was added at some point that stated, confusingly, that just two public events would take place.
During his presentation at the March 2022 public hearing, Frank Fish (principal at BFJ Planning), explained the timeline in detail, sharing the same schedule that would later appear on the website and trying to allay concerns that the public would be cut out of the process. Crucially, Fish also noted that only after that third hearing on the master plan, and once P&Z had voted to approve it, would the town then decide whether and how to incorporate the master plan priorities into the zoning code or planning documents like the POCD.
When GMW began inquiring this month about what became of the second of the three public hearings, it became clear that the third hearing in the process had been fundamentally restructured as well.
In meetings held on Sept. 21, 2023 and Sept. 28, 2023, Wrinn and P&Z Chair Rick Tomasetti informed the Master Plan Subcommittee and full P&Z Commission that the final “public hearing” would not concern the master plan itself at all.
“The master plan really is not getting voted on,” Tomasetti said on Sept. 21 to the Master Plan subcommittee he assembled in 2021. “You can read it, but it’s not something that gets voted on by the [Planning & Zoning] Commission. It just is what it is.”
In recent years, master plans conducted by the following Fairfield County towns concluded in a public vote by a town Commission or Board: Westport, Norwalk, Darien, and Ridgefield. After failing to find any examples of peer towns that adopted master plans without a vote, GMW reached out to Wrinn. On Monday, Oct. 16, we asked for clarification on the vote and flagged that accepting a master plan that had never been voted on seemed to flout both good governance standards generally and the explicit assurances made early on in the planning process with BFJ.
In an email reply on Monday afternoon, Wrinn reiterated that “the regulations are the only part being voted on… As always, any change to the zoning regulations requires a public hearing. The public weighs in on the actual specific regulation change being proposed.”
The public was told a very different story back in March 2022 when the initial public hearing was held.
“We didn’t want to start [developing the master plan] until after this public workshop,” Fish said then. “We wanted to get as much input here as we could get, and then start in on the actual development alternatives themselves. And you can see down below we’ve got the two workshops presented in the green future meetings with the committee.”
Even with the promise of two additional public hearings that would come further along in the process, the subcommittee and consultants heard concerns from residents during the initial hearing that the public engagement process was lacking. Two individuals specifically commented that a single meeting to gather ideas before the master plan development got underway was insufficient.
Sarah Marceau, who identified herself as a mom and business owner, called the timing and system of the meeting “definitely not ideal” for parents of young children. “I think for an important meeting like this, it would be absolutely wonderful to have a second meeting at a different time.”
Sarah Curtis, who shared extensive comments and went on an exploratory walk throughout the study area in anticipation of the hearing, called for a deeper public engagement process. “The fact that we’re just having one public meeting on Zoom… we should be having a great conversation,” she said. “We should be walking around Wilton Center where we can engage with one another. And I would hope that our consultants and the committee would consider that and not have what’s supposed to be the next public meeting be the final recommendations. I think we, as a town, owe it to ourselves.”
Before concluding his presentation at the March 2022 meeting, Fish encouraged interested residents to “keep checking that [master plan] website” for updates on the subcommittee’s work and new material from the consultants. More than 18 months later, an ad for the initial public hearing remains the top item under the Get Involved tab. Scrolling down, it lists an incomplete archive of subcommittee meetings that, at one point, skips nine months from December 2022 to September 2023, a period in which the subcommittee actually met 10 times.
A New Agenda Poses More Questions Than it Answers
Up until Tuesday afternoon (Oct. 17) at 3:20 p.m., the town meeting calendar listed the Thursday event as simply “Planning and Zoning Commission Special Meeting,” with no topic. At 3:20 p.m. on Tuesday, the town released a formal agenda for Thursday’s hearing, which veers significantly in format and language from the agendas used in prior regular meetings and special meetings of the Commission.
GMW emailed Wrinn on Tuesday afternoon hoping to clarify a series of unanswered questions on the agenda. His responses are presented in full below:
Is the master plan now going to a vote? It is listed under possible action on the agenda.
Wrinn: Based on comments heard from the public, action could be a recommendation to revise something in the plan, continue discussion to the next meeting, etc
Is public comment allowed on the reg[ulation] changes? Only the master plan agenda item mentions public comment
Wrinn: Public comment is a given that it is a public hearing
Is the master plan being presented? Only the reg[ulation] changes are listed as a public meeting item
Wrinn: Master Plan is being presented and comments allowed
Is there a reason the reg[ulation] changes inspired by the master plan are being presented before the public comments on the master plan?
Wrinn: Only that we always start the agenda with Public Hearings – (very similar to when someone comes in with a Zoning Amendment and a Special Permit, two separate applications but almost always presented / commented on concurrently )
Finally, if you expect you may not make it through the four reg[ulation] changes at the start of the agenda [as Wrinn stated earlier in the exchange], does that mean comment on the master plan will likely not happen tomorrow night?
Wrinn: No, as above, comments will be taken on both, not a case where we are going through, for instance, Form based code and then the conversation on that shuts off. Just trying to focus the conversation on a particular overlay at a time so everyone understands that part of the puzzle.
Tuesday afternoon, GMW emailed an additional question to Wrinn asking what had changed between the Sept. 21 meeting where it was discussed the vote would only be on the regulations and confirmed to GMW that the public would only weigh in on the regulation changes, to the seemingly revised approach outlined on the agenda for Thursday’s meeting.
A response has not been received as of publication time, but GMW will update the story accordingly.
Requests for Input
As indicated by the agenda, the Planning & Zoning Commission is expected to host a public hearing on the zoning changes incited by the Greater Wilton Center master planning process on Thursday, Oct. 19.
Over the last three months, GOOD Morning Wilton‘s reporter repeatedly reached out to Tomasetti and Wrinn for information on the final stages of the master planning process, largely without response of any kind. On Oct. 7, Tomasetti reached out to GMW‘s editor requesting to do a video interview on the master plan project. He was informed that any interview on the topic would need to be with the reporter who has written about the process since the start and who had already reached out directly to him on the topic.
Since then, GMW‘s reporter reached out multiple times to schedule an interview with Tomasetti to help inform Wilton residents about the nuance of the master plan and accompanying regulatory changes. These requests to speak were either refused, ignored, or accepted and later canceled. On Monday morning, GMW reached out one final time to Tomasetti, this time noting that we would now be reporting on the handling of the public review process itself as well. When invited once more to either speak with GMW himself or designate another member of the subcommittee who would be available to speak on its behalf, Tomasetti did not respond.
Monday evening, the town submitted an op-ed to the editor of GOOD Morning Wilton signed by the six members of the Greater Wilton Center Area Master Plan Subcommittee describing its two-year project as “transparent, adaptive, and most importantly, driven by community feedback.” That op-ed was published on Tuesday.
GOOD Morning Wilton will run an article outlining the findings of the master plan, the aims of the proposed zoning changes to Wilton Center and nearby Danbury Rd., and the relationship between them tomorrow, Thursday, Oct. 19, ahead of that evening’s public hearing.
Even ignoring everything else wrong with this process (Republican gaslighting over “transparency” at its worst), any time a zoning board does something irregular – as is seemingly the case here, not holding a vote on a master plan when other neighboring towns have done so – it’s a gold-plated invitation to developers (and, for that matter, residents) to mount legal challenges over decisions they don’t like arising out of it.
It’s not much of a stretch to imagine that a Wilton Center property owner who doesn’t like one of the zoning changes arising out of this plan might end up suing the town over it, and that the lack of public review or a formal approval vote for the whole plan might help them in that suit.
(lawsuits are also, of course, one of the many reasons to worry about conflicts of interest on the BOE)
We as a community – and GMW as the only effective source of Wilton news – should focus on the merits of the Master Plan, as opposed to revisiting history and the process of how we got to this finish line. That line of inquiry is not productive. We should express our gratitude to the exceptionally qualified group of volunteers who have spent innumerable hours of their personal time over two years developing this plan. The public now has the opportunity to comment and ask questions. Let’s wrap it up and move forward!
Seems like communication about the process is sloppy, but the actual thing they’re doing is reasonable. Public has plenty of input and there will be hearings on the actual things that matter (the regulation changes), and the listening sessions/hearings never actually draw a representative sample of the town anyways and mostly feel like unnecessary red tape. I don’t want to have to show up at hearings all the time to make sure my view is considered, I just want to vote for elected officials to represent me, and if I have thoughts I think are valuable on a particular point I can send an email. And when there are really big deal things, put it on the ballot at a major election date.
Here we go again. Planning and Zoning attempting to disenfranchise Wilton’s citizens not unlike dictating a permanent ban on Cannabis by a few in P&Z. There is no coalition with public input with this commission only one way P&Z edicts. They do not care about the people only their self sustainment…
Congratulations to theWilton Master Plan Subcommittee for working so hard and creating such a thoughtful plan for Wilton. Those of us who love our town nonetheless know that its one flaw is the lack of a walkable village with thriving shops and lively restaurants. This plan, and the statute changes it recommends, will allow us to take control of our inevitable development and guide it in a direction that will make Wilton a desirable destination for people and families for generations to come. I hope everyone with the stake in the future of Wilton voices their support.
Wilton‘s planning and zoning review process has a long history of public involvement through open public forum. While it is important to utilize the skill of planning consultants, the commission has a duty to place significant changes to the regulations which define our community’s character in front of the public, to inform and provide input regarding Wilton’s future. Unfortunately, that has not been the case so far with this process.
The subcommittee has expressed its goals for the Center, which on the surface read as a laudable vision for our town. Tonight there will be a presentation of the subcommittee’s suggested roadmap on how to achieve those goals. With little public input, it should only be regarded as a proposal, not a completed process.
The public must be allowed the opportunity to hear out the subcommittee proposals, and to coalesce around the vision which will guide property owners and development in the future. P and Z should welcome comments, and be prepared to adjust this public statement to assure that its manifestation is what Wilton truly hopes for. To quote Winston Churchill, “This is not the end, or the beginning of the end. It is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.”
Wait, am I missing something? I have been practicing zoning law for over 40 years and sat on Wilton P&Z for eight, and I have never heard of any jurisdiction (including Wilton) where a master plan or portion thereof has not been formally adopted by vote of the Commission. It does not just arise sui generis “is what it is”. Without a formal vote, the plan is unenforceable and not worth the paper it is written on – and if it has not been formally adopted then it can’t be the foundation for any approval or denial of a subsequent application – including the adoption of new regulations that are intended to advance the goals of the master plan. Note that if you look at the 2019 POCD (available on the Town’s website) on the front cover it states that the POCD was “Adopted September 23, 2019 Effective October 1, 2019” – because the Commission voted on it (indeed the link on the website is named the “adopted POCD”.
There may be disagreement as to what the Master Plan for Wilton Center should say, but there should be no disagreement that it needs to be formally adopted by vote of the Commission, and that the formal adoption must occur before either the adoption of any regulations seeking to advance the goals and strategies in the master plan, or the approval/denial of any land use application that the Commission justifies on the basis of its consistency with the master plan.
Again, maybe I missed something but Chairman Tomassetti’s quoted statement would indicate otherwise.