Planning Commission - Regular Meeting

Evening, everybody. I'm Michael Kammeyer, and I'm tonight's chair of the planning and zoning commission meeting on 03/02/2026. Pursuant to state law, there will be no physical location for this meeting. This meeting will be held electronically and live streamed on westporttp.gov. This meeting will also be shown on Westport's optimum government access channel 79 subject to availability.

The public may attend and offer testimony during the meeting by using the meeting link published on the agenda prior to the meeting. The meeting agenda is available on westportct.gov, on the meeting list and calendar webpage. Written comments may also be received prior to the public meeting and shall be sent to PNZ, that's pandz@westportct.gov, by 12PM on the day of the meetings, if intended to be distributed for consideration by the members of the Planning and Zoning Commission. Written comments received after 12:00 on the day of the meeting will be entered into the record but will not be distributed until the next business day. Meeting materials submitted are available at westwardct.gov on the planning and zoning department webpage under PNC pending applications and recent approvals.

Tonight, we have in our meeting Michelle Pirelli, our planning director. We have Mike Kalis standing in for Hollywood. We have Nicole Laskin. We have Brie Injeski, our secretary, and we have John Bolton. So second miss secret missus secretary.

Madam secretary. I I think it'd

The official recommendation secretary. Yes.

So, anyways, alright. First thing is, work session, and the approval of the minutes

from, February 2. Had an opportunity to has everybody had an opportunity to go over the minutes? And do we have well, do we do we have enough people to approve the minutes with four of us? I mean, I'm assuming that's Nicole wouldn't approve the minutes.

Yes. You can you can approve the minutes with four.

Okay. So four of us. Has everybody we good with the minutes from two two, 02:29, and 02:23?

I you know what? I never do this, But last was last week, two votes where Mike Kalise, I believe, voted aye. And it yeah. So could we just make sure that that's accurate? So, like, there might be some six o's.

Okay. It was five and they were they

were Right. And and I just wanna make sure that that got reported. So

Okay. I'll take a look. Wait. 29 2 I'm sorry. 29 or 223?

I think it was it was last week we met. Right?

Okay. Okay. I'll check.

Yeah. Time is yeah. I just wanna, you know, close that up. Okay. Thanks.

Alright. So pending that, move to approve. Two do you three votes or one vote?

We could do it. One. That's okay.

Yeah. We could do one. Minutes. I'll move to approve the minutes. Do I have a second?

Second. I have a second. Yeah. That's fine.

Okay. Sean, I saw your hand. And all in favor, say aye. We can do this, I think, with hands. Right? Aye. Mike Kalisz Yeah.

It's fine.

Do you approve the do you approve the minutes?

Regarding what?

The last three hearings. From the the last three meetings, February 2 Yeah.

They were fine.

Okay. Great. Thank you.

Before I saw them, I'm satisfied.

Okay. Great. So now, the next item in is a work session item. We're going to skip that and come back to it. So, I would like to move to go to public hearing. Second. Alright. Great.

Item number the first item in the public hearing is item number 325 Calvary Road, Special permit site plan application PZ2500740 submitted by Eric Michaels for property owned by Eloise, Bune DeGastino to renovate the existing barn to accommodate a recreational space requiring incentives for gross floor area and number of stories for an accessory structure pursuant to Section 32 Dash 18 historic residential structures located in the Residence A A A District. PIDC15005000. Applicant's presentation time is fifteen minutes.

All set? Take it away.

Okay. Can everybody see the screen with the drawing on? Yes. We can.

Yeah. Yeah.

Okay. Great. This is the existing lower level. I call it the first floor plan. There is absolutely no change whatsoever to what is there. That's there. It's gonna remain there. If I look at my existing rear elevation, and this is the, east elevation, again, those are exactly what is there, and there will be no change whatsoever to either of those. The 2nd Floor plan, this is the existing second floor plan. This is all storage and roof.

Nothing happens there. This is a door right now. And in our proposed plan, we're gonna take this and make it a real door over in this area because this door is only about five foot high. We're gonna make it a real door over there. These are little hatch windows, and we're gonna make it real windows over there. So then if I look at my elevations, the existing front, you see those two little doors, and we're gonna put in regular sized doors. And then where we have these two little hatch doors, we're gonna put some windows. That is the entire change.

Okay. Thank you, Michelle.

Okay. Thank you. Let's see. The property is conforming with 2.2 acres in a resident's AAA zoning district requiring two acres. The property is located in the Northwest section of the town on the corner of Cavalry And Redcoat Road.

The site currently contains two historic buildings. The single family residence was constructed in about 1837 as described in the historic resource inventory. Then the tax assessor's card labels the historic barns to be constructed in about 1810. The lot does have wetlands, about 22,700 square feet, and the waterway protection line ordinance is on the site in the low lying southern portion of the property. Therefore, inland wetlands and watercourse and WPLO regulations, have to be applied to the site.

There is also about 2,600 square feet of steep slopes, and the lot is served by a private septic system and public water. The barn is preexisting nonconforming to the West setback. So the applicant is seeking special permit and site plan approval along with zoning incentives, for the size of the barn and the number of stories for an accessory building. As described by the applicant, the proposal includes exterior and interior renovations. This was reviewed by the Historic District Commission at their 11/12/2025 meeting and deemed the barn eligible pursuant to 3218.

Then a recommendation for approval was issued on 12/02/2025 by the Historic District Commission and Architectural Review Board, also known as the joint committee with the following conditions. On the west side elevation windows to remove one vertical row and one horizontal row from the top, install siding behind the beams on the lower level on west side elevation, and adding a masonry curve around the lower level. Those changes were, I believe, incorporated into the plans per the staff comments by Amanda. Also, all applications, a draft perpetual preservation easement was also submitted and has been posted as part of the application on the website. It's required to be accompanied for this application, enforceable by both the P and Z and the HTC, which shall provide, among other things, the right of the holder of the easement to do everything necessary to preserve the structure and the historic integrity.

Also, in the staff comments, there were recommendations by Amanda to you know, the commission should discuss with the applicant how request to renovate and change the use is consistent with the intent of thirty two eighteen and why the gross floor area and storage relief should be granted for the barn. So those are just suggestions for things to be put onto the record by the applicant. I believe that's all. I'm here for questions. Thank you.

Thanks, Michelle. Commissioners. Great.

Yeah. Michelle, I just have a question. The, the amendments that we just passed to the same section that become effective today, how does that affect this application? Does it need to comply with the new section thirty two eighteen?

No. It would comply with the old because it's been, it's been pending under the old regulation. So so anything submitted today and after would would have to comply with the new regulation.

Okay. Yeah. That's the, that's the only question that I have. Otherwise, I think that this is this seems like a a good a good use of this building, to save a historic structure.

Anybody else?

Who's that? Whose picture is that of the barn?

That's a picture that I took.

Well, I I want to thank

you because for all the, as builts and and plans and everything that we see and site plans and whatnot. Sometimes I'm just dying for a plain old picture to bring it to to life, and this was great. So thank you.

Good.

You know, that that was a good point about the conflict, but I guess it goes by the application date, with the new reg. So, you know, I don't see anything here that's offensive or in any way violating spirit or the black letter of the zoning regs. So I don't really have a question or a comment other than thank you for the picture. It helps. It really does.

Excellent.

Nicole?

I think it's terrific. I love to see it. I love to see the preservation of a historic structure like this. I think it's in keeping with the design, the the house as well. I think it works beautifully, and, I'm in favor of it.

Alright. So my turn. I I think this is great as well. Michelle, I do have a question for you. Amanda had those two questions that she wanted put on the record about how to request to renovate and change the user consistent with intent with thirty two eighteen and why the gross, floor area and stories relief should be granted. Do we wanna get that on the record from the applicant?

Yeah. I would if you want, and maybe you could just put it on the record in in the hearing just what, you know, the reasoning for. I think, you know, we understand it's preexisting and things like that, but maybe just doesn't hurt to say it again.

So is that for the applicant to say it?

Yes.

Okay. Eric.

It is ready for this preexisting. K. How's that?

Great. Thank you. Does that answer both questions, Michelle?

Hold on. Let me just go back to my notes, make sure we covered it all in a second. I think we did. Yeah. I think that's fine. I think I think it was just, it was just for consideration things to

Okay. So I turn this back to the applicant to close.

Thank you very much.

Okay. I'll move to Mike the Elise. We didn't hear from you. Any any questions? Sorry about that. I just can you take the share down? That's I didn't

Yeah. It's probably shielding you or whatever.

Yeah. Yeah. See everybody.

How do I do that? Where is that?

I'll do it for you.

Thank you.

Let us there you go. Okay. There we go. Is anybody else I I know we'll be turning it back to the applicant, but I think I'm good to close this. But is anybody else anything else to say on this?

Did we go to the public?

Sorry. Thank you.

About to. You were about to. I I I heard you.

I was about to. I was gonna say, is my police anything else? Because we didn't hear from my police and the public. We've got one, two, three, four members of the public on this meeting. Wow. This is the lowest attended meeting ever. Going once, going twice. Now I'll move to close.

I will second that. Close. Okay.

Hey. All in favor of closing.

Aye.

I see Nicole with a yes, Brie with a yes, John with a yes, Mike in favor of closing.

Michael Kalise, do you vote to close?

Is somebody referring to me?

Yeah. Do you vote to close? Do you vote to close?

Do I what?

Are you good to close the

Oh, do I

vote to close? Yes.

Oh, yeah. Yes. I will.

Okay. Thank you. We are now closed. I'll move to go back to work session.

Second.

Okay. Before we go to the discussion with Ted Gil, do we all wanna vote on 25 cavalry?

Sure. Why make them yeah. Why make them hang around?

Okay. So I'll move to approve.

I will second.

Okay. Who's I'll give Nicole the second. All in favor, I'll call you out. Nicole?

Yes.

Bree?

Yes.

John? Yes. Mister Kalis?

Yes.

And I'm a yes. That's 123450. Thank you, mister Michaels.

Okay. Thank you very much.

Welcome. Now we can go to the discussion in work session with Ted Gil. Hi. Hello. Hello.

Thanks for being here.

Thanks for coming.

Absolutely. I know you guys have a lot of interest in our town drainage regs and so do we. We like to talk about them. So we also like to discuss whenever anybody has any ideas for, for what we might be able to do better.

Sure. Do you want me to go first and ask my question? Sure. Okay. So I did a whole bunch of research on this, just reading a lot.

And my take on it was that when you calculate the storms, the data points that go into it, they're from a while ago, but, like, you'll take the max storm each year. And for, like I'm not I haven't reread everything, but you basically take the max point of each year and you go back, like, fifty years or something like that, and then you develop your averages. And when I was reading that, I said, okay. That's interesting. But the problem is, let's just say the velocity of the storms has increased in the last five to ten years.

Those storms don't get weighted as heavily with a distribution based on what I read. They're just another data point, and so it'll keep increasing the averages. But if you were to knock out the last, say, or sorry. Say, if you're only to use the last ten years for data points, your levels for that twenty five year storm would be higher levels than what the benchmarks are at. So I'm not saying that, hey. Do as a town, should we require fifty year drainage versus twenty five year drainage or a hundred year versus this? I'm saying the actual benchmarks themselves seem skewed based on what I read, and I would love to be, like, educated in this.

So we're gonna be we're gonna be pushing the limits of my technical understanding a little bit far in this conversation, but I do have a little bit of a little bit of knowledge. So when we're talking about a twenty five year storm or a hundred year storm, right? All of those are just, you know, statistical models. So what does that actually mean? Town, every state is gonna have different answers for what a twenty five year storm really means. And we don't make that up. The town doesn't adopt a number. Right? We just use, in Westport, we use NOAA. NOAA has data that, based off of a statistical analysis on the likelihood of, of having certain size storms.

So when we're talking about a 25 storm in Westport right now it's 6.51 inches when we wrote our drainage standards in 2014 it was 6.4 inches. If you go back far enough you can get down to like 6.36 and so over time that number does change, right? The number can go up. It can actually go down as well if the storms that we were actually experiencing end up changing that data over time. The one thing I will caution about is while we do have, you know, I'm I'm definitely not in any way, climate change denier or anything.

But

when we're talking about, like rainfall data within, Connecticut and within Westport, we do have a lot of data that goes back pretty far but we don't have anything that's clearly easily a smoking gun saying like, in the next decade, we're getting over the last decade, we're getting, you know, one inch more in in a twenty five year storm. We're getting like one inch more per per storm. Right? The the numbers have been relatively flat. And it gets to the point where actually our town engineer Keith Wilberg he he does a lot of a lot of stuff with the numbers.

He actually likes to save all of the rainfall data in spreadsheets on his own so that he can do his own plots And it's really one of those things where you can you can kind of lie with data if you if you plot out all of the rainfall over the last say five years versus ten years versus 20 versus 30 versus 50 you don't get consistent trends. Sometimes those trends will be positive and will make it look like oh over the next hundred years we're gonna get one inch of rainfall more per year, but if you do it you know starting from 1980 to today you might actually get a decrease in runoff because you might just happen to pick up you know a few more drought years than you picked up very heavy rainfall years. And when we're talking about you know crazy storms the largest storm that we have on record actually is 1955 in Westport. Right? All of the storms that we've had in the last you know five years, I know 2018 was a really wet year, 2019, 2021 we had really wet years and none of them came close right?

We've had 6.5 inches of rain in one storm for for while I was here but we never had anything came close to the 10 inches of rain that we had in twenty four hours in 1955. So just because it's old data doesn't necessarily mean it's on, it it's it's not any good. And it's also inherently right? We have a lot of data. Right?

But as you go further and further back, it it's less detailed. So there are issues with a statistical model where you're trying to to predict, you know what kind of storm would we expect to only have a 1% chance of seeing in any given year, right, a one hundred year storm. Well if we're basing it off of say eighty years of really good data and then maybe another twenty to thirty years of not as not as thorough data, or we have say, you know, eighty years of data that's really good, but it's also at like five weather stations across the the whole coast of Connecticut. There are limitations to it. Right?

And there are things that are much harder to predict. So so climate change, a lot of the issues that we we I I would say it's easier to say you you can see a bigger impact. They they would happen in in strange things that would basically make you throw out the models that we're working with. Right? So when we had all of those floods down in North Carolina recently, and they talked about, you know Asheville North Carolina and had this this crazy confluence of factors a lot of those there were things that were not picked up in the types of models that they were using.

Right? So that kind of thing, is what climate change causes more of and the problem with that is that if we if we use that and say well because of that we're going to adopt a different drainage standard. We don't know exactly how those sorts of things can impact us. That's the whole point of a changing climate and that's the whole point of things are happening that don't fit with our current models. If we had if we if we knew how to predict how much rain we were going to get we would use that to update the models but if we don't then it's kind of we can start making things up, but what's the value in that?

Mhmm. And and and how do we how do we hold somebody to a standard, a fair standard if if we can't back back back it up with, you know, numbers. So hopefully, that was that was at least a little bit answering

your question. It's it's it's it's helpful. It kind of I guess, here's the question for you. So even if we're saying the numbers so it is ticking up a little bit. And even if we created our own analysis, and I'd love to hear more.

But and it did tick up more because we waited heavier more more, you know, the last five years. The question that I have is okay. So let's say you said it was and and by the way, the data that I was looking at, if I pull it up right here, I had written down something with 6.6. And I I was looking at Bridgeport because that was easy to find. I couldn't find Westport, but I'm assuming, give or take, close enough.

And this was saying that the six the twenty five year death was 6.6. How well, how first question, I guess, going back to what you're saying, how often is that measured? Is it every year that we're reviewing this, or is it every ten years?

I do know it gets updated. I want to I I don't I don't know. I it's more frequent than ten years. I don't know if it's five. Okay. But, yeah, it it does get

So no. That's fine. The question I have, though, is how do we know that the standards that we want in this town let's say it is. You you need to build drainage to accommodate a 25. I don't by the way, Michelle, what is what is a residential standard?

Well, one thing I just wanted to say first is I wanted to see if Ted can, explain how we look at, the properties as if there's no drainage. I don't know if the commission understands that. That makes us extremely conservative is that we look at Perfect. Property. So I think Ted does a really good job explaining that. So I just wanted to to get that in there.

Before we go yeah. You know what? Thank you. Go do that. That that's a good shot to start first.

Sure. Yeah. So so that's that's another one of these things that some towns end up holding people to a hundred year storm and a lot of people assume that that means that they are more conservative than the town of Westport. But most towns do not do what we do in terms of treatment of existing impervious areas. So if somebody who comes in to tear down a house and build a new house, we treat their property like there is nothing on it.

So we we basically say you have to have your engineer model the property, in an undeveloped condition, no house, no driveway, no patio, no pool, nothing impervious whatsoever. Then model it with everything that they're designing, the house, the driveway, pool, patio, everything on it. We don't just go by your coverage numbers, that's another sticking point that that we argue with people a lot. We don't use coverage numbers, we use what is pervious, what is impervious. Right? Grass is pervious, trees are pervious, patio is impervious whether it's at grade or not. A wall, if it's more than 12 inches wide at the top of the wall, it's impervious. If you have a walkway that's impervious. We're gonna call all of that impervious for our calculations. Right?

So so it's not gonna be the same as your coverage numbers. And every square foot of that is brand new from our perspective. Right? So there are plenty of towns where they allow you say, know, I'm building a a detached garage but it's over my existing driveway. So yeah, I'm removing a thousand square feet of asphalt putting in a thousand square feet of a garage.

It's a wash. Right? In Westport no that's not a wash that's a thousand square feet of brand new and luckily that that actually that piece of it is encoded there's not a lot of our drainage standards that are encoded in the the planning and zoning regulations that part actually is spelled out directly in the PNC regs. Most of the rest of the the technical stuff is kind of left to us. So the town engineer, enforces it, and we have our our four or five page long packet of drainage standards that spells out how else you achieve no net increase in a twenty five year storm.

But by virtue of not giving credit for impervious surfaces to be removed, that's usually the one thing that design firms come back to us and freak out about. Right? When engineers have never worked in Westport before and they hear that standard a lot of times they get they get very cagey because that's gonna, you know, double or triple the size of their drainage system right there. Whereas if we upgraded to the hundred year storm and we also said oh we'll give you credit for impervious surfaces to be removed you could tear down a house you could build a new house without doing any drainage whatsoever. Right?

So that that that size of storm by the the year, it it it might sound good to upgrade to a hundred year storm and you would probably need to do a little bit more drainage, but the vast majority of the drainage we require is because of that standard. No credit for impervious to be removed.

So, basically, what we're saying is that the minute any property is touched where drainage would need to be reviewed by the department, you're basically catching up, period. End of story. Everything. You're getting it up to where it should be no matter what because it's always considered new. Right?

Only so only for the new things. Right? So in Westport, the a lot of what we look at our teardown rebuilds. Right? In which case we look at everything as if it's brand new and some developers especially when it's their first time coming in and they don't know our our standards, sometimes they'll play games with, well, what if I leave the foundation of the house or well, what if I leave the entire driveway? I'm gonna build a brand new house, it's gonna be $2,000,000 house on an old cracked apart terrible driveway so that I don't have to put in drainage for the driveway. If it's a new house everything is is blank slate. If somebody comes in for a 200 square foot addition we are reviewing the addition. Now if the addition is over yard versus driveway, it doesn't matter. Right? It's gonna need drainage, but we're still only gonna look at the addition.

Okay. I get it.

And and that's also very important what a lot of times we will look at your definitions for new construction. So if somebody is doing an addition, but it's so big that their house is now classified as new construction, same deal as as a brand new house. We do require drainage in that case.

So this is good. But then now to take this one step further, how do we know that it's enough? Is it this who's setting that we're building to? Is it our well, first off, first question is, do or do they are the regs say you have to build to a twenty five year? Like, for new construct like, is it different in different zones? What's the what is the regulation?

So our our regulations, forty five three point five point three just, says if new here, I could share it. This is for just a residential property. This is not a special permit use or something like that. So it basically says if the new construction on a property increases total coverage by more than a 100 square feet, you have to provide on-site drainage. So it doesn't Ted, don't we differentiate what storm it is in this in our regs?

That's a great question for the Commission probably. I mean so the town of the Westport drainage standards do specify twenty five year storm and twenty five year storm is specified in the subdivision requirements so I'm if not it's kind of a tacit approval I don't know who adopted it first right I know that drainage standards first started coming about because of the flood and erosion control board working with the engineering department back in the '19 the late eighties and the early nineties. Obviously it was very different back then that was when this idea of no net increase in a twenty five year storm kind of came into play. It is a very standard thing, there's a lot of these numbers that are very standard for engineers, so if engineers are designing roadways going over streams, we design culverts under roadways for a hundred year storm, we design storm drainage for a minimum of a ten year storm, a lot of times we will upgrade that to a twenty five year storm depending on how busy the roadway is. So a lot of these numbers are just kind of standards that have been around for a long time.

I don't know what exactly was the reasoning behind when they first adopted twenty five year storm in Westport, as I understood it, a big push for it from the engineering department was the idea that as we built the roads and the street drainage for the roads they were functioning well and then we started experiencing situations where drainage was working, it was working, it was working, we were not getting an increase in rainfall but the drainage was not able to keep up anymore and this was when Westport was getting really heavily developed in the sixties and the seventies and the eighties and we have some drainage flood studies from back then and that they were kind of encouraging, hey you guys are allowing a lot of development in this town you should probably address stormwater runoff from individual properties. And so when we had started adopting them, these standards, the engineering department wanted it from the perspective of well if you have a lot more water coming off of your property it's now going to be flooding the street drains faster than they were designed to keep up. And so now in order to get our drainage to function again, we're going to impose these drainage standards.

And that was why we lobbied for the no net increase, applying to an undeveloped condition because you've already we have a problem. The developers have created a problem by adding all of this impervious without any drainage. And so if we have that problem today rather than just accepting that and continuously putting in larger and larger pipes and more and more catch basins in our roads, we're going to now require that as properties get redeveloped you have to now go in and fix the problem on your properties. And so over time you know over these large watersheds that that contribute to each of the individual streams, over time we theoretically see that impact of you know now thousands of properties have gotten torn down and rebuilt over the last you know, thirty years that we've had drainage standards, and each one of them has to put in this subsurface drainage and we don't we don't have like a single database that that splits out exactly how much of an impact that should have had, but it's enough that it should have had an impact. I I believe that flooding would be a lot worse in a lot of these streams today if we did not have these standards for the last thirty years.

Well, that it's it sounds like we're moving in

the

right direction. But let me ask you this question.

Sure.

Again, this goes back to well, like you just said, we're not sure where the twenty five years came from. Is it is it something that we should reevaluate? Are we you know? And the difference between twenty five and fifty and what I was looking at was maybe one inch.

A little bit less actually. I have a table in front of me, twenty five years, 6.51 inches and a fifty year is 7.37.

Okay. So 0.9. So what's the like,

the flip side of it is if that's not that big of a difference, then why would we, what, what is the impetus to, to implement that change as well? Because one thing that I also wanna keep everybody kinda aware of, right, is we have a wet year and we have drainage complaints. You know, this coming spring, I am fully expecting with all of the snow that we had and all of it slowly melting and this week we're getting rain. I'm fully expecting especially after last year was a very dry year it usually just happens dry years gonna be followed by a wet year right? It's not going to take a twenty five year storm for us to get drainage complaints so it it it's not even gonna take the size storms that we already regulate to for for Westport to have flooding.

And so when we're looking at the specific cases that are kind of driving the issues, right, where where we talk about, drainage is a problem, flooding is a problem. Well, upgrading from a twenty five to a fifty or a hundred year storm, is that going to address the type of flooding that we're talking about? So really, we have to say, what type of flooding are we talking about? Are we looking at a property in a flood zone? Because if somebody lives in a flood zone and not not just tidal flood zones down by the shore but say a riverine flood zone like on Dead Man's Brook.

If we tore down every single house in all of the watershed of Dead Man's Brook and and and just let it revert to grass or tore it down today and built it to a hundred year storm, if we get a twenty five year storm well below that design design storm, there will still be a flood zone around Dead Man's Brook. It will still overflow its banks. It will still flood through several like several neighborhoods within Westport and their properties that will still have water going around the house no matter what drainage standards the town of Westport ever adopts. Right? So if the goal here is to install so much drainage on individual properties as they get developed that we will solve flooding along these streams by the numbers that that's not going to be possible.

That's not really a goal that is achievable. Right? The focus should be on within those flood zones doing one of two things. One is build everything with resilience in mind. Build it with the flood zone in mind.

Lift the house so it's a high enough elevation so that the water comes in, the water goes back out. Or, and this is the one that is far less popular and far less likely, but the other alternative is, you know, retreat from flood zones. It's it's taking properties that were built in the way of the water and removing them from that path. Right? That's, you know, if if somebody was looking at the land in Westport and, you know, remove act act like there's nothing at all in Westport and ask me from an engineering perspective should we be building houses on Saugatuck Island or down in Campo Basin where we're expecting we're gonna get a big storm and there's gonna be seven feet of water when you're standing in the road.

I would tell you no from an engineering perspective we really should not be developing these areas. Now unfortunately those are already some of the most heavily developed areas in Westport, so is it is it likely that we're ever gonna adopt a retreat from there? No, probably not. But encouraging houses that are in flood zones to be lifted, to be become FEMA compliant, that's a way to address the issues that are related to their flooding. If we if we tell them don't worry we're going to regulate other properties as they develop until you don't flood anymore that's an impossible goal to set. We're never going to get there no matter what size storm we adopt.

From an engineering point of view, what is the what do you know? What what's the what's involved with building from 25 to 50? You know, like we said, it's only an inch.

Yeah. No. It's a few more galleries. It's

way. Is there a significant cost for the end user to build for the

actual I would say, well, what what significant to who? Right? Your your definition of significant may be different from mine. Right? Fair. So that's

Okay. So forget about the word significant. What is the sample cost to go from 25 to 50? If you were to can you boil it down to some example?

That I'm I'm I'm far less versed in. Right? I require these drainage systems every day, but I never actually get quotes for them I don't I don't get quotes from other engineers I don't know what other engineers are are charging to actually design these things. I would say that it is probably relatively marginal right if we were to go from 25 to 50 relatively marginal as in it would be easy to absorb that cost on large projects. So when somebody is coming in developer wants to tear down a house and build a brand new house, probably fairly easy to do that.

Where it would start making a huge impact and where I would say our standards already make a big impact is for individual homeowners who are trying to do anything on their property, say move their driveway or they have one driveway but they feel it's dangerous to turn around, they want to add a pull off or they want to have a crescent driveway. When people come in with projects like that it is not uncommon for us to end up basically shutting down their project because they come in and they say look I've got this amount of money to do this project and I'm coming in for my permit and what do I need from that they said to go talk to engineering about drainage. I explain everything to them, they call up an engineer, they get a $10,000 quote and that blew their budget out of the water. They can't move forward with their with anything. Right?

Those are the types of projects that our drainage standards already make much more difficult for for homeowners in Westport. So we're already, you know, somewhere in that, in that realm. There's the the thing you're if you have higher and higher standards stricter and stricter standards require more and more drainage eventually the drainage would have so much costs associated with it that no project would ever become, possible to build. Right? But if we have so much flooding in a one inch storm that there are you know the bulk of our complaints the drainage complaints that we get all start showing up between no rain and a two inch storm I would say which isn't isn't even really on the chart.

It's not a it's not a special storm at all. You get to a two year storm and it's three and a half inches of rain. Most strange complaints are gonna be in those storms up to two inches, right? By the time we get up to six inches of rain we have complaints but they're everywhere in town and it's that's that's kind of you know obviously we're gonna have a lot of complaints there but a lot of those complaints would have come in and smaller storms anyway. So if we could have lower standards that allow more projects to get built and install some drainage to attenuate those smaller storms there's actually a benefit there where if more developer a more, small scale development like that was able to happen, you may actually have a larger benefit in small storms and have a, you know, less of a benefit in large storms as opposed to, you know, a tremendous benefit from a couple of individual properties each year in these huge storms.

But then in general, nobody can develop anymore because we've increased the size of of drainage requirements to the point where it's no longer economically feasible. Right? So right now, we're somewhere in the middle. Obviously, those two extremes are are probably both bad.

Right. But

we we have not seen a good engineering reason to move in either direction.

But your eyes are on it all the time?

Constantly.

Okay.

Now let me switch questioning because it seems like we're you've given us good education here. And even if the data going back just because I know a few people joined here, even if the data was changed a little bit, you might be talking about a half inch movement, even if your data was using more recent data to define the benchmark of the twenty five year. Right? You're it's not

As that does update automatically. Right? As NOAA sends out more data, we go by what NOAA says the twenty five year storm is. So as that storm increases, right, that's what we're regulating to.

Right. So but even if Noah's calculations are a little, I mean, I don't wanna I don't wanna say that we're thinking about this more than Noah is. But even if their calculations didn't weight more recent climate events, you're not talking about skewing the numbers that much is my point. It's what we're kind of going at. Maybe it'd be a half inch stricter.

You know, that'd be, like, a little bit higher if they if if and, again, I don't know if I'm right and I can't trust everything you read, but, you know, if based on the math that I read, it didn't seem logical to me. It seemed like an old calculation. But even if it was recent, I don't know how much more it would skew I don't know how much more it would move that benchmark, I guess, is my point. And that's kinda what you're saying too is it doesn't. It's still it's still moving.

Yeah. I mean and and and that's another thing is that if if you if you go to that extreme as well, we say, well, we're only gonna use the most extreme recent data. Well, last year, rainfall. We had very few storms that were of any significant magnitude. Does that mean that we should we should have no drainage standards? Right? Because we had a dry year. Right? So it it you know, we have wet years. We have dry years. If we cherry pick out the individual years that that were the wettest, you know, it it does that necessarily mean that that's

I was because based on the calculation that I read, it's only taking one the the max data point per year and inserting that into the calculation. So even if you have five storms and they're close to about the same year, that's only gonna be one storm one data point into the calculation. I don't know if that's right or wrong. That's what I read, and that's what I was curious about. But that's not on us. That's on NOAA. Right? I mean, we're not we're not gonna create our own twenty five year calculation. That's not, it's not in our purview. Correct?

Yeah. We are we are not statisticians, so we wouldn't really have that

Fair enough. Yeah. Okay. So then off of the calcs yes, Michelle.

I just wanted to jump in and say, do we also not need to, take into consideration the clear cutting of properties because it seems like in my discussions that that has really plays into a lot of the drainage problems. Just to go back in time, we did have a regulation and subcommittee where we were regulating trees on private property. And, ultimately, we were told by the town attorney that they didn't feel that we had authority to, to have a regulation such as that. So, it feels like we're in a little bit of a catch 22 unless we So that's fine. Want to. Yeah. Okay. So that's always That's

where I was going next, which was the clear cutting. But but what happens when you clear cut and you build a new house is you got these little bobcats running around in circles and circles and circles. A lot of heavy machinery running around in circles and circles and circles and pounding and compacting the land. Do we have regulations on the books that says after any project is done, that land needs to be decompacted, like, mechanically to a certain degree. So this way, like, water will naturally go down instead of being held.

Yeah. I I get it, but we don't no. We don't

have anything like that.

Something that we should explore. So Because won't that help just naturally help not like, it'll naturally help water go down instead of just run off?

I just don't know how you I mean

I see where you're going with it, although I'm not sure that I would put that much emphasis on that. You know, for the most part, when we're talking about, say, a twenty five year storm, the majority of that water is not going into the ground even if it's grass. Right? So a lot of the the amount of runoff that we're talking about when we're doing an analysis of property in twenty five year storm the fact that it's grass or trees or anything like that it's more how that interacts with slowing the water down in a twenty five year storm that has a bigger impact rather than the impact of how much water actually soaks into into the ground. Right?

We get six inches of rain in twenty four hours. Grass is not accepting six inches of rain soaking into it in twenty four hours. Right? Trees cutting down trees has a bad impact for drainage. Absolutely.

Trees are not drinking enough water during a six a six inch rainfall event to make any significant impact by the amount of water that they soak up. So so the the impact is that the the branches of the leaves and the the ground cover that impact how quickly the water is able to run off of that site and make its way into a nearby watercourse. And as all of these properties in a watershed all do that, that's what causes a huge peak flow rate in that watercourse. That's what creates and generates the actual flooding along that watercourse. So, you know, when we're talking about the compaction of the soils, we're talking about trees being cut down, when we're talking about individual types of ground cover, those kinds of things can absolutely have an impact, on runoff, but it may not be the kind that I would talk about in an engineering sense.

And there's another thing. So I always would say, cutting down trees does absolutely have a negative impact with drainage, but you you never want to try and solve that by going to my department because then you'd end up in a situation where somebody has a big yard that has a whole bunch of trees they want to cut down trees. My department are the ones I would say okay yeah you can solve that you can cut down 20 trees and we'll do a quick calculation here. Okay cut down the trees, put in grass, oh but you have to bury seven concrete boxes underneath your yard in order to make up that difference. Does that solve the environmental impacts of cutting down the trees?

No it does not. It might solve the numbers that we're talking about but that's not the real issue, right? Trees have a big impact, people hate the amount of flooding that they experience after they cut down a tree but that's usually what we would consider nuisance flooding. We're talking about puddles in the yard because the yard is no longer able to soak up that water because the roots aren't there, and that sticks around for weeks after a storm. When I'm talking about a storm, I'm talking about during the storm. I'm talking about the peak runoff in a stream during that storm, Not necessarily, you know, is your yard mushy a week later? So so that's that's a difference between what I'm talking about when I say flooding. I'm talking about twenty five year storm, hundred year storm. I'm talking about models.

When

homeowners are talking about flooding, they're usually talking about what I would consider what we call nuisance flooding. They're talking about a wet yard. They're talking about flooded basements, right? A couple of inches of water in their basement. Sometimes they're talking about, you know, a large flood. A lot of times that would only really happen in, you know, actual flood zones. Right? In which case we'd be talking about, okay, well, is your house FEMA compliant? Can you design it for resiliency? Because those storms are coming back. Right? But but it it is important that when we're talking about flooding, there's there's different types of flooding, and and they don't always interact with each other, the same way that you'd think.

Okay. Well, how do we so we're essentially talking about two different things here. More than two. Right. Right. You've got big you have big flow from from the storms, and then you've got sitting water that people don't like around their houses. Right? Let me pause there for a second. Michelle, have a question for you. Yes. In work session, when we're talking about applications, the public's generally not allowed to ask questions or way or anything like that. But this is like a discussion. Can I am I allowed to ask the public if they have any questions?

I think if the commission agrees, you know, that they're open to opening it up to the public, then then I think you're you can do that in limited circumstances like this.

Well, we've got one, two, three, four folks on here that I'm sure that at least two have questions. Are you guys all okay with that since we have

the expert?

John, you good?

With the public input?

Yeah. Just asking

some questions. This part. Yeah. Yeah. No. It's great. Yeah. Sure. I'm okay with that. Cool.

Alright. So I'm assuming that Val and Jenny both have questions. Maybe Harris, but, Jenny, you wanna go first? It's fine.

Well, wait a minute. I'll let other commissioner's talk first.

Oh, by the way. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Sorry. Sorry. Sorry. Sorry. I was just having this interactive dialogue. You guys

It's okay, Mike.

Okay. Yeah.

No problem.

Let's Not

coming over Passover, am I? Okay. No worries.

Sorry. Yes. Let's let's first before we before Val and Jenny ask questions, what are you, John? Free? Do.

I I Mike?

I do have Yes. Please. Please. Please. Please.

So when we're using NOAA. Right? And and there's, like, two different categories. There's the Atlas 14, and then there's the FEMA insurance. And for some reason, I've never been able to nail down which one we rely on the most. Atlas 14. Atlas 14. Okay. Yeah. And I knew that, you know, preparing for today, have you ever you flew this first street methodology. You ever heard of that?

First street methodology?

Yeah. It's like this

private organization. Right? That's

And we were talking about it with, with CIRCA. There's a there's a it's on the website, right, for this for the state. And, I think there was there was some some issue with it. I remember that they were we were being told, but but we do, we have used it just for reference purposes. But all for our regulatory information, we have to use the the FEMA flood maps. Sorry. I need to jump in.

But No. No. Thank you. I'm glad you did that. You you just clarified something important because I think the state requires that we do, right, under section eight of

the statute.

So that makes sense. I was just curious if, like, there was, like, a movement to start going to something that's less established or as, you know, Noah's Noah.

Nothing.

So let me well, I have a it's a loaded question, but hopefully a short one. If I hear you right, basically, not only is it the amount of rain that matters, but it's also the quality of the infrastructure that's capturing the rain. Correct? That has a big say in all this. Correct? Okay. I mean, that's I'm sorry. That's for you, Ted. I'm sorry. Is that is that a fair thing for me to pull out of this? Yes. Okay. So on, like, the November 24 agenda three months ago, I think the first three or four items related to this kind of stuff. It was Mayfair. It was Old Road and I think Sturgis.

And I wanna say Edgemarth Hill, but I'm not sure.

Mhmm.

The point was we had a very top heavy agenda. And so I kind of, like, spontaneously went off a little soliloquy and said, if we don't start looking at what we're doing as planners, like approving subdivisions here six months, eight months, a year ago, and forgetting about it, Right? The sponge that is no longer because of all the, you know, impervious structures or development on top of it, and that we're gonna have huge problems in this town. Because we're you know, it's not just look. We're under we're under, I think, you know, gun to the head from from Hartford.

I don't have to get into that. Everybody knows what I'm talking about. So right there and then, you're going to be having more impervious services, and we're gonna be losing less of the sponge, and our infrastructure is not gonna be able to keep up. So it just seems like the only real I wanna be careful how to say this. The most viable solution right now, I think, the town has is to slow down as much development as reasonably possible until we figure out where our infrastructure is going to handle all the stuff because we don't have it.

It's still a nineteen fifty suburb. Right? I mean, infrastructure wise, there's been no, like, major enhancements other than post road because that state. And I don't even know. Was that for storm water? All those projects over the last ten, fifteen years?

Storm water wasn't the driving factor in any of those, but they did increase the capacity for storm drainage for everywhere that they they went. Okay.

So I'm not asking you. I'm actually declaring in a weird way, but, you know, saying basically, other than backing down and sort of, not sort of, being a little bit more constrained or restrained in future development, I think we need to take a time out sort of and and assess where we're going here because everybody's property values are gonna sink if they're underwater. You're And gonna have hand to hand basement to basement fighting, which we don't want. So, this was useful, though. Thanks for, this talk. I appreciate it.

Mike, Chris? Mike, can you hear me? You're muted. Can we we'll wait a second. If I might just hit the mute button on the lower left.

I'm sorry. I didn't didn't realize it was

Sorry about it. Go ahead.

Wasn't working. So there there were a couple of things that are particularly bothersome to me in terms of drainage and water storage. And thank you, mister Gillis. Your your meeting with us has very been very helpful. One one of them is what I consider a sort of weakness in our regulation.

It's it's not unusual, and I see this, quite frequently in terms of, watching the, the ZBA. It's not unusual where an applicant will get a variance or just simply be able to take out a permit as a freight and put it in a swimming pool. And then, of course, they build on grade below the three foot threshold, and they build a patio. And the drainage from these patios have consistently caused flooding throughout town in in the in the short term of the event at the beginning of the storm before it's all absorbed into the into the the ground. But but but it is a significant problem, and it does affect many properties.

And, and I think it's a lack in our regulation quite personally. I think that we should be looking at pool coverage and patio coverage around pools and the drainage aspect of it even though they are at grade and below grade. That that's the first thing. And the other is what I consider an enforcement problem. I watch driveways being built.

This is mostly in new construction, but I've also seen it in in subsequent work. I watched driveways being built where they adhere to the specifications of the conservation commission with the proper excavation and fill. But then on top of the driveway, they put these large stones and simply have them an inch or less apart. And so you don't get any real drainage. The water runs off and very, very little, enters the space below through these cracks.

So in effect, the driveway design is not properly done. It's it doesn't coincide with what our conservation commissioner will be looking for. In addition to that, regarding driveways, and I was able to get staff to agree at a recent hearing within the last couple of years, to more closely monitor this. But it's not unusual for a builder to file an as built, and get signed off by by zoning and then finish the driveway. And the finished driveway is significantly larger than the as built, which was signed off on before the completion of the project.

I know of number of instances where that has occurred. And I'm speaking of what I said before, I did get an agreement, which I have not followed up on. Don't know how well it's being here to where staff would actually go out and inspect the site before they signed off on an as built. But those two things, think, are problematic. One one is enforcement, and one is regulation a a in our regulations.

Thank you very much.

Absolutely. So I think I can I can address, a couple of those? So first off, patios and pools, we do agree they are impervious. So regardless of how you guys for planning and zoning purposes calculate coverage, we call anything that is impervious, impervious, and we require drainage for it. So pools are required to be modeled as curve number 98.

That's the same curve number as asphalt for how much water comes off of a pool. Same with the patio, we call it curve number 98, whether it is pervious or impervious, right? So when somebody comes in and they go to conservation, this ties into your next comment about driveways and whether a driveway is pervious or not. A lot of properties that go to the Conservation Commission for approval, Conservation encourages LID, so low impact development. They want pervious driveways, they want pervious patios, they like rain gardens, things like that.

A lot of those things can address our drainage standards they don't always. So sometimes when somebody goes to conservation and conservation says you need to do a pervious driveway they will model the driveway as pervious and use that as a drainage system in order to address our drainage standards. If they do that, then they need to actually prove it to us. So then they need to do percolation tests through the driveway. We actually see whether or not water is able to flow through, we have to have an engineer detail from a professional engineer showing, that the spaces in between the pavers are appropriate depending on the size of paver, right?

If they're very large pavers and they have a very small opening that's probably not going to be good enough. We regulate the type of material that you can even put them in so if somebody has a pervious patio and they want to put it down a lot of patio builders will say oh just put in some stone dust that's usually what you base a patio in. Stone dust is not pervious over time it ends up acting a lot more like cement than anything else so we require they use something like bedding sand instead. So if somebody wants a pervious patio or a pervious driveway to address an engineering issue, an engineering drainage requirement, then we do get into all of those details. That is not to say that we always do that because a lot of times people will design a standard drainage system.

They'll design great across the driveway, they'll have gutters on the house and they'll have a regular slot drain around a patio that will all route into standard subsurface drainage systems same as every other property for our purposes they receive the approval from engineering then they go to the Conservation Commission. Conservation says well we're gonna make you do it a pervious driveway and pervious patio anyway. So then they will just put on the bare minimum they'll say well here's a detail is this good enough for conservation purposes to be pervious there? Those ones I can't guarantee, right? If they made conservation happy but they're not addressing our standards, we are not reviewing those details, we are not going out and testing whether or not the surface is pervious.

Those I would agree with you. Those may not be pervious, but in those cases they are still subject to our drainage standards and they would have to address our drainage standards in another way if it calls it pervious and we're not actually confirming it. So, hopefully that answers, answers that one. And then, yeah, patios, pools, walkways, the retaining wall, the tops of retaining walls, anything that water is not soaking through, we call impervious and we model as curve number 98 impervious in a drainage report. Even if somebody says it's a gravel driveway technically by the the even even the documents that govern how to run the types of drainage analyses that we require TR 55 TR so even in there they'd say well a gravel driveway would be curve number 89 and so sometimes you'll see an engineer makes that mistake and they actually if you go and I don't know if you guys ever actually dig through the drainage reports that they have to submit to you but that's that's usually where I spend a lot of my review time.

If you dig in there every now and then you'll see an engineer who left in Curve Number 89 for a driveway because it's a gravel driveway. Well Westport we call it 98 no matter what. We assume the worst. We assume you're gonna go in and pave that driveway next year after you got your sign off. So we always treat every impervious as fully impervious and then we make you design drainage for it.

Now you can design a patio to be pervious and to have a pervious surface and allow that water to seep through it. We still make you model it as fully impervious for the purposes of how much runoff is going to be generated by it. So that's another one of those ways that we we just have that there there there's a couple of ways of modeling it and we just choose the most conservative way. And then the last issue is work after a permit gets approved. That is something that unfortunately I don't think we can ever really avoid.

I agree that is an enforcement thing. If you ever see somebody doing work after they got their permit signed off on then that is absolutely something to let planning and zoning know and and they can work on enforcement. Obviously my department doesn't really have a whole lot to do with that because when I'm talking about drainage or grading or anything I am doing your guys's bidding, I'm reviewing plans for you guys reviewing your your standards for grading, reviewing our standards that address your requirement for drainage. But at the end of the day when somebody comes in for a house and they say, I finished all of the work come out and take a look at it. Oh I decided not to pave my driveway.

I can't necessarily withhold an approval if they if they haven't paved their driveway. They will have had to address my drainage standards right? So if they if they have drains that are not at grade so the water is not making it into them I can withhold my my approval for that. But if they pave their driveway and everything is perfectly fine and I sign off on it and a month later they widen their driveway all it takes is somebody bring that up to planning and zoning and then we can go after it as as enforcement but there's nothing we can't we can't prevent that from happening by you know, refusing to ever sign off on a permit again. So unfortunately, there's it's only possible to to to deal with situations like that, after the fact, which we do. And and every now and then we do catch those and we do go after them and we do, you know, follow-up with enforcement

Yeah.

If it's brought if it's brought before us.

K. Any other commissioners before we go to Jenny? K. Go ahead.

Yeah. Hi. Can you hear me?

Yep.

Hi. Hi. I'm this is not my expertise at all. So I I appreciate all of you and and Ted and everybody that's, here on this call. And so I'm what I'm gonna say is very un unscripted.

My sense having been following some of the issues related to how flooding components and concerns is that I really in the end, there's just a lot happening. I I was not able to attend the CIRCA event, at the library a couple weeks ago, or whenever that was. It seems to me that there's a lot of communities dealing with this, and there's a lot of state resources. And I just urge, our commission to, look at what's happening in other towns and others and what other states are doing. It's, as mister Bolton points out, I mean, bottom line is is that we have infrastructure that is just not going to handle all this, runoff.

These houses are, getting bigger. And as as mister Gill said, there are thousands and thousands of new houses that have been built. Mine's one of them. Mine was built in, 2006, and, all the water is supposed to stay in the property. It requires that I maintain something that's in my front yard, and I still don't know what it is or how to maintain it. My bad. But you, there's no I I gotta figure out what I need to do to that. There's there's just once, mister Gill reviews it, it's kinda out of his hands. So this is a dynamic process. The groundwater is increasing.

There are more and more homeowners that are having more and more water problems. And as much as we're doing some great work to engineer it at a certain, point in the spectrum, the fact that we are losing trees and the houses are bigger and the infrastructure is not getting larger and it may be clogged, it just seems that we need to be looking at this a little bit of everything everywhere all at once. One being how can we meet increase our standards because storms are getting bigger. We know that there have been deaths in in up in New Haven because of the storms were intense, and how can we provide the resources for property owners, and and how can we increase, Michelle's staff on enforcement, so it doesn't become a landowner needing to, you know, go solo into the planning and zoning, commission. And just one other thought, my concern also is that I think we could be doing a better job of actually tracking and logging individual property owner concerns.

It does seem like there's a lot of silent suffering, and, individually, people are tackling this, but I think it'd be very fascinating to see where these things are coming up so we could maybe plan for in the future. Thank you. Sorry I said a lot there. Wasn't really all that tight, but appreciate your time.

No. This is the one opportunity that we get to, like, kinda talk these things through that's not in subcommittee and just ask some questions. So I'm appreciative that you jumped on now.

Very good. Thank you.

Am I up, Michael?

Yep.

Thank you so, so much. Many of you know that this is an issue that Save Westport now started talking about in 2018 when we first sat down with Pete Rakovich. My notes were in no particular order, so please forgive me. But I hope someone will take notes of what I'm saying because I do have some specific suggestions. And I apologize for coming in late.

But when I did arrive at the meeting, I heard mister Gill talking about, well, if the goal is, you know, to stop it, you know, retreat, we can't. And I agree I agree. We're not all gonna leave Westport, and we can't absolutely guarantee it. So the way I look at this is what can we do to, what I call, nibble around the edges to improve things for people in Westport, okay, when it comes to drainage? And, yes, people are dying. Jenny said New Haven, but I I think maybe she meant Newtown. I'm not sure. But if we get one of these gigantic storms, we are gonna be inundated. We got so lucky the last couple years. We had a dry year last year, but the two years before that, you know, Wilton got hammered, etcetera.

I don't I don't have to tell you. You're holding this meeting. So one of the things that I do believe we should do is we should move to the a hundred year numbers. And by the way, the state is recommending that, and that's you know, no offense, mister Gill, but, like, all that talk at the long lots meetings about how we were going above and beyond, we weren't really going above and beyond. We were doing what the state was probably gonna require of us anyway.

And, yes, maybe we haven't had one storm that hit the hundred year number, but we have these weeks where we get two big storms in a row and the ground is saturated, etcetera. So what would I suggest in terms of nibbling around the edges to make things better for people in Westport? And again, in no particular order. First one would be to move to the hundred year numbers. It's not gonna solve it.

I agree. But if it if it were to contain an extra 100 gallons on every house on the street, it might prevent the guy who's the lowest in elevation from having quite so much water in his or her basement. The next thing I would, I would mention is I think the PNC should consider requiring planting certain diameter trees for every I don't know. Pick a number. So many square foot of new, construction.

These new houses are going up, and they we all know this. They're clear cutting. And even if we prevent them from changing the grade in the last five feet, which is our, I believe, our current rule, we could easily say, for every thousand or for every 500 square feet of new construction, you have to plant x number of trees, and maybe they need to be a certain diameter. And one of the big problems is that they're replacing in in my neighborhood, they replaced a 100 years of vegetation. They carved it out and carted it away in one day, and they replaced it with lawn.

And that just does not absorb the same amount of water. We all lawns are killing us from the pesticide and fertilizer and killing the pollinators, etcetera. Anyway, why not say, okay, on lots of a certain size, you have to you have to put some trees in and rain gardens. Why not? Why not say that you have to do that?

Somebody said bend the curve. I think it was mister Gill, and I agree with him 1000% on this. We're not gonna stop the water. The best we can hope for in a huge storm is to slow it down. So I happen to live, as some of you know, because I've been here complaining about neighbors who have changed drainage and put in what I consider to be excessive patios, etcetera, that when the water's coming down, what we could be doing is slowing it down before it hits the storm drains.

We could be requiring people who have sloped properties to put in some kind of swales and berms. Again, I call it during COVID, we called it bending the curve. We all knew so many people were gonna die, and we only had so many hospital beds, etcetera. I used the same analogy here. We need to bend the curve.

We need to slow it down, and we're not thinking about that. And this this is a related point similar to what mister Kalise was talking about. We have a current regulation that lets the builders terrace these hillsides with 35 inch walls capped by impervious patios, and the water is coming down those hillsides in sheets. And instead, a, we should get rid of that 36 inch terracing situation and stop that. Okay?

That's my first suggestion. Another suggestion rather. But I also think that we need to be creative about saying to people, you may need to put a little rain garden at the bottom of this, or you may need to have a swale to slow the water down. I made this point recently. I forgot.

It wasn't Mayflower. You folks remember the address. I probably don't. But, like, they basically created a runway between their front lawn and their driveway where the water if we got sick you know, water that was gonna overflow their gutters, it was gonna be just a river of water flowing down to the one storm drain that serves the entire neighborhood. What would it have taken to just say to them, you need to put a swell in there. You need to slow this down a little bit. You need to plant some trees in the front to help absorb some of this. I agree with mister Gill. This isn't gonna solve it. If we had our druthers, none of us would probably be living here.

But we don't, you know, we don't have the benefit of hindsight. What I'm so, again, nibbling around. Burns, slowing the curve, more dry wells. Okay. So one of the reasons that mister Rakovich told me he was against the 100 year number, using the hundred year number was, quote, and I quote him, oh, the developers won't like that.

Well, I'm sorry, but the neighbors might. Because even if it only requires two more dry wells or one more dry well, it's a backwards way of also controlling house size based on how much water the lot can hold. So I think that really and truly, that 100 number is important. It's not going to solve the problem, but the state's moving there. They would have required it on long lots anyway.

So I think that you folks should seriously consider it. The next solution I have is to let's take care of what we already have. One of the reasons my whole neighborhood flooded back in 2018 was that no one had cleaned the storm drains. There are a number of situations in this town, and I don't know where they are. Maybe Michelle has a list of them.

I don't know. But the properties on Mayflower, the condition for the builder to build there back in the eighties or nineties was that he put in these storm drains and then give the town easement. But no one's maintaining them. They're in the back of somebody's backyard, and they need to be vacuumed out. They need to be cleared in the fall so that they're not covered with leaves.

And, again, we need a regular schedule of maintenance. Frankly, you know, me and my leaf blower thing, let's spend less time blowing the leaves on this in in the curbs and take care of getting the leaves out of all of our storm drains and keeping them clean. The next thing I think you should consider is seeing if there's any federal or other money available to help people raise houses. I know that there's a a FEMA program, but it's $20,000. If if any of you know how much it costs to lift a house, that wouldn't even cover the the the design plans to do it.

So I don't know. Maybe there is some some kind of fund out there or some money available to help people who do wanna lift their houses. Another suggestion I have, which no one has mentioned, I'm kinda surprised Jenny didn't mention it because she and I have talked about this. And that is that in Europe, and I believe in Japan, excuse me, some of the low lying countries, they know how to deal with water, right, in The Netherlands, etcetera. What they've done is they have designed their public spaces so that they're recessed.

They almost look like stadium seating. And then, again, it's part of their bend the curve, plan. When they get a heavy storm or a flood or the dikes are in danger of giving away, the water can actually flood these places with no harm to buildings or anything because they've already recessed it out. And they put them around in various places. Sometimes even parking lots, believe it or not, are set up that way.

Recessing it down just three or four feet could make a huge difference. I actually suggested this when it came to the long lots project because that soccer field in the front, and I have lots of issues about the numbers that were used on that drain on those drainage calculations. We could have really helped the neighbors there, and all the soccer fans could have had their soccer field had they recessed it. Because then in an overflow situation, it would act as a quasi retention pond. And and one of the architects or engineers actually admitted this at the school committee hearing.

He said, well, the only way to really help the situation would be to build a retention pond here. We could have had a a field that served dual purposes, and we squandered that situation. And we need to not do that again. We need to start looking at what they're doing in other places and stop just kicking the can and saying, well, if the goal is to stop it, we can't stop it. That's not the goal. The goal is to help people. The next thing I have on my list are the is the patio situation. Now I remember, Ellie Lowenstein was head of P and Z at the or maybe Ron Corwin. I don't remember. They were leading up P and Z, and there was an attempt to make patios count as coverage.

And I understand, mister Gill, they put them in the they put them in

the

drainage calculation. And we all thought that would be enough. And one of the reasons I was actually opposed to to making patios count as coverage was because it was gonna suddenly make every house in well, not every house. That's an exaggeration. Thousands of houses in Westport would suddenly become nonconforming, or the properties would become nonconforming. And that was not tenable from a mortgage situation and from a transfer situation. But I do think something needs to be done about the patios. If mister Gill is right that we shouldn't be setting them in stone desk well, first of all, I think we should stop allowing them to be set in concrete. Maybe that's the solution. If you set them in concrete, it's gonna count as coverage.

And if you and if you don't set them, I don't know anything. I don't know the difference between bedding sand and stone dust. But maybe we should be requiring that people set them in a different material to encourage the percolation between the blue stone or whatever stone they're using. But I do think we need to take a long hard look at these patios. That situation in Mayfair, it's the one that's freshest in my mind, so please forgive me.

They added, I forgot, 1,500 square feet of patio, and they're not out of coverage yet because the patios don't count. And they could, if they wanna come back and add an ADU because they still have 500 square feet of coverage left. That should not be happening in a situation where they are bordering the only drain for the neighborhood. Another suggestion I have is I know that the driveways get compacted. I realize that.

And I realize that, Ted, thank you. You're on it when when conservation mandates it. But I also think that maybe we should create an area that call it the Campo Basin, whatever it is, and stop and say to people, you know what? No more asphalt driveways because that is part of the problem. I live on a street where I don't wanna exaggerate, but I think there are only two houses that have gravel driveways, mine being one of them. Everybody else, it's asphalt. Water is just coming down in sheets, and most of these are relatively new driveways. Because people I get it. When our snowplow plowed, it's a pain in the neck. My husband had to go out and rake the rake the stones back into the driveway.

I get it. But we do it because we are concerned about drainage, and we also don't wanna be pushing more water to our neighbors. And I think it's time to be creative about this and just say, I understand somebody might try to break the rules, but people speed it. Does that mean we don't set speed limits anymore? No. Yes. It's gonna be an enforcement issue. But we're gonna tell the town, we've gotta get smart about this climate change. I don't know the numbers, mister Gill. You would know better than I do.

But when I talked to mister Rakovich back in 2018, he told me the water table was eight or nine inches higher than it was twenty years before. We know the sound is rising three quarters of an inch a year. Like, the underground water is coming up. We can't have all the all this asphalt and all these cemented patios everywhere. And finally, I already talked about the rain gardens, put that in with the swale category, and the berms.

I really think that those are underused in this town. And finally, I don't know what to do about this, but, we have so many ops applications. I didn't even bother attending. I think you had one a week or two ago, and I was like, here it is again. Another builder broke the rules on drainage, broke the rules on moving fill. And what do they do? They come in and they wring their hands and they say, oh, I just put in an $18,000 apron on my driveway. Are you gonna make me rip that up? And I'm quoting, actually, from that meeting. We we have to put some teeth into this and say to them, yeah.

We are gonna make you rip it up, or we are gonna stop you, or you're not pulling in you people you're not pulling another building permit for a year or something. By the way, you don't know this, but I was fighting that battle on Mayfair. I had multiple builders call me and say, hey, Valerie. That guy has broken the rules three, four times that I know of. And I went down to and I but don't quote me, they said. So I went down to planning and zoning to try find out, is it true? Did the same builder break the rule three times? We're not keeping records on this. We should be keeping records on who are the people who are breaking the rules. I don't know.

So I didn't I didn't raise it at the hearing because I didn't know. But other builders are calling me. Granted, they had, you know, skin in the game. They have an incentive to trash their competition. But, I think some of the suggestions I'm making will actually help homeowners, particularly things like public spaces being used for dual purposes, especially with all this new construction going on, especially with the driveways and some kind of maintenance schedule and mapping of every storm drain and somebody being in charge of making sure they're cleaned out. And I again, I'm done. I really appreciate you letting me speak. I have been worrying about this and thinking about it since 2018, so thank you very much.

Glad you did. Now, Michelle, we need to take notes on all of this, and I think that maybe this should Ted, thanks for coming. I think we should maybe move this to subcommittee and continue to dialogue on this. Right? And kinda

Oh, yeah. Yeah. Then we can have Ted and if we can have Ted come to those meetings.

Great. I mean, Val, I understand what you're saying. It's like, do we upgrade to the hundred year storm? And I understand everything you're saying, but then what are the real life you have to look at both sides of the coin. Right? It's gonna help a lot. It's gonna help the environment. It's gonna help the drainage. How much does it really cost? What does that really mean? Is it something that's gonna like, I don't know the answer. The question, is this something that's gonna

save a little bit. If putting in

a couple of extra dry wells thousand dollar project or no?

It's it's probably it's probably less than $3,000 when you're building a 2 or $3,000,000 it it's nothing.

It's a not it's nothing then. And that means it's nothing. Right. But if it's if it's a if it's a $30,000 expense extra, it's all relative to the project. We need to study all of that to before we just go ahead and just carte blanche a hundred year across the board, right, obviously.

Well, I don't know, Matt, Michael, because the state is gonna tell the state is gonna tell us to do it imminently anyway. So they're already we would have had to do it for long lots. So, you know, like, I don't know why we can't

it for that. My question is, as a town, are we even allowed to legally change the standards? And that's to Michelle. Yes. Yes.

We are.

Yeah. Yes. You are.

Okay. So let's move

this something. Yeah. We'll have to we'll have to get added to the subcommittee. Think we should move this up.

The Yeah. Mhmm. Do any of the commissioners have any follow ups on this, or are we done for the night? John, you're on mute. Ted. Yeah.

If I may, I did have one one thing I wanted to to pull up and kind of show you guys. I know that normally you guys are looking things for at things from an individual property development perspective. Our department often looks at things you know, we're we're reviewing projects for you guys at that individual property level, but we also look at watershed wide. We look at all of the flooding on all of the streams in Westport. And if, do I have the ability to share my screen?

I just sent it over. Let me know if you don't skip. Okay.

So I'm going to share a couple of things here. This is this is Deadmansbrook at downtown. Can you guys see this?

Mhmm. Yes.

Yeah.

Alright. So so this is this is where Deadmansbrook comes down through Jessup Road and under the post road. Here it is at Myrtle and here's this this very narrow channel by Violet Lane. Is the church. This is Winslow Dog Park.

All right. Our Winslow Park, sorry. We had a flood study done back in 2018 that looked at what we could do as a town in order to address flooding on Dead Man's Brook. And so the the engineering firm, BL companies, they looked into several different ways of trying to address flooding on Dead Man's Brook. And they, classic ways of of getting water to stay within a stream, an engineer would normally say, we'll just make the stream bigger physically, make the channel bigger, wider, deeper.

Unfortunately, in downtown, right, that that's that's buildings being torn down in order to to make the stream wider. And when you get into downtown, Deadmans Brook is tidal. So so it's not it's not sustainable to say, you know, blow up a couple of commercial buildings in order to widen a stream in a tidal zone where the tidal floodwaters are not going to be at all alleviated by widening a stream channel. That's only going to be the water coming down from upstream. So rather than do any of that, BL company said would be the only way that you might be able to have an impact on flooding on a Dead Man's Brook would be by building detention ponds.

You know similar to what miss Jacobs was was pointing out for Long Lot school. What if we took the entire soccer field and turned it into a detention pond? Would that have any impact? So we we had them look at that and they proposed several alternatives that we could try and put into Deadmans Brook and this this is one of them. So this is Where is that?

Winslow Park is off to the right. This is the channel Myrtle Avenue is at the bottom of the page and this is the idea that they came up with. We have this pond up here we're going to go immediately downstream of the pond and we're going to have a section where the stream can go off to the side into this massive detention pond it comes over this at elevation

Is it all existing Winslow Park?

18 and not the entirety. No. So Winslow Park, the majority of Winslow Park is over here.

No, but it's okay. It's that area.

This is the entire wooded hillside that leads down to Deadmans Brook and it's not just on dog park or or on on park property. Right? It's on park property. It's on the individual private properties of all of these houses. One of them has an a separate building that they have on the other side of the stream.

We would have to do a lot of a lot of eminent domain and takings in order to take people's property in order to build this massive detention pond that's 11 and a half feet deep in order to try and divert water from Dead Man's Brook into it to slow that water down, store some of it, so that we can reduce the flooding in Deadman's Brook. Right? This is this is the the poster child. Every single time we get we get flooding, it's in the news, it because there's a picture of a car stuck in the water over Myrtle Avenue. Usually the police nowadays try to close this road down if we know a big storm is coming through but it still happens.

Cars get stuck in the water over Myrtle Avenue. You see like you know a foot and a half of water flowing across the street there. It looks terrible and it's always in the news, right? Well so we do something like this this was alternative five in this drainage study what impact do we think this would have on the flood heights over Myrtle Avenue? And when they did that analysis right before you got to Myrtle Avenue the difference in elevation in a one hundred year storm was it would be reduced by 0.28 feet.

So a couple of inches. You would reduce the flooding over Myrtle Avenue by a couple of inches by building this and again look at the houses for scale here. This is the size of many multiple houses this is three houses side by side the length of this 11 foot deep hole where we'd be blown up a whole side of this hill. This is what engineers who are even better at this than anybody that works for the town. This is what they said would be required to start having a big enough impact on the flows that are coming through Dead Man's Brook to reduce flooding by a couple of inches on on that road.

That was that was what they came back with and that's that's not you know like I said, that's not an easy project for us to go and start. That's not something that we could just spend the money and go do. That's taking people's property that is destroying a section of our park that is a huge amount of work and money and it came back with a negligible impact on on the actual flooding experienced there. And so that was that was basically when we're talking about, you know, properties like like Long Lot school, could they have turned the whole soccer field into a detention pond? If they had built it again this thing was 10 and a half feet tall that I just or deep that I just showed you but if they built a berm around that that was going to store you know five or eight feet of water over that entire soccer field, you could probably hold back a significant amount of water.

But when we're talking about the water that was flowing through the Longwatts school property, that's a very minor tributary to Muddy Brook. Even if you remove all of the water from that tributary, the flood zones on Muddy Brook are still there. The people who have six feet of flooding in their house during a hundred year storm, are they gonna notice whether it was six feet or 5.8 feet? You know, it's a negligible impact at that point. Our focus should be on in educating. Right? Education, I think, is the biggest thing that the town of Westport lacks. It's it's unfortunate that it is possible for somebody to buy a house and their their real estate agent didn't tell them that there was a significant history of flooding there. How you how we reg regulate that? I don't know.

But the number of times that people come to us and say, we just experienced this horrible flooding. We say, yeah, well you live in a flood zone. We actually know that house. I have been there. Well, it's flooded. And they say, well, bought it, you know, six months ago. I had no idea it flooded. Nobody ever told me that it flooded. How we fix that? I don't know.

But education and and and making that more available, making people understand where they live and what they should expect for flooding. I think that there's a tremendous benefit that can be made in those realms, but you know even if every single house on the watershed for for Deadmans Brook put in drainage to accommodate a hundred year storm at the end of the day the channels through downtown are still gonna be too small. They're still not going to, be able to carry the the hundred year flow rates that are gonna be flowing through, from that watershed. So so we can can increase our drainage standards. Right?

If we we can increase to a fifty year or a hundred year or a five hundred year storm, will that solve flooding? No. It will not. And so will it have a a significant impact? I'm not even confident it would have a significant impact on making people's lives better in Westport. But as I had said, it it will it will certainly take more of especially the smaller scale projects. Right? Developers don't like it. Right? You know, the the the people are coming in and tearing down five or six houses a year and building building new ones.

The yeah. They're not gonna like it, but they're still gonna be able to do it. Westport, it's not gonna make it, economically unfeasible to tear down houses and build new houses for us to increase the size of storms. But it will make it harder for for individuals who are building responsible small additions on their properties or moving their driveway slightly. Those smaller scale projects, those are already the ones that are are harder to do and more cost prohibitive because of our drainage standards making it more difficult. And those are the ones that more and more of them would be cut out by increasing our our drainage, since I know the commission heard

that about I appreciate that.

Jenny and and and felt good to hear

it.

So Thank you. You know what? Look. This is a lot to talk about in subcommittee. Thank you. Alright. Jenny, quickly.

Yeah. It's gonna go to subcommittee anyway.

I just wanna quickly add. Look. I would encourage every anybody on the commission, regarding what, Ted just said, I'm very familiar with the dead man study. It was a $600,000 study that yes. It's hard, and it was another one of many studies that we've done over the last two decades that have been shelved.

But that one is one that I think would be really worthwhile for the commission. When you go for a walk, go to the Saugatuck Congregational Church, go to the back of the parking lot and just walk, And you'll see that the there is a natural topography there. It's an interesting issue. So I I, I think that that is an area where someday we may be needing to, figure out how we're gonna save our downtown. But, but in any event, I I just wanted everyone to, just take the opportunity when you have a chance to to just check out that area, when you, have a when the weather clears, go for a nice walk. Thanks.

Thanks, Jenny. Kyle?

The last thing I wanted to add is I I agree we should be educating everyone about the impacts of climate change and drainage, etcetera. But to say that educating people about this is basically just saying, oh, let's chill the sales of houses in Westport. And I don't think that's P and Z's goal. In other words, why aren't the realtors telling them, like, okay. What is that gonna do? That's not gonna solve the problem. It's it's basically gonna reduce the number of buyers who might want a particular property. If we really want to address drainage, then we do need to look at some of these other solutions. And, again, the goal we know, mister Gill, we know we can't stop it. We know that.

We know that none of the none of these by themselves and none of them altogether is gonna stop it because, truthfully, we're screwed. When it comes to climate change, we're screwed with these with these storms. None of them or all of them together isn't gonna solve it. But what I'm suggesting and I remember when I met with you with Paula Bell and Jenny, I don't know, a year ago, November, I think. We I pressed you, and I pressed you, and I said, like, well, what would raising the number to a 100? How much benefit will we get? And you bought again, it was off the cuff. Well, maybe 10%. Maybe. Well, you know what?

To a purse if we did 10% benefit from the 100 and we had more trees and we did berms and we did some public retention areas, maybe we don't have to blast out a hillside. Maybe we have smaller ones dotted around the city to help, around the town to help a little bit. We're not thinking creatively. And I would also say that I am not sure that the American engineers are using the same creativity that the people in Europe are because they are really at the at the forefront of what's going on in terms of controlling water, especially in the low lying countries. And I would encourage this committee to think about reaching beyond the usual pool of expertise that Americans are using.

Thank you.

Thanks. Okay. I think that brings us to Ted, do you have anything else or are good until next time we all talk? Okay. I think that brings us to the end of our evening. Correct, Michelle?

Yeah. Nothing else for tonight. Thank you. Alright.

So that being said

Can I bring can I just ask one thing? I'm trying again to reschedule the executive session for those who are going to attend. So I'm now looking at next, week. So I'm going to be sending out an email with availability for next week, around four.

Right now?

We can do, I'm sorry. My I was thinking of Monday, but I don't think Craig's back. I don't know if Craig's back on Monday. I think she comes back on Tuesday. So I think we're thinking Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday at four.

I'm in for Tuesday or Wednesday.

Okay. Okay. So that would be

helpful if anybody else wants to give their availability now. Tuesday, Wednesday is

I could do Tuesday or Thursday next week.

I can't do Wednesday at four. I have a call at four.

Okay. So Tuesday

Let's and it sounds like free is good on Tuesday, so let's do Tuesday.

Free. Okay. Let me, check with Ira. I think he said that he was free on Tuesday.

Are you free on Tuesday? Can you be

free Tuesday, though? John's not on that one.

Yeah. I'm confused.

Mike maybe we can get Michael Kalis, I think.

Mike Kalis, are you available Tuesday, 4PM, the tenth? You're muted, but is that a thumbs up? If you can I'm sorry.

I didn't get what you said.

Are you available Tuesday the tenth at 4PM on Zoom for an executive session?

Sure. I'll make it. Absolutely. Great.

Okay. That's one thing

for any of us.

Three definite. It's okay. And I'm sounds good. I think, hopefully, that'll be the date. So just pencil it in for now, and I'll I'll email you with con confirmed confirmation. Thanks. Thanks, Ted, so much for being here. It's really helpful.

Thank you, Ted. Really appreciate it. I move to adjourn.

Second.

Have a good night, everybody.

Good night. Bye bye.

Thanks, Nicole. Take care.