Strong feelings on both sides for Salisbury affordable housing plan

SALISBURY — This fall the Salisbury Planning and Zoning Commission (P&Z) conducted a lengthy public hearing on an application from the Salisbury Housing Committee to build an affordable housing apartment building in Lakeville.

The public hearing, held online, and spread over three evenings, attracted considerable attention.

(See the town website, www.salisburyct.us, for exhibits and materials pertaining to the application.)

It was somewhat anticlimactic when the Housing Committee withdrew the application prior to the third round of the hearing on Nov. 9.

Jocelyn Ayer, a member of the Housing Committee’s board of directors, wrote in an email Saturday, Nov. 7 that, “We’ve received new information in the last few days and need more than three days to address it sufficiently, so we withdrew the application. We plan to submit an even stronger application to P&Z for Holley Place in the next month or so.”

The withdrawn application was for a 13-unit apartment building at 11 Holley St. in Lakeville’s Historic District. The  town-owned site is now occupied by a small park and a parking lot at the intersection of Holley Street and Main Street (Route 44).

The breakdown of the building, according to the withdrawn application, was: eight one-bedroom apartments, two two-bedroom apartments and three three-bedroom apartments, plus an office and a common room, on three floors.

During the first two sessions of the public hearing, on Sept. 21 and Oct. 8, several concerns were raised, including: The legality of the Board of Selectmen’s extension of the Housing Committee’s option to buy the property at a special meeting on July 23; technical problems with the application; whether the site is appropriate for the purpose; traffic safety; public parking at the site versus parking for the residents; the size of the proposed apartment building; the impact of construction on nearby properties; the impact on access to nearby properties; does the design of the building match the intentions of the original donors; have the P&Z meetings on the subject been properly warned and neighbors properly notified.

On Nov. 9, the public hearing reconvened. P and Z Chair Michael Klemens read into the record a list of exhibits, including several dozen  letters both pro and con. 

There was a lengthy letter, with 131 signatures, opposing the proposal. The letter reads, in part, “After mining our Town’s records and meeting archives, we’ve discovered that this urban complex is not only out of context with the design and scale of buildings that line the streetscape in Lakeville, but that it violates multiple State laws and Salisbury zoning regulations, posing serious health and safety concerns.”

The commission then voted unanimously to close the public hearing. Then the commission voted unanimously to accept, without prejudice, the notice from the Housing Committee that the application was being withdrawn.