An attorney for New Canaan Country School is denying a neighbor’s claim that the new athletic facility approved for school’s Frogtown Road campus will diminish the value of her home more in its planned location than it would anywhere else on the 70-plus-acre property.
Attorney Steve Finn, a partner at Stamford-based Wofsey, Rosen, Kweskin & Kuriansky LLP, also is denying the neighbor’s claim that locating the two-story facility near the school’s eastern property line was done “solely for NCCS’s convenience” even though there were other potential sites that would’ve had less impact.
In answering a lawsuit filed in August on behalf of the neighbor, Katherine Moore, Finn in several places—for example, in addressing the assertion that one member of the Planning & Zoning Commission who had recused himself from considering the application later actively participated in deliberations—said New Canaan Country School “is unable to admit or deny the allegations … and leaves the plaintiff to her proof.”
P&Z in March voted 9-0 in favor of a Special Permit application filed on behalf of the school, and in June approved the site plan (with 17 conditions) by a 7-1 vote.
The town is named as primary defendant in the administrative appeal and is represented by Westport-based Berchem Moses PC.
Finn filed his answer Sept. 27, according to Connecticut Judicial Branch records, and the case last week was transferred to Superior Court in Hartford.
The plaintiff is represented by attorney Ted O’Hanlan of Stamford-based Robinson + Cole.
In an Aug. 9 complaint, O’Hanlan said P&Z’s decision to approve the site plan was “illegal, arbitrary, capricious and constitutes an abuse of discretion for a variety of reasons.” They include that the Country School’s initial application was incomplete and inaccurate, failed to meet New Canaan’s Special Permit criteria, that P&Z reached its decision through “incomplete, non-conforming and illegal plans” that the Commission then tried to address through conditions of approval and that the plan allows the school to exceed maximum allowable coverage illegally (by applying a 2006 Zoning Board of Appeals decision that’s no longer relevant), according to the complaint.
Between the first hearing on the NCCS applications in January and the June meeting where P&Z approved the site plan, the Moores and Country School officials met, records show. The school adjusted its screening plan based on a 2006 agreement that had not been taken into consideration before, and “slightly revised the location of the new facility,” according to meeting minutes. Specifically, it was pushed another 30 feet off of the property line, reoriented so that no wall faces the Moore property and the sizes of the building and parking lots themselves were decreased, according to the minutes.
The conditions of site plan approval include that all “existing, previously agreed buffer landscaping” would remain, and that prior to the issuance of a Zoning Permit, a revised landscape plan “which will provide additional landscaped berms to further screen the views of the Athletic Center” would need to be approved by the town planner.
As a New Canaan resident living in Graystone Circle,walking my dog,I see so many cars at the Millport and Lakeview intersection that do not STOP . Many just either slow down or often use cruise thru. It is dangerous. A policeman in an unmarked car would be able to verify my comments.