Government
Officials Approve Petition for New Wetlands Boundary on Charter Oak Drive Property
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Town officials have approved a petition from Charter Oak Drive homeowners to re-draw the boundaries of a wetlands located their property so that it’s smaller than originally mapped—a change that followed a frustrating process that led to locating a new house closer to the road than wanted, the residents said. Though John and Sheila Lee Chun Arabolos knew that the 1.88-acre property at 108 Charter Oak Drive contained wetlands when they bought it last May, the couple had already started construction of a single-family home (through her father, builder Moon Chun) when new testing from a soil scientist showed that “we could have moved the house further back away from the curb,” John Arabolos told the Inland Wetlands Commission at its Feb. 22 meeting. “We could have had more space in between the house and the street and, you know, the house is built now,” Arabolos said during the meeting, held at Town Hall. “The foundation is laid, the structure is up, but we feel like in the initial steps of it, if we had just questioned results, we would have had a better result on our end.”
Inland Wetlands staff members and multiple soil scientists said that the work of pinpointing just where the wetlands lay was made more difficult because a previous owner of the property had filled wetlands that had been there, violating local regulations.