Connecticut’s development process for projects such as The Riverview – an $8 million reception and banquet facility on the Farmington River in Simsbury, shown above in a rendering – could become easier thanks to a new online planning tool.
Fast-forward to the spring of 2008.
A happy couple will be the first to celebrate a marriage at The Riverview, an $8 million reception facility slated to open on the banks of the Farmington River in Simsbury. As at any wedding party, the newlyweds will cut the cake, take the first dance and make their toasts.
No one will be thinking about the two years needed to make the 15-acre banquet site a reality.
Between now and then, passersby might notice the changes during the construction phase at the site. Less visible but equally lengthy in time – 12 months – was the recently completed planning and approval stage.
Connecticut has a particularly tough reputation for the development approvals process, especially when the projects are abutting water and wetlands. But a new Web-based tool for land-use planning could mark the beginning of making that process easier.
Called the Community Resource Inventory, or CRI, the planning tool is a Web site that allows visitors to create maps for any of the state’s 169 towns, showing features such as water resources, land cover, protected open space, wetlands, farmland soils, roads and utility-service areas. In essence, the site is designed to provide geographic information system data in a way that doesn’t require a lot of technical expertise.
Launched in mid-January, the site is already attracting some attention.
“This page is now the most-hit page besides our home page,” said John Rozum, director of Nonpoint Education for Municipal Officials at the University of Connecticut. The tool was developed by NEMO and funded by a $35,000 grant from the state’s Department of Environmental Protection, and incorporates the department’s GIS data.
“It’s obvious that people are poking around and looking at it,” Rozum said. Traffic to NEMO’s Web site had been tracking between 200 and 300 daily visitors, he said. But those numbers have doubled since CRI’s debut.
CRI was created primarily as a tool for education and regulatory committees, but Rozum welcomes the development community to use the site, too.
“Our feeling is that it’s just as applicable to them,” he said. “We’re trying to make this info available to anyone with a Web browser.”
‘On the Right Track’
If CRI can offer even a little assistance in streamlining the development approvals process, the tool likely will be welcomed with open arms. The results of a recent study highlight the relative stringency in the state’s land-use regulations, compared to other parts of the county.
Nationwide, Connecticut ranked 15th in terms of land-development regulation, according to an index created by the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. While the study focused on residential land use, it sheds some light on how various regions handle development proposals.
New England, in general, ranked as the most regulated region, according to Joseph Gyourko, a professor of real estate and finance at the Wharton School and co-author of the study. Rhode Island, Massachusetts and New Hampshire took second, third and fourth places, respectively, on the study’s chart ranking the level of regulation.
More than 2,600 municipalities nationwide responded to the survey, including 65 from Connecticut, to establish each state’s score. The survey covered topics such as the number of regulatory committees involved in the approvals process, restrictions on the number of developments, the number of applications filed versus those approved, and the average length of the approval process.
Simsbury First Selectman Thomas Vincent, who oversaw the 12-month development approval process for The Riverview, acknowledged that those types of projects take time.
“[The process] does take a little while,” he said. “But it’s done to benefit the eventual structure and the business, too.”
For The Riverview, the process began with a site search for the right property to develop. That was followed by three trips before the town’s Design Review Board, which examines a project’s architecture.
“The Design Review Board worked out perfectly,” said Rich Correia of Correia Commercial Realty in Canton. “The finished product is much better-looking than where we started from.”
Correia and Bruce Cagenello of Prudential Connecticut Realty in Avon represented the seller in the deal, Edith Yakemore Revokable Trust. Vincent cited the willingness of Correia and Cagenello to listen and work with the various commissions as a reason for the project’s eventual approval.
Connecticut’s reputation as a stickler for regulations notwithstanding, “I think it’s how you work with the commissions,” Vincent said. “It is the intermingling of the commissions and the applicant.”
After the Design Review Board, the application made its way before several other commissions: Wetlands, Planning, Zoning and Economic Development. In addition, “We went to the Farmington River Watershed Association very early in the process to make them aware of what we were doing,” Correia said.
Though it took 12 months to complete the approval process, the project managed to secure unanimous approval at each stop along the way, Cagenello said. Without that kind of support, he noted, the process likely would have taken longer.
Like Vincent, Correia acknowledged that projects like The Riverview take time.
“It could happen faster,” he said. “There’s always lessons learned from different communities.”
Determining whether tools like CRI will help expedite the process will take time, too. At this point, CRI seems to be helping – at least in a broad sense.
“It looks like it could be a great resource in searching out specific types of properties,” Cagenello said.
Correia agreed.
“When you have a client who has a specific idea of what they want, having that type of system would be very beneficial,” he said. “Conceptually, it’s definitely on the right track. But from my perspective, it’s not specific enough.”
Some of the data is from 2000, so not all of the information is current, Correia said. And while the mapping provides a good overview of a town, he added, it doesn’t have enough site-specific information.
Rozum said he understands such concerns, and pointed out that CRI has more of a “town-wide scope” in its planning applications.
“When you get down to the site level, you still have to go out and figure out where the wetlands are,” he said.
Meanwhile, Rozum has been demonstrating CRI’s capabilities to his counterparts and colleagues in other states.
“This may start to go across the country,” he said. “The idea has been around for years, but now the technology is there for us to do it.”
CRI can be found online at https://nemo.uconn.edu/tools/cri.
