Residents Oppose Proposed Zoning Regulation to Prevent McMansions

Asked whether the town should have a say in how residents can add on to their homes, locals said no. At least, the seven speakers — several of them homebuilders and architects — at a Plan and Zoning Commission workshop did.

 About 20 residents attended the workshop, held Tuesday night. The commission held the informal meeting to get public input on the idea and to help publicize the issue.

“We really haven’t had that much input from the community at large,” Commission Chairman James Pogson said. “We were hoping in this workshop we might get some input as to whether people felt it was a good idea, a bad idea, whether it might be modified or if it should be put forward at all.”

The issue was raised out of concern that "McMansions" might creep into town and destroy the character of existing neighborhoods, particularly after one case of development on the edge of the Farmington historic district.

But the speakers Tuesday said such a problem didn’t yet exist in Farmington and that a regulation to prevent unfitting development would create prohibitive costs for families trying to add on, even in a reasonable way.

“I think this will be cost prohibitive for families because they’ll need to pay an architect and surveyors to do an addition,” said John Carrier, who has built several developments in town. “It’s really a deterrent because I don’t think anybody’s going to be able to get an addition done for less than $5,000.”

David Quisenberry, an architect with Quisenberry & Arcari agreed the costs would be high for individuals and for the town, which he said would get a reputation as being anti-development if a regulation were passed.

“To a certain extent somebody who owns a house has certain rights to have their house the way they would like it to be,” he said. “We all want to kind of regulate design and I think we’re searching for ways to do that... but that’s very hard to do and probably in some ways even illegal.”

Jack Kemper, of Kemper Associates, suggested the existing zoning code be modified to include concrete guidelines, similar to how commercial properties are regulated.

Loftus Jestin, chairman of the Historic District Commission and landscape architect Evan Cowles agreed with previous speakers in opposition to the regulation. 

“I don’t think imposing this on all residents should be done because a specific home was done without any sense of ownership,” Cowles said. “I would steer clear on trying to legislate what fits into a neighborhood.”

Commissioners advised the audience that any proposed regulation would not be passed without a new public hearing on the subject.