The Conservation Commission agreed with a 5-0 vote to recommend granting a conditional use permit for an amended site plan to complete a senior housing development at the Whittemore Estates property.
The amendment is for an increase in buffer disturbance from the permitted 10,185 square feet to 16,736 square feet. About 90 percent of that increase is for a storm water management area on the site, engineer Earl Blatchford of Hayner/ Swanson explained.
“The project languished until last year,” Blatchford said, explaining the first phase of construction at the site was completed in 2004, which included the construction of Trail Haven Drive.
Just north of the property, a 78 unit workforce housing project, NeighborWorks, is under way.
“Our firm was asked to create a site plan for the remainder of Whittemore Estates and broke out the remainder of the project in a new site plan, which was re-approved with the 17 units and clubhouse that was part of the original approval,” Blatchford said.
The proposal that is going before the Planning Board is to remove the clubhouse and add 11 additional two-bedroom units.
“This is a much more scaled down project,” Blatchford said, noting parking lots have been removed and garages are located underneath the units in the new proposal. The size of the site allows for construction of 122 units.
“This is an incremental increase here, but if you take this project here and add it to the NeighborWorks project at the rear of the property, this is less than the original Whittemore Project as proposed, which featured 83 elderly units on the 59 acre site,” Blatchford said.
“This is a perfect example of the flaw in our zoning ordinance, which sets the maximum number of units based on total acreage of the parcel regardless of what’s on the parcel,” Commissioner Mike Speltz said. “They’re eligible for 122 units, which they would have to put on stilts in the swamp. It’s haunting us. Hopefully this will be caught in the zoning audit, and if not, we should make sure it gets corrected.”
As he continued presenting plans for the completion of Whittemore Estates, Blatchford described the storm water management area proposed as a pocket pond that will have a permanent pool in it, a feature he said the state looks for in best management practice.
“It will basically be a small basin, about 6 feet deep with a 3-foot-deep pool, and about 3 feet of head area for the storage of swamps,” he said.
Vice Chair Eugene Harrington asked that pavement in a buffer area on the plan, which was added as part of a driveway, be removed as a condition of the Conservation Commission’s recommending the plan as amended.
Speltz agreed, saying he didn’t think the Commission could recommend the variance with the buffer being filled in with asphalt, as its not mandatory for completion of the plan.
“You could pave the buffer for an entrance to an otherwise undevelopable lot,” he said. “But I think we can approve this on the condition he take the pavement out.”
The Commission agreed to recommend granting the conditional use permit so long as the pavement shown in the buffer area for Unit 86 is removed from the plan.