“Don’t it always seem to go that you don’t know what you’ve got ‘til it’s gone?” – Joni Mitchell
In the time-honored New England tradition of Annual Town Meeting, Deerfield’s citizens approved major changes to the town’s Zoning By-Laws in 2010. In their wisdom, voters made a conscious decision to place well-defined limits on the size of new Commercial Retail developments. Perhaps they had Joni Mitchell’s words in mind when they did so.
But what is the purpose of these By-Laws and why should we care about them? ARTICLE 1 of the document states, in part:
“These regulations are enacted to promote the general welfare of the Town of Deerfield, to protect the health and safety of its inhabitants, to encourage the most appropriate use of land throughout the town, to preserve the cultural, historical and agricultural heritage of the community, …”
The size limits voters approved grant developers the right to construct Commercial Retail buildings of “4,000 square feet or less of enclosed floor area,” provided all other state laws and local building statutes are met. Retail structures larger than 4,000 square feet require a Special Permit, and such proposals are subject to rigorous review by the Planning Board and Zoning Board of Appeals (ZBA).
The Planning Board is currently reviewing a site plan application from Lisciotti Development of Leominster to build a 9,318-square-foot retail box store on land at the intersection of Mill Village Road and Route 5.
Lisciotti is seeking to build a flat-roofed rectangular structure 130 feet wide (almost half a football field), 70 feet deep and 20 feet high. The proposed building is similar in nature to those one commonly sees in an industrial manufacturing zone.
To get a sense of its size, the building would be twice as large as the new Cumberland Farms off Elm Street in South Deerfield. The Rock, Fossil & Dinosaur Shop next door would fit into the Lisciotti store’s footprint about 4.5 times. And the store would dwarf the nearby homes in the Mill Village Road condominium neighborhood.
Since Lisciotti wants to build a store that is 2.33 times larger than the size allowed by right in Deerfield’s By-Laws, the ZBA – as the town’s Special Permit Granting Authority – will be required to exercise its discretionary power to reject or approve this Special Permit application.
To approve a project of this size, the ZBA’s members will have to provide a ”written determination that benefits of the proposed use outweigh its detrimental impacts on the town and the neighborhood.”
The site where Lisciotti wants to build is extremely wet, and the water table is very close to the surface of the ground. Indeed, hydrologic soil tests indicate the site has many of the characteristics of a wetland.
Questions such as where to plow snow in winter and how to manage storm water from torrential rains make this a challenging site for any retail development. Meanwhile, water runoff from a site where so much of the land area would be covered by hard surfaces also poses a threat to the leach fields of the neighboring homes.
Yet these and other engineering problems pale by comparison with the increased traffic dangers a retail store of this size would create at an already perilous intersection that has been classified a Top Crash Location by the Massachusetts Department of Transportation (http://gis.massdot.state.ma.us/maptemplate/topcrashlocations).
In Lisciotti’s initial plans, the store would be accessed exclusively from Route 5. That means people driving along Mill Village Road could not enter the site from that road. Rather they would have to drive to the Route 5 intersection, turn left across southbound traffic, then immediately turn left 100 feet later across the same southbound traffic to enter the parking area. This is a recipe for future accidents.
Although often described as a Dollar General proposal, that description is inaccurate. Lisciotti would own the land and any building, even if it currently intends to lease the space to Dollar General. If in the future Dollar General decides to end its lease (either because there are too many other Dollar General stores in neighboring towns or because the company goes south, Lisciotti’s empty store would remain.
That is why, as Planning Board Chairman John Waite has explained during recent public hearings, the town must work to ensure any development at this location is properly engineered and appropriate in size and character to the neighborhood and the town.
John Kuhn (of Kuhn-Riddle Architects in Amherst) helped design the entirety of the Yankee Candle campus in the nineties. In a September letter to the ZBA and Planning Board, Mr. Kuhn wrote that in his professional opinion, “the proposed Dollar General Store is NOT in keeping with the character of this area … and will ultimately, if allowed to be built as shown, be a permanent eyesore in the community.”
Lisciotti’s website (http://lisciotti.com/project/dollar-general/) provides one possible solution to the question of architectural character. The Dollar General store photo accompanying this essay is prominently displayed on Lisciotti’s website and features design elements much more in keeping with the Mill Village Road neighborhood. Presumably Lisciotti is proud of this structure. At 63 feet wide by 63 feet deep, a store of this design would enclose 3,969 square feet of space, and it would not require a Special Permit.
At press time, no images of the 9,318-square-foot box store Lisciotti proposes to build at Mill Village Road could be found on its website. If Lisciotti itself appears reluctant to publicly share pictures of this flat-roofed store design, perhaps Deerfield should take that as a sign.
Our town is blessed with an abundance of agricultural, scenic and ecological resources along the Historic Deerfield Corridor (Route 5), and stewardship of these riches is the responsibility of all of its citizens. Let’s hope our grandchildren don’t look back on our generation and say, echoing Joni Mitchell’s words, ”They paved paradise, put up a parking lot.”
Tim Hilchey is a Deerfield resident.