Of late, there has been much online discussion about protecting the watershed areas that feed into the three reservoirs in town. The Connecticut Department of Energy and Environmental Protection (DEEP) defines a watershed as: “that area of land that drains or sheds water into a specific receiving waterbody, such as a lake (reservoir) or a river. As rainwater or melted snow runs downhill in the watershed, it collects and transports sediment and other materials and deposits them into the receiving waterbody.”
The fact of the matter is that Aquarion, the current successor to the original owner of our reservoirs – the Bridgeport Hydraulic Company (BHC), owns a good deal of the watershed land along the streams and rivers that feed into their reservoirs. Ownership and control over those properties extends as far north as Newtown, Monroe, and Bethel. Through the process of eminent domain, the BHC purchased that land in the early part of the twentieth century, making a concerted effort to rid their properties of contamination from previous factories and farms, as well as removing dozens of old mill pond dams that slowed the flow of water into their reservoirs. Company owned watershed lands are classified by the State and each classification comes with its own set of regulations.
The land that the BHC didn’t take remained in the hands of private owners and it was up to each of the towns to issue its own regulations regarding use. Despite some misconceptions, the entire town of Easton is not classified as a watershed.
This year, more than most in the past, the disinformation about the town’s long standing zoning regulations and the community’s mostly 3-acre lot size requirements is flowing freely. Social media threads are brimming with misconceptions about lot size and its role in protecting our watershed areas. Our 1941 adoption of 3-acre zoning had little to do with protecting the watershed and everything to do with maintaining the quality of life in a small town in Fairfield County that never wanted to see unbridled growth. So, this week, I thought it might be a good idea to look back and see why our ancestors – be they right or wrong – came to the conclusion that 3-acres was the proper size building lot in northern Easton.
According to the forward of the Standard State Zoning Enabling Act drafted in 1923 by the United States Department of Commerce: As of September 1921, only 48 cities and towns, representing less than 11,000,000 inhabitants, had adopted zoning ordinances. By the end of 1923, a little more than two years later, zoning was in effect in 218 municipalities, holding more than 22,000,000 inhabitants, and new ones were being added to the list each month.
That act was designed to assist local communities in their efforts to draft regulations that fit the needs of each municipality in such a manner that zoning requirements would be constructive and uniform to avoid legal challenges in court. It was also made clear that new zoning policies only be enforced for future construction and would not apply retroactively to existing buildings.
When Easton adopted its first zoning regulations in 1941, the town was divided into two distinct residential zones. Zone RA set a minimum lot size going forward of 40,000 square feet – approximately .91 Acre with a minimum buildable area of 37,000 square feet to be located within the boundaries of that lot. That zone began at the Fairfield town line and extended 1,000 feet beyond Flat Rock & Beers Roads as a northern boundary. The western boundary was Morehouse Road, and the eastern boundary was South Park Avenue. The remainder of the town, Zone RB, was zoned for minimum 3-acre lots with 2 acres of buildable space on each lot.
Almost all of Zone RA was already supplied by municipal water lines, but individual septic systems were still required for waste removal. A 40,000 square foot lot was considered large enough to safely filter wastewater discharge from individual septic systems.
The other probable factor in this designation was that the most politically connected Easton landowners owned the majority of the land on top of Sport Hill and many were already selling building lots, some as small as one-half acre. The Kent (55 acres), Marsh (161 acres), Disbrow (53 acres), and Senior (137 acres) families all owned large parcels suitable for development, and several new roads exiting from Sport Hill had already been built or were in their final planning stages. Power and potential revenue surely played a role in establishing the smaller parcels in Zone RA.
While some think that the smaller lots in southern Easton were safely below the watershed lands that served the town’s three reservoirs, one must remember that the Mill River below Easton Lake was the main water source from the then still active Samp Mortar Reservoir in Fairfield. Surely, if a man as powerful and influential in Easton politics as BHC President Samuel Senior felt his company’s water supply was in true danger of being polluted by those smaller building lots, Zone RA would have consisted of larger parcels.
While Zone RB was largely within the vast upstream watershed area that fed the local reservoirs, there were multiple factors in the decision to require larger lots to the north. Easton’s land was generally quite rocky and the need to drill individual wells and install individual septic systems required larger parcels to ensure clean ground water for other homes in the vicinity. While certainly an arbitrary figure, the 3 acres that was chosen was still within the normal range (1 to 3 acres) that most surrounding rural communities were then requiring for building lots where neither city water nor city sewers were available nor in the planning stages. Both Redding and Weston, also towns with large watershed areas that fed into the same system, would both settle on smaller 2-acre zoning requirements
By 1941, most Easton residents favored little or no further commercial development. Allowing too many smaller buildable lots would have overtaxed the town’s coffers when it came to building schools, providing police & fire protection, and building & maintaining roads. In 1941, the only fully paved roads in Easton were Sport Hill to Union Cemetery, the Black Rock Turnpike, Westport Road, Center Road, and the Monroe Turnpike (Stepney Road). Those were all maintained by the state. The town maintained no paved byways. Fire protection was a 100% volunteer operation with no consistent town funding. The department had only one pumper truck built in 1928 to fight fires. The only hydrants were south of Flat Rock Road. Police protection consisted of one full-time paid officer. The only school operating in town was Samuel Staples Elementary that served grades 1-8. High School education was provided by the town paying tuition to the City of Bridgeport for its high-school aged students as well as hiring a bus to transport them from Easton to Bridgeport. With very little in the way of non-conforming commercial ventures contributing to the tax base and no new ones allowed, zoning the town for 3, 4 or even 5 times as many residences would have made Easton’s taxes explode as the town’s infrastructure would have needed to grow dramatically to meet the needs of so many families.
Easton’s original zoning was more a matter of sound economic policy than it was for protecting the water supply for its reservoirs. It’s highly doubtful that even the most farsighted Easton residents would have imagined the explosion of growth that lower Fairfield County would experience after the war. Planning ten, twenty, or thirty years in the future wasn’t in the cards.
The Easton of 1941 was not an affluent community by any standards of the day. Easton was still a farming community that was just beginning to grow. Growth in most of Fairfield County wouldn’t mushroom until after the war – a good half dozen or more years after Easton’s two zones had been established.
After the war, Easton had severe limitations when it came to accommodating much in the way of sustainable growth. The Bridgeport Hydraulic Company’s three large reservoir systems cut the town off from much of Trumbull, Fairfield and Weston on an east-west basis. The BHC lands limited growth in the southern part of Easton to the Sport Hill Road and Morehouse Highway corridors. Expanding north-south arteries to allow faster commutes to the commercial hubs to the south was simply impossible.
Since the town’s zoning prohibited additional commercial growth, and the smaller lots were soon built out, no one in the community saw any need for sewers or additional municipal water lines. Most of the remaining acreage was zoned for 3-acres and lots of that size offered more than sufficient space to accommodate wells and individual septic systems. Adding municipal services would have been an unnecessary and extremely costly proposition. During the 1950’s and 60’s, conservation and water protection was on nobody’s radar.
Fast forward a few years. By the 1970’s, there were those in the larger cities who began to question the restrictive zoning of towns such as Easton, Redding, and Weston.
According to Charles Gardner in an article written for and published by the Mercatus Center at George Mason University in August 2023, the minimum lot size that many municipalities had established between 1940 and 1960 resulted in studies where: “The general conclusions of those research efforts were that minimum lot sizes … adversely affected housing affordability, they promoted automobile dependance, and their constitutionality—even under a rational basis standard of review—was open to question. After 1970, in response to a series of litigation setbacks, defenders of large minimum lot sizes proposed the use of ecological rationales to assuage the concerns of skeptical courts and to serve as a plausible general welfare justification for regulations requiring an acre or more of land for each single-family home… With the ascendance of the modern environmental movement during the 1970s lending credence to those contentions, litigation challenging minimum lot sizes dwindled, and the subject received limited attention from legal scholars in the following four decades.
Suddenly, our state and local politicians began touting the fact that our 3-acre zoning was all about protecting the watershed. It was as if Easton’s superior quality of life was suddenly just a fortunate by-product of our altruistic attempt to protect the drinking water for the residents of lower Fairfield County and not the other way around. It wasn’t that our zoning didn’t benefit the water supply, but did we really need to make excuses for wanting to remain small, live in a quiet town surrounded by nature while the rest of Fairfield County began to resemble one continuous city along the coastline, and where we were willing to pay the higher prices for homes and taxes to do so?
And then came CGS 8-30g in 1989. Overnight, developers offering affordable housing units could challenge local zoning regulations and rather than having the burden of proof be on them to convince a court that a zoning regulation was somehow unfair, it became the municipality’s obligation to prove that the regulation was an absolute necessity to maintain the safety and health of its citizenry. Towns that didn’t have at least ten percent of their housing inventory qualify as “affordable” were put at a terrible disadvantage.
As a result of 8-30g, over the past several years, Easton’s Planning and Zoning Commission has been required by law to negotiate with developers who either apply for permits to build high-density projects with affordable units or threaten to do so if P&Z won’t relax some of its rules in exchange for a smaller project. Some concessions may need to be made to avoid larger projects from being built by developers who are willing to take the Town to court to enforce the rights afforded them by the “one size fits all” 8-30g. Historically, dealing with this situation has been less of a partisan issue, but more a practical one.
It would appear that almost everyone in this town, regardless of their political affiliation, wants Easton to remain pretty much as it is; but to listen to some of the rhetoric posted on social media, one might wrongly conclude that the two major parties were miles apart in their goals.
By design, both our Board of Selectmen and our Planning and Zoning Commission include members from both major parties. The reality is that due to CGS 8-30g, some compromises will likely need to be made with the developers of both the Saddle Ridge and Plumtree Lane projects despite nearly everyone’s objections to both developments.
