AA Learn more about in-home care options for your loved ones

OLD LYME — A nearly three-year standoff about public access is nowhere near resolution between Old Lyme and the owner of a historic landing on the Connecticut River. Nevertheless, the town announced Friday it will move ahead with installing signage on the property, establishing rules for public use.

“The signs are being fabricated. Three signs will be installed, I would say probably this month,” First Selectman Tim Griswold told CT Examiner on Friday.

But property owners George Frampton and Carla D’Arista, who purchased 12 and 19 Tantummaheag Road in 2020, have not agreed to public signs identifying the 300-year-old Tantummaheag Landing and directing vehicles toward a parking area away from the Framptons’ house and buildings.

Frampton told CT Examiner this week that the town does not own the land and that a public road never existed between his driveway entrance and the land leading to the Connecticut River, according to his research. If a road did exist, he explained, it was deemed legally inactive after 1727 through the landowner’s will.

Though agreeing that Old Lyme does necessarily not own the land, Griswold said the public has used the roadway or right-of-way on the property since about 1700. He argued it’s a town road regardless of who owns the underlying real estate and that, over the years, Old Lyme has maintained the road and mowed the path to the river.

Frampton said he and D’Arista bought the property “with the understanding there was a pedestrian right of way,” that “it was possible for cars to go down there,” and that people had launched kayaks from the river.

“We understood there would be people using it, and people have used it. I mean the neighbors, fewer now, not very many people. But there are half a dozen neighbors, at least, who walk a couple of times a week,” he said.

But when the owners tried negotiating limits on use of the back driveway to reflect “a balance of public access with our safety and security,” Frampton said, the town insisted on unlimited car and truck access, parking for two cars, signage, and promising year-round vehicle access.

Frampton said he and D’Arista presented the first selectman with an “extensive deed search and historical archival record analysis” in July 2021, showing that they owned the entire landing and that the town had no ownership interest.

Frampton accused Griswold of keeping the research secret for several months, but the first selectman denied the claim.

“In terms of hiding or having secret information, I don’t know what he’s talking about,” Griswold said. “If it’s in land records, it would be public information, so I’m not sure specifically what is meant by the town hiding information, because all of the information comes out of land records.”

Griswold said the 1700s land records are “murky” and not as carefully documented as contemporary records.

“We maintain, based on advice from learned counsel, that the road was made and it existed, and as to the exact spot, I don’t know,” he said. “But the whole idea of the road coming forward to the present is that it is in the right location. … We’re not saying that we own the ground, but we have a town road.”

Frampton sent a complaint and compromise offer to the town on May 27 that included a demand that Old Lyme “issue and publicize a written apology to the Framptons acknowledging its failure to be forthright about the status of the Landing for the past two years.” The letter also demanded the town record a quitclaim deed conveying any “right, title or interest of any kind the Town may have in Tantummaheag Landing” to the Framptons.

“The Framptons will be under no obligation whatsoever [to] post signage or place or stow objects or allow any form of vehicular access of any kind or parking on their property,” the compromise offer stated.

Griswold said the town has not yet responded to the compromise offer, but that his answer would be “no.”

“We haven’t responded, and I personally would have trouble with some of those suggestions. But we would leave that to counsel, but it seems like we’re diverging instead of converging and trying to get something solidified,” he said.

The first selectman also noted there are many roads in Old Lyme that the town does not own, but that property owners are not allowed to block them.

“We don’t own the real estate under Lyme Street. We don’t own real estate under Mile Creek Road. So many, many roads are basically rights-of-way, and they evolved from people saying ‘I need to get from here to there,’ and you make a kind of deer path and it becomes a road,” he said.

Griswold said the town is offering the Framptons its proposal from two years ago – drafted by the Harbor Management Commission and the Board of Selectmen – which included a sign with hours of operation, private property signs and parking signs, as well as a boulder placed on the path to prevent vehicular access to the water.

According to Frampton, the town’s latest offer also bans the owners from subdividing their land, but Griswold said he was unaware of that requirement.

The first selectman said residents are frustrated with the long resolution process.

“People have been critical that, for a good long while, nothing’s happened. And we have been back and forth, and spent money trying to come up with something that would be an agreeable way to come to conclusion. … That has not really materialized,” he said.

When informed of the town’s plan to erect signs on his property, Frampton responded, “If the town believes it has the right to secure public access to our back driveway greater than the pedestrian access we have consistently afforded … Connecticut law requires the town to establish the exact details of such use in court.”

“They continue threatening to bulldoze our property because they believe it’s been a public highway for the past 300 years,” he continued. “… Their continuing threat to bulldoze our back driveway, carve out new parking places that have never existed, erect their own signs and smash our wetlands without any legal basis at all to do so is simply lawless behavior unbecoming of such a storied community as this.”

Cate Hewitt is a reporter and Associate Editor for CT Examiner. Hewitt covers planning and zoning issues.

OLD LYME — Three years after proposing an apartment complex requiring a tie-in to sewers, Mark Diebolt is back with an affordable housing project relying instead on septic.

The state’s affordable housing statute allows developers to largely bypass local zoning approvals in towns where less than 10 percent of the housing stock qualifies as affordable. According to the 2022 Housing Appeals List, 1.57 percent of Old Lyme’s housing stock meets state rules of affordability.

Diebolt is planning six buildings of 30 to 32 units each. Of the total 189 units, 57 would be affordable for people earning 50, 60 or 80 percent of the area median income, which was $113,889 in 2021, according to census data.

The buildings would be built on Diebolt’s 20.6-acre parcel at 49 Hatchetts Hill Road and a 16.25-acre adjoining parcel at 54-6 Four Mile River Road that he recently purchased and where he plans some of the septic.

Diebolt, engineer Seamus Moran and investors from Port One Companies presented the outlines of the proposal to the Planning Commission during an informal discussion on Thursday, in part to secure the commission’s approval to subdivide the two existing lots into six lots to fulfill state septic requirements.

The Hatchetts Hill property was zoned for multifamily use under a special exception in 2005 when a developer purchased the land from Diebolt with plans to build 16 luxury condos. That project was never built and Diebolt eventually regained ownership.

Peter Bartash, CEO of Port One Companies and a licensed architect, told the commission that the location for the project – in a mixed industrial and residential setting with easy access to the highway – would have very little impact on the town.

“It really stood out to us that we could look at doing something that has a little bit larger scale here from an overall project perspective without compromising the character integrity of the town,” he said.

Moran told the commission that subdivision was the first step in moving the project forward.

He said that testing of the soil in the 54-6 Four Mile River Road parcel showed it was “very nice sand and gravel that would be great for septic systems,” and he estimated that each building would need 7,500 gallons of sewage capacity a day, the limit allowed for approval by Ledge Light and the Department of Health.

Moran said that except for the septic area, the lower property would be dedicated open space with walking trails.

Commission member Jim Lampos questioned whether the well on the site could provide sufficient water for the residents.

Moran acknowledged that a well on site produces 50 gallons per minute, but said the buildings would have water storage tanks to meet demand at peak flow.

He also emphasized that the design was in its early conceptual phase. “We’re at about two and a half percent of the design.”

Bartash said the construction is planned for two phases over a two or three year period, first with 60 units closer to the Hatchetts Hill Road entrance, followed by 129 units in the second phase built toward the back of the parcel.

The site is close to a pump station for the East Lyme sewer system, but Diebolt was unable to gain permission in 2020 to use 50,000 gallons of 300,000 gallons designated for the town and the beach communities in an agreement with New London. The beach community sewer project, estimated at $14.1 million to $21.1 million, is still on hold while the town awaits word on a $17 million forgivable loan from the Department of Energy and Environmental Protection.

Editor’s note: A previous version of this story stated that Diebolt was unable to gain permission from the Old Lyme Water Pollution Control Authority (WPCA) to use 50,000 gallons of 300,000 gallons designated for the town and the beach communities, but the WPCA did not have the authority to grant that permission due to its agreements. Also, “Four Mile Creek Road” has been corrected to “Four Mile River Road.” This story has been updated.

Cate Hewitt is a reporter and Associate Editor for CT Examiner. Hewitt covers planning and zoning issues.

[email protected]

The tree, sitting at about 40 feet long, has been stuck in the water for more than two weeks at Miami Beach in Old Lyme.

OLD LYME, Conn. — A massive tree is causing a bit of a “tiff” on Connecticut’s shoreline. The tree made its way to Miami Beach in Old Lyme during last month’s storms, and it’s been stuck in the water ever since. Over the last two weeks, there’s been a lot of back and forth about who is responsible for getting rid of the safety hazard.

“From our perspective, the town should have worked with the state of Connecticut, worked with DEEP to get it removed before it became a danger,” said Mark Mongillo, President of the Miami Beach Association.

The association is made up of 262 houses and about 450 members who live near the water in Old Lyme. It’s a chartered organization, responsible for the same things as a local municipality. Members of the association pay town taxes, plus extra taxes for living along the shore.

“We pay for our own lights, electricity, insurance. We have to maintain our roads, we have snow plowing contracts, we have beach contracts. Anything that would happen in a municipality is basically what we do,” Mongillo said.

However, Mongillo said their property line very clearly ends at a certain point…at the high tide water mark. Therefore, anything below that, meaning in the water, he said is not their responsibility. The tree is sitting in the water, near the public swimming area.

“So, therein lies part of our issue with what’s happening,” Mangillo said.

The association has been reaching out to the state and to local town officials since the tree showed up on their shore on July 18. Mangillo said those efforts have fallen on deaf ears.

“Briefly stated, (they said) it’s not our problem,” Mangillo said.

FOX61 reached out to the town’s First Selectman, Tim Griswold.

Griswold believes the tree is not sitting on their property, either. Removing it, he said, wouldn’t be fair for other associations, which have already spent thousands cleaning up after this summer’s storms.

“If we were to suddenly say, ‘Okay, we will take a large tree off of your beach,’ then that sets a precedent and other people would want the same treatment,” Griswold said.

Griswold said if there were a federal disaster declaration for the damage, they may have been get the state to help out.

FOX61 also reached out to The Connecticut Department of Energy and Environmental Protection. The organization’s communications team responded with the following statement.

“DEEP recognizes that there is an extraordinary amount of debris in Long Island Sound and our inland rivers as a result of the weather events of the past few weeks. DEEP does not address naturally occurring floating debris such as trees, logs, or other woody debris upon Connecticut’s waterways, nor will the USCG typically respond unless the floating debris is lodged in such a way to block a federal navigation channel (e.g. in a bridge underpass). We recognize that this type of debris can be hazardous for those recreating in the water and we routinely advise boaters and swimmers to be wary of floating debris and to always be on the lookout.”

Now, Mangillo said he and his members have no choice but to take matters into their own hands. They reached out to see how much it’d cost to take the tree down and got a quote for $4,000. Mangillo said they don’t have that kind of money, especially after already spending $4,000 on other summer storm cleanup efforts.

“From our perspective, now we have this large tree that could have been taken care of almost two and a half weeks ago,” Mangillo said.

Mangillo argues that even if the tree is not considered to be on public property now, the state and the town had a chance to take care of it when it definitely was. At first, the tree was out at sea near Hawks Nest Beach. Within a few days, it moved, knocking down the swim line and the buoys in its path, before landing near Miami Beach’s shoreline.

“So, it took about five, six days for it to break through and start to come down this way. So, that’s five or six days that the town could have done something about it instead of saying, ‘let’s see what happens,’” Mangillo said.

Now with no other option, the association is taking care of it this weekend on their own time, with their own money. The first selectman said he sympathizes with them but stands by his point about precedence.

Sign up for the FOX61 newsletters: Morning Forecast, Morning Headlines, Evening Headlines

“Certainly, on the shoreline in Old Lyme and even over to New London, big chunks of wood and other things have washed up on the beaches and people have been disposing of them without demanding the towns take care of it for them,” Griswold said. “And probably people who spent anywhere from 3-$10,000 cleaning their beach. And maybe they’d say, ‘Well, I’ve already cleaned out so maybe you should pay me the cost of removal.’ So, I think it would snowball into a big problem.”

“It’s a shame it’s coming down to this but, we already paid $4,000 for pickup. We can’t afford to pay another $4,000. This is our taxpayer’s hard-earned money,” Mangillo said. “But we did not budget for $8-$10,000 of extra costs. It just didn’t make any sense.”

Related Articles

Julia LeBlanc is a reporter at FOX61 News. She can be reached at [email protected] Follow her on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.

---

Have a story idea or something on your mind you want to share? We want to hear from you! Email us at [email protected]

----

HERE ARE MORE WAYS TO GET FOX61 NEWS

Download the FOX61 News APP

iTunes: Click here to download

Google Play: Click here to download

Stream Live on ROKU: Add the channel from the ROKU store or by searching FOX61.

Steam Live on FIRE TV: Search ‘FOX61’ and click ‘Get’ to download.

EAST LYME, CT (WFSB) - Ledge blasting is causing intermittent closures twice a day on Interstate 95 in East Lyme.

Drivers can sign up for text message alerts of blasting operations on the project’s website, i-95eastlyme.com.

For Oct. 9, the state Department of Transportation said there would be one blast. It was set for between 11 a.m. and 11:10 a.m.

Both sides of I-95 will be closed during that span of time.

The DOT started the periodic closures on Aug. 1.

The blasting was scheduled to take place Monday through Thursday for a period of 6 to 8 weeks. It will not happen on Fridays.

“As a result, I-95 northbound and southbound will be closed twice a day between the hours of 9 a.m. and 1:30 p.m. for 15 minutes for each blast,” the I-95 East Lyme Project announced. “Please know that every effort will be made to keep the these temporary highway closures to the shortest duration possible.”

The DOT noted that the start of this closure could change based on weather or other factors.

Detours included:

“Because this work is so technical, so specialized and so dependent on conditions in the moment, we could only give a 30 minute window of when the operation is going to happen. If people head to I-95EASTLYME.COM, they can sign up for text alerts to receive that 30 minutes heads up,” said Josh Morgan with the DOT.

“[It] has just been so busy: People rushing on the highways, speeding, cutting through lanes,” said Mark Cofrancesco, of Plainville.

Cofrancesco took I-95 to get his family to the beach last week, but he may soon have to find a different route.

“We plan for the worst scenarios, but we certainly hope for the best,” said Robert Obey, resident engineer for GM2 Associates. “We have about 30,000 yards of rock to remove.”

Rock on the northbound side will be blasted to make room for new lanes.

“Everything we do is to minimize that risk of putting debris onto the highway,” Obey said.

“It’s so dependent on conditions in that moment: Weather conditions, wind, what the blast operator is seeing,” said Josh Morgan with the Connecticut Department of Transportation.

The closures were set to last 15 minutes, sometimes within a five-hour span.

“That will allow the team to send out a 30-minute heads up that at this time on this day we will be closing the roadway,” Morgan said.

Those texts were why Chelsea Horton thought the restaurant she worked at off of Route 161 would be a little busier.

She said it’s been that way even before the blasting.

People were getting off the highway to avoid the construction.

“I think it has upped our business a little bit with through traffic and whatnot, so I think it will help us a little bit,” Horton said.

The blasting and closures will not happen on Fridays, weekends, and Labor Day to try and minimize the impact on summer travel.

“The hope is that these will be short, 15 minutes closures twice a day just to safely remove that rock ledge,” Morgan said.

For real-time traffic updates, check the Channel 3 traffic map here.

Copyright 2023 WFSB. All rights reserved.

OLD LYME — Miami Beach Association has questioned the legality and content of an agreement with the town that has allowed public use of a short stretch of Pond Road since 1997.

Currently the agreement allows public vehicular access along Pond Road between Hartford and Portland avenues plus about 50 additional feet of Pond Road heading west.

The association owns Pond Road. The town owns Hartford and Portland avenues. The town’s beach parking lot is also bordered on three sides by Hartford Ave., Pond Road, and Portland Ave.

Mark Mongillo, president of the Miami Beach Association, told CT Examiner on Friday that the 1997 agreement posed a number of legal issues, including that Larrye DeBear, who was president of the association in 1997, did not have the authority to sign the agreement with the town.

“The board or the board members should have signed a corporate resolution granting the president the right to sign a document with the town and that never happened,” Mongillo said.

In addition, Mongillo said the original agreement with the town allowed only emergency vehicles and garbage trucks on the designated swath of Pond Road – which he said is reflected in the minutes of the association board and member meetings.

But the agreement was changed to allow public access, Mongillo said.

“For some reason the words in that agreement were changed – by whom we do not know – and I’m not pointing fingers anyplace. I’m just saying the words in that agreement were changed from what was communicated to the Miami Beach membership back in 1997, which are in our minutes,” he said. “Somehow, those words got changed to read ‘open to the public.’ Something transpired and we did not know, but that’s why it’s in the hands of the town lawyer and our lawyer because it’s not only the fact that the president didn’t have the authority to sign the document with the town… but also because the wording changed and we don’t know by whom or what.”

But Mongillo said he could not share the association minutes with CT Examiner until the legal issues had been resolved.

Mongillo also said research by association members uncovered the language change, which he said he raised with former First Selectman Bonnie Reemsnyder in 2013.

“We’re not just coming up with this now. This has been going back almost 10 years,” he said.

Mongillo said Miami Beach Association is proposing several options to the town, including that the town build its own road parallel to Pond Road.

“We’re trying to be good neighbors, and saying we need to reclaim our road. But we also understand the town needs a way to get from Hartford out to Portland Ave,” he said.

But said that his board is also willing to propose to the association membership the idea of giving the town an easement on certain areas of the property, which would require a membership vote.

“But the town has to make the first move as far as ‘are you open to putting in a road’ because that would be the easiest solution. If they want to, that’s the path we’re trying to go down… there’s options and to me that’s a neighborly, amicable way of resolving all of this.”

Mongillo said he gave the legal documents to First Selectman Timothy Griswold and Selectmen Martha Shoemaker and Matt Ward on July 7, and presented the information at the Board of Selectmen meeting on Aug. 7.

At the Aug. 7 meeting, according to meeting minutes, Keith Henson, who owns a parking lot at 11 Pond Road, told the selectmen that making Pond Road private would “shut down his business” and that he was being targeted unfairly.

Mongillo said that upon approval of his association board, the association would share excavation and paving costs and give the town two small parcels that abut the town parking lot.

As of Friday, Mongillo said he and the association attorney had not heard back from the town attorney about the issue.

“We’d like a fair and equitable resolution to an issue that has been out there for a couple of decades,” he said.

When CT Examiner spoke with Griswold on Friday, he said he remembered signing the agreement in 1997, the year he was first elected to office.

He acknowledged the association’s claim that President DeBear was not authorized to sign the agreement but said that the Miami Beach Association and President DeBear were represented by counsel at the time.

Griswold said that building a new road would involve moving electrical poles, contending with a water main and drainage issues.

He said the town has not responded to the association yet.

“It’s an open issue. We’d like to resolve it amicably,” Griswold said.

Pond Road is listed as an agenda item for Tuesday’s Board of Selectmen meeting.

Cate Hewitt is a reporter and Associate Editor for CT Examiner. Hewitt covers planning and zoning issues.

[email protected]