Town officials have approved a petition from Charter Oak Drive homeowners to re-draw the boundaries of a wetlands located their property so that it’s smaller than originally mapped—a change that followed a frustrating process that led to locating a new house closer to the road than wanted, the residents said.
The new 6,600-square-foot home going up at 108 Charter Oak Drive. Credit: Michael Dinan
Though John and Sheila Lee Chun Arabolos knew that the 1.88-acre property at 108 Charter Oak Drive contained wetlands when they bought it last May, the couple had already started construction of a single-family home (through her father, builder Moon Chun) when new testing from a soil scientist showed that “we could have moved the house further back away from the curb,” John Arabolos told the Inland Wetlands Commission at its Feb. 22 meeting.
“We could have had more space in between the house and the street and, you know, the house is built now,” Arabolos said during the meeting, held at Town Hall. “The foundation is laid, the structure is up, but we feel like in the initial steps of it, if we had just questioned results, we would have had a better result on our end.”
A look at the home being built at 108 Charter Oak Drive from White Birch Lane. Credit: Michael Dinan
Inland Wetlands staff members and multiple soil scientists said that the work of pinpointing just where the wetlands lay was made more difficult because a previous owner of the property had filled wetlands that had been there, violating local regulations. Wetlands are protected by law and any work that would alter a designated area can only be done with a permit. Officials say they’re seeing an uptick in violations in New Canaan.
“It is a disturbed wetlands,” said 30-year soil scientist Thomas Pietras, one of three who tested the property.
“It’s my professional experience [that] this is getting to be more of a marginal wetland, and so it just made it difficult and we were stuck basically using whatever we could out there, and it came down to really scrutinizing coloration patterns. We did come to an agreement that it is a unique situation and fortunately, we are not coming across this on a daily basis because otherwise, our work would be almost impossible. We would have almost constant disagreements.”
Another of the three soil scientists, Bill Kenny, called the past disturbance a primary reason for the site’s difficulty. Typically when a soil has formed over time, features develop that reflect average conditions, as opposed to when the soil is “all mixed up, removed and put back” so that “you are working with a fraction of the evidence you would typically have.”
Site map of 108 Charter Oak Drive in New Canaan.
Even so, Sheila Lee Chung Arabolos said, it was “a very difficult thing to reconcile” the difference between two expert opinions when those professionals each must be paid and they arrive at different conclusions.
“If you go down deep enough, you should be able to figure out what the wetlands are and redo this line,” she said, pointing to a site plan, “but it should have matched this one [line] and it doesn’t.”
Inland Wetlands staff members underscored that the homeowners were undergoing the very process in place for petitioning a boundary change (see page 44 here in the regulations).
The commission voted unanimously in favor of the petition.
Commissioners asked how big the wetlands is (about half the size of the Town Meeting Room), whether the owners knew there were wetlands on the site when they bought the property (yes), whether the town brought in the third soil scientist (yes) and whether there were any issues as to a lack of clarity among the three soil scientists (none). They also discussed just how much of a difference in size the “new” wetlands boundary makes and how much it may have changed where the house could be located—one estimate put it at a 10- or 15-foot difference.
The property at 108 Charter Oak Drive included a 1952 ranch-style home when it was purchased last May for $900,000, tax records show. That house was demolished in the summer and the town in September issued a building permit for a 6,600-square-foot home now under construction.