To the Editor:

Newtown finds itself in the uncomfortable position of possessing open space with easy access to interstate Highway 84 just when the delivery giants are seeking giant-size facilities for their trucks and warehouses. No wonder a developer eying long-term cash yield wants to build a sprawling facility to lease to the likes of Amazon or UPS that demand industrial space on a scale that will overwhelm an entire neighborhood.

The application for the Hawleyville warehouse attempts to persuade our planning and zoning board to permit construction of an 8-acre warehouse surrounded by dock spaces for 76 trucks and 51 trailers, and pave acres of access roads and parking fields for 362 cars. If reasonably efficient — let us say unloading trailers in two hours, loading delivery trucks in half that time, and parking two shifts of employees’ automobiles — the operation could move two thousand vehicles in and out of Hawleyville every day.

And easily three thousand during the holiday season.

Not all change is bad, nor all growth. The strip mall that houses Hawleyville’s post office is the best-looking strip mall in the nation; the new Mitchelll’s gas station is a sight to behold that honors Hawleyville’s long-ago history as a rail depot. But enormous new projects must justify their bad effects, and enormous operations tend to ride roughshod over their neighbors.

Eversource blazing electric light into Hawleyville’s night sky as if bracing for a Russian sneak attack is a prime example. This proposed warehouse would be much worse — the noise and pollution of hundreds and hundreds of trucks coming and going daily, not to mention paving over significant ground surface above the Pond Brook aquifer.

We who have our homes in Newtown must encourage Planning and Zoning to resist this out of scale project.

It’s an uneven battle – selfless commission volunteers pitted against the applicant’s professional experts who are paid to package permissions. Town approval is a prize they will sell or lease to the highest, biggest bidder. They will move on; we will be stuck with an industrial behemoth. Anyone who thinks they live far enough away that it won’t affect them, might consider what the sight of an eight-acre warehouse at the Exit 9 entrance to Newtown will do to real estate appraisals.

Justin Scott

Newtown

Editor's note: Neither Amazon nor UPS have been defined as potential tenants of the proposed Hawleyville distribution facility, and a project measurably larger was previously approved for this commercially zoned site.