To the Editor:

Perhaps the largest crowd ever to attend a Planning & Zoning public hearing showed up last Thursday evening, April 7, to demonstrate opposition to an insidious warehouse proposal by Wharton Equity Partners of New York City. To accommodate the crowd, the meeting was moved from the usual Municipal Center facility to the much larger Community Center. Even with that, space quickly ran out.

Make no mistake, the Wharton proposal is running into a groundswell of opposition as Newtown residents wake up to the mess these distribution centers bring. Understandably, Wharton came to the meeting with a half dozen specialists who tried to make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear. They spoke about all that would be done to minimize the truck noise.

They downplayed environmental impacts to the wetlands, and to the Pond Brook Aquifer from soil erosion, and runoff from the paved warehouse surfaces. They talked about minimizing the visual impacts of the 40 foot high warehouse as seen from Route 25 and Mount Pleasant Road, and from the homes that look down on the property.

“Minimize” is an operative word here because what they absolutely could not say was “NO IMPACTS” from noise, or traffic, or to the environment, or to the area’s quality of life. Listening to Wharton’s presentations, you’d think they were offering a dish of cherry topped ice cream to the town.

Wharton projects 125 truck trips each day, split between morning and evening rush hours. All of it on I-84, with zero impact to local roads. Can we believe not a single truck will arrive at the property during off-peak hours, or that trucks will only come from I-84, or that none will ever come from the I-91/Route 25 corridor out of Bridgeport, or none will wrap around the flagpole on their way through the town?

Consider another lovely reality: there could be at least two employee shifts at the site every day. That means there could be a potential for 360 entry trips and 360 exit trips for each shift, or a total of 1440 for both. Add on the 250 tractor-trailer trips projected in Wharton’s study (125 trucks in and out) on top of 1,440 employee trips and there’s a potential for nearly 2,000 each day.

Try to imagine all those cars and trucks on the single lane access road serving the property.

Newtown residents are not going to sit idly by as our town is defiled by Wharton’s noxious proposal. We need everyone’s support to keep going.

If you’re as concerned as those who showed up at the P&Z hearing, please consider making your voice heard at the next P&Z session on this matter.

Don Leonard

Newtown