This story by Tommy Gardner first appeared in the News & Citizen on Sept. 21.
A summer-long dispute between Morristown zoning officials and the developer of a 24-unit affordable apartment building appears to have been smoothed over — with fresh coats of blacktop and concrete.
Contractors last week resurfaced the municipal parking lot in the middle of the village and reconfigured the parking spaces to create more than 30 new spots, freeing up a key sticking point in the town zoning administrator’s and development review board’s attempts to prohibit Village Center Apartments from letting people move in.
The apartment’s owner, Lamoille Housing Partnership, disputed that, saying it was the town’s responsibility to complete the work and should have done so long ago. All the while, despite the prohibition, the partnership continued to let tenants move in, including three individuals or families who had been homeless.
“We’re really happy that the work is done,” Jim Lovinsky, the partnership’s outgoing executive director, said last week.
Also last week, the apartment building owners tore up the asphalt sidewalk in front of it and replaced it with concrete to satisfy another occupancy requirement.
It remained unclear as of press deadline whether the developers had satisfied the conditions of its zoning permit by paying the town for a share of the parking lot cost, according to town zoning administrator Todd Thomas.
As of Friday, 12 of the 24 units in the Hutchins Street building — a mix of studio, one-bedroom and two-bedroom apartments with rents ranging from $680 and $1,200 a month — were occupied.
This is despite zoning administrator Todd Thomas’s assertion in July that occupying the building violates the town’s land use permit. The biggest sticking point was the parking lot, which Thomas said needed to be reconfigured to provide necessary overnight parking spots for the building’s residents.
However, Thomas offered the owners an alternative solution: pay the town $35,000 and forget about the parking requirement.
Thomas fined the owners $500, which the developer paid Aug. 9. However, Lovinsky refused to pay the $35,000 until the paving was finished, saying it was the town’s responsibility and should have been done long ago.
The town doubled down and the development review board “instructed” Thomas and the interim town administrator to disallow occupancy.
Interim administrator Jason Luneau — also the town’s police chief — declined to do so, and Lovinsky and crew just kept moving people in.
Thomas said he disagreed with the notion that there has been a dispute between the town and the developers, saying in an email Tuesday that it was an act of noncompliance.
“I have never had another developer start moving people into a new building without satisfying the Development Review Board’s occupancy requirements before,” Thomas wrote. “What happened was unprecedented, which is why the developer received the largest fine I have ever written.”
Lovinsky said the building would have been finished last summer but for a fire that broke out in the nearly complete building last summer, requiring crews to gut it to the studs and begin again.
“If we had finished the building last summer but the town hadn’t finished the parking lot yet, then, by his logic, that building would have sat empty for a year,” he said last week.
Thomas, in an interview in July, hypothesized it had been so rainy this summer that Pike Industries, the contractor hired to re-do the parking lot, might not have been able to get the work done before the winter. That was true, to an extent — Pike subcontracted the work out to St. Albans-based Hungerford Paving.
Pike had not sent in a final bill for the work as of last week, but the original quote from the contractor, to which the town agreed on April 26, was for $90,750 for both the Pleasant Street parking lot and a park and ride lot at the corner of Bridge Street and the village bypass that had been a nondescript patch of dirt.
The town had a deadline for the park-and-ride lot paving to receive a grant to pay for it, which is why Pike delegated the work to Hungerford, according to town executive assistant Judi Alberi.
The work also included paving the Morristown portion of Center Road, quoted at $25,695, and all three projects were done between Sept. 7-12. All told, Pike quoted $116,445 for the three paving projects.
“If that was the total of all three projects, then the parking lot must have been pretty close to what we figured it was going to be in the first place,” Lovinsky said. “We agreed to pay up to $35,000, and we’ll pay that happily. We’re really happy that it’s done, for our benefit and for the benefit of the whole town.”
Thomas estimated in July that it would cost “well over” $100,000 just to have the municipal lot done and complained that the $35,000 he was asking Lamoille Housing/Evernorth to pay in lieu of the work was “giving the taxpayers the short end of the stick.”
He also said the developers “don’t want to pay their fair share of the parking lot,” a claim Lovinsky called “baloney.”
