PZC denies concert venue application

By Suzanne Carlson
Journal Inquirer
Published: Friday, March 12, 2010 12:09 PM EST

VERNON — The Planning and Zoning Commission denied the application for an outdoor concert venue at 60 South Frontage Road on Thursday, citing several regulations as grounds for rejecting the seven special permits required for the project.

“We sat here through many, many hours of testimony from both the applicant and the members of the community,” commissioner Chester Morgan said, as he explained his reasons for voting against the venue.

Morgan said that in his opinion the venue would create a hazardous public health and safety conditions, would not be compatible with neighboring uses, and would create a nuisance.

He also said that though testimony of the residents was important, “I did not vote based on what the neighbors testified. I voted against the venue because it did not meet the Vernon zoning regulations.”

The seven commissioners voted on 10 separate motions over the course of the hour-long special meeting.

The first motion cleared up an issue brought up by Bamforth Road resident Douglas Moser, who argued during the Feb. 4 hearing that the venue should be denied because it did not fit the definition of its specified permitted use.

TicketNetwork LLC had applied to build the venue under the classification of a “commercial recreational facility,” which town regulations say is an acceptable use of the commercially zoned parcel adjacent to the company’s headquarters.

But there was legal argument over whether the wording of the definition referred solely to sports-related activities, or a broader range of uses.

Zoning Enforcement Officer Abraham Ford said the concert venue did fall within the definition of recreation.

Dorian Famiglietti, lawyer for TicketNetwork, also said in a rebuttal hearing on March 4 that definitions for the word “recreation” include intellectual forms of activity, which the venue would provide.

It was up to the PZC to make the final decision, and in a 5-2 vote commissioners ruled that the venue was not a commercial recreational facility, and therefore would not be a permitted use.

Commissioners Walter Mealy and Charles Bardes voted against the motion, while Keith Lauzon, Chet Morgan, Francis Kaplan, Sarah Iacobello, and Chairman Lester Finkle voted for it.

The second vote came on a motion to deny the application. Six commissioners voted to deny, with Charles Bardes casting the sole vote against the motion.

Town Attorney Harold Cummings suggested the PZC vote on separate, specific reasons why the application was being denied to avoid legal ambiguity should an appeal of the decision be made in court.

Finkle agreed, and the PZC voted on seven subsequent motions citing various regulatory clauses, as well as a motion to clarify that Cummings and Town Planner Leonard K. Tundermann drafted the motions.

For each motion, six commissioners voted in favor with Charles Bardes abstaining, except for a motion saying that the venue would hinder future sound development of the community, which Walter Mealy voted against.

After the meeting adjourned, Bardes said he abstained from the final votes because he had voted against the motion to deny the application.

“I didn’t agree with the first conclusion, so how can I vote on anything else?” Bardes said.

TicketNetwork CEO Donald Vaccaro said he was disappointed by the decision, but was “not dead-set on appealing,” contradicting earlier statements from Famiglietti, who indicated that TicketNetwork was ready to fight a denial of the application in court.

Kaplan called the venue a “nice idea in a bad neighborhood.

“It’s basically in a residential location. People’s privacy and way of life shouldn’t be changed because of the venue,” Kaplan said.

Iacobello said that during the Dec. 17 PZC meeting, Finkle suggested TicketNetwork have a public meeting in which residents could have input, which the company declined to do.

“A lot of the concerns over the noise and the noise test could have been assuaged by having public input and neutral members of the Planning and Zoning at the sound test. I think that was a crucial matter here, there were no neutral parties present,” Iacobello said.

Mealy called TicketNetwork’s controversial sound test a “seriously flawed,” procedure, and inclusion of neighbors in the test process “would have given much more weight to any specific results.”

“It was said that only 20 days out of 365 days would be used by this venue. No, I see it as 20 weekends out of 52 weekends, which would be 38 percent of those weekends,” Mealy said, adding that residents deserved rest at the end of the week and the “unwanted sound” from the venue would “shatter the peace of any neighborhood. The quality of life would be gone.”

Members of the Vernon Citizens for Responsible Development gave a standing ovation when Finkle adjourned the meeting, and many credited the group’s lawyers with helping to clarify how the venue would negatively affect residents.

“We’re very pleased with the decision, the commission really respected the rights of property owners in that area,” Pineview Drive resident Jennifer Roggi said.

“On behalf of the VCRD, we would like to thank the attorneys Robert Sitkowski and Matthew Willis from Branse, Willis, and Knapp LLC for their excellent counsel pertaining to this application,” Roggi said.