PLAINFIELD — The owner of a Route 12A warehouse, where a trucking operation has been in violation of the 2017 conditions of approval by the Zoning Board of Adjustment, will have its application to amend the operating hours heard by the ZBA on Monday.
Specifically, Bart Industries of Bellows Falls, Vt., which leases the warehouse to Frito-Lay for use as a distribution center, is asking the ZBA to approve hours of operation from 5 a.m. to 10 p.m., seven days a week. Currently Frito-Lay is to use the facility between 6 a.m. and 6 p.m., Monday to Saturday.
Repeated violations by Frito-Lay resulted in the town issuing a “cease and desist” order to the company in July. A hearing Monday in Sullivan County Superior Court on the town’s request to have the court enforce the order was continued because of the application for an amendment by Bart.
Neighbors to the warehouse have complained repeatedly to the town about Frito-Lay making tractor trailer deliveries during the night, waking them up with slamming doors and beeping when the trucks back up. Smaller trucks load up in the morning to make deliveries around the area.
Paul Franklin, an abutter to the warehouse, which is located in a rural residential zone, said this week he opposes expanding the hours.
Franklin said Bart’s application to amend the hours and days of the trucking operation is no different than what the company has previously sought. “They asked for those hours the first time,” Franklin said.
The lack of anything that is “substantively” different than in previous applications means Bart is not meeting the threshold established in a 1980 Supreme Court case involving the Dover, N.H. ZBA, according to Franklin.
“I don’t think the board should even consider it,” Franklin said.
In March, the board denied Bart’s request to allow some deliveries outside of the approved hours of operations. The board concluded that because Bart could not state specifically when those off hour deliveries would be made and how often, it concluded the company was essentially seeking to operate 24 hours a day and therefore denied the application. Bart explained it has no control over when the tractor trailer arrives from Connecticut.
In its cease and desist filing with the court, the town documented a number of deliveries made after 6 p.m. and before 6 a.m.
Adam Hubbard of Hubbard Land Design, a landscape architectural firm in Putney, Vt., submitted two letters to the ZBA with the application for a change in the operation. The first letter of Aug. 26 asked for hours of 6 a.m. to 10 p.m. for no more than two tractor trailer deliveries a day with an allowance of 10% outside those hours to account for “weather, mechanical failures and special circumstances.”
Then on Sept. 9, Hubbard’s letter requested hours of 5 a.m. to 10 p.m. with no allowance for deliveries outside the normal operating hours.
Hubbard also said in his Aug. 26 letter that a review of the driver logs for Frito-Lay and documentation by neighbors show “clear differences” and raise questions about the source of the noise. He suggested some of the trucks the neighbors hear are from “other sites and truck noise not associated with the Frito-Lay delivery trucks.”
Monday’s ZBA meeting is at 7 p.m. in the Meriden Town Hall.
Patrick O’Grady can be re ached at pogclmt@gmail.com.
