Dispute over Oswegatchie Hills project heads to court

— The decades-long fight East Lyme between affordable housing and the environment continues to roil the town, where a developer proposing upward of 800 apartments in the Oswegatchie Hills is set to take his case against the Water and Sewer Commission to trial in civil court.

Landmark Development Group LLC, under principal Glenn Russo, has been trying since the turn of the millennium to get various iterations of the project through the local approval process. Issues of sewer access and public opposition based on environmental impacts to the Niantic River watershed have dominated the debate.

The most recent proposal calls for 840 units in 24 buildings, which would cover about 36 acres of Russo’s 236-acre spread off Calkins Road.

The trial in front of New London Superior Court Judge Josephine S. Graff was set for Thursday, but was postponed amid a legal skirmish over what evidence is admissible and what’s not.

Russo’s attorney, affordable housing expert Tim Hollister, is seeking a binding opinion from the court on whether the commission was justified when it added restrictions to its regulations dictating who gets access to the public sewer system.

Hollister argued in the November 2020 complaint that putting a fouryear expiration date on approvals unfairly targets large-scale affordable housing developments, which typically take longer than applications for smaller projects.

Mark Nickerson, first selectman and Water and Sewer Commission chairman at the time, said the move was meant to ensure a developer could not hold on to an allocation indefinitely.

Commission members in 2018 allocated 118,000 gallons of sewage per day for Landmark after a state Appellate Court decision forced the town to do so. Officials then and now have warned the town is close to reaching the capacity of a system designed to send 1.5 million gallons of sewage per day from East Lyme to New London’s Piacenti Water Treatment Facility.

While the commission’s four-year expiration date didn’t apply to existing approvals, Landmark in 2020 sought in state Superior Court to overturn the regulation based on its potential to prevent the company from accessing sewer capacity in the

future.

The case was thrown out because the developer hadn’t been harmed by the regulation and had no right to sue. That’s when the developer instead chose to test the validity of the regulation by filing for declaratory judgment in the state Superior Court.

Hollister in court documents questioned whether the tightened regulations were an effort to undermine the court-ordered approval. He cited the timing of the amendment, which was drafted and approved within about one month of the involuntary sewer allocation.

Among the more recent of multiple lawsuits spanning the past quarte-century is one lodged by Landmark against the Zoning Commission, which ended in 2021 when a Superior Court judge said the developer must go back to the commission for final site plan approval.

Russo has told The Day he intends to submit the site plan, but not until the issues raised in the pending sewer case are clarified.