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To the editor:

Last month’s West Hartford Town Council meeting was cancelled 45 minutes after it should have started at the request of the applicant, developer West Hartford 1 LLC. This developer will propose to build four five-story apartment buildings in the middle of our residential neighborhood of single family homes. Residents and neighbors who had signed up to voice their concerns about the project were sent home without being heard and the meeting was continued to April 15 at 5:30 p.m.

This is a massive development that will transform the character of our neighborhood and most certainly impact the already heavy  traffic on Trout Brook Drive and Asylum Ave.

Trout Brook  Drive/King Phillip Drive is home to two middle schools and one elementary school. School buses and cars carry students to and from these schools and additional congestion comes from traffic trying to avoid North Main Street. Accidents are common and I witnessed one accident last week which closed Trout Brook Drive and caused a major backup of cars attempting to turn onto Asylum Ave.

Building four five-story apartment buildings on Trout Brook will bring hundreds more residents and cars onto our already crowded streets. This does not include the traffic which will be added if the developer gets its way and puts up a huge commercial complex on the other side of Trout Brook Drive. This whole project is too big for our roads and neighborhood! We know that the Town needs all the toxic waste from the old UConn campus cleaned up and expects the developer to do this. It’s an expensive job and the developer wants to offset their costs by maximizing its investment with as many buildings as it can fit on the site. The developer West Hartford 1 LLC will come in, complete this project and then move on to its next project. That’s what developers do.

We live here and expect our Town Council to consider our neighborhood needs and not just rubber stamp this project. We want our Town Council to listen to our concerns and modify this proposal by significantly scaling it back in size. Our concerns are not about bushes or plantings or whether the fifth story of the apartment buildings are recessed to make them appear smaller. The whole proposed development is too big for our neighborhood!

Lois Bures
West Hartford