FARMINGTON – A proposal to subdivide historic farmland will need more work before a Planning Board renders a decision, Farmington’s code enforcement officer said Tuesday.

On Monday night, the Farmington Planning Board opted to table an application from Anson residents Scott and Thomas Dillion, who want to split up the former Osborne family homestead and surrounding farmland and forest into more than a dozen house lots to be named East Grand View Estate and West Grand View Estate.

But before it put the application on the shelf, the board hosted a public hearing, which pulled in a standing-room-only crowd, made up mostly of local farmers

Farmington’s Code Enforcement Officer Steve Kaiser said the plan needs a lot more work before it can be decided on. Farmers at the hearing pointed out that if a subdivision was approved, people who built homes there might complain about the smell and sounds from nearby farms.

Farmers also agreed that it was too bad that what was once open space is now getting chopped up into lots for buildings.

“The final crop is a house lot,” Kaiser said.

The town’s Comprehensive Plan, written in 1998, talks about keeping rural areas rural and building subdivisions closer to town, Kaiser said.

The reason, he said, is both for preservation and cost, as building the infrastructure to support developments out of town is very costly.

But the next year when the town looked at the zoning rules, those involved decided they did not want to place too many restrictions on subdivisions.

The Dillions’ proposed subdivision is causing the town to rethink that idea, Kaiser said.

Because the Dillions’ application is already in the pipeline, the town cannot change its ordinances, he stressed.

But the discussion both by board members and townspeople has helped reshape the application and Kaiser said the developers have been receptive and while they are trying to make the project financially viable, they are looking out for the interest of the town and its rural aesthetics, Kaiser said.

The application will be reopened at the next regular meeting of the board in April.

The University of Maine at Farmington was given the unanimous go-ahead for their proposed 43,000-square-foot College of Education, Health and Rehabilitation as was Kevin and Judith Vining, who plan to build a small access road.

The 1,000-foot-long connector road will be 12 feet wide and allow Vining workers to access a gravel mining pit off of an existing private roadway owned by David Pike. Other access ways are extremely limited due to the location of Temple Stream to the South and east and Sandy River to the west.

sdepoy@sunjournal.com

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