A plan to build a Lowe's Home Improvement store in Hadley on a parcel adjoining Long Hollow Bison Farm has hit an obstacle. The developer, Paradigm Development of Colden, N.Y., has been informed by the state that it must start all over again proving that a stream on the property, owned by the Ciaglo family, is an intermittent stream, not a perennial stream.
Streams that flow all year, designated perennial streams, are subject to the provisions of the Rivers Protection Act, which are much stricter than those governing intermittent streams. Crucial in this case is the fact that perennial streams must be given much larger setbacks (the distance between a built structure and the stream). Intermittent streams only require 35-foot setbacks, but 200-foot setbacks are required for perennial streams.
An interesting twist of environmental law now comes into play: Paradigm has three years to find and document four days within a 12-month period that the stream isn't running. That may not sound difficult, but the four days have to be within a period not designated by the state as a period of extended drought, and drought is becoming more common in Massachusetts.
If Paradigm and its environmental consultants, New England Environmental of Amherst, cannot prove that the body of water in question is an intermittent stream, the footprint of the project may have to be reduced.
"They classified the stream as intermittent. We found that the information submitted doesn't meet our standards. We asked them to submit additional information to show that it's intermittent. If not, then it would be a perennial stream and subject to the Rivers Protection Act. &Then there might have to be some changes or some alternatives," said Eva Tor, a spokeswoman for the state Department of Environmental Protection.
The store as proposed would occupy 140,000 square feet, nearly twice as much as Hadley's current limit of 75,000 square feet for new retail construction allows. In February Paradigm won permission to build a larger structure by getting the Lowe's project grandfathered in under older rules. But the structure as planned might not fit on the parcel under rules requiring 200-foot setbacks.
"I don't think there's room to wedge this thing in where they are now," said Alexandra Dawson, chair of the Hadley Conservation Commission, which had approved the Lowe's project before the question about the stream was revived. The Advocate was unable to contact Paradigm about its response to the DEP's letter, and Paradigm's local contractor, Berkshire Design of Northampton, failed to return several phone calls.
The Lowe's project is not the first in the new generation of large-scale development proposals for Hadley to run into difficulty because of wetlands issues; streams, swamps and wetland ecologies turn up every now and then in the water-rich Connecticut River delta farmland that Rte. 9 traverses through Hadley.
A Wal-Mart Supercenter had been proposed for the Hampshire Mall farther east, but disagreements between the state and the developers over wetland boundaries protracted the permittal process. Probably for other reasons, such as Wall Street's disapproval of Wal-Mart's rapid-fire new openings at the expense of its existing stores (there was already a Wal-Mart in the nearby Mountain Farms Mall), that project appears to have been cancelled. But if the permits could have been obtained earlier, it might have been built before the economic climate changed. Hadley politicians have been courting development along Rte. 9 to expand the town's tax base.
