ROB LEVESQUE
WESTFIELD – The Conservation Commission voted 5-0 last night to close an enforcement order opened when the managers of the Westfield Shops paved the entrance to their East Main Street mall without seeking prior permission.
The Conservation Commission is empowered to review all activity within a flood plain and given jurisdiction by federal and state law to seek compensatory storage of flood water displaced by any activity, such as paving.
The commission issued an enforcement order to Devcon Enterprises, the third enforcement order issued to the East Main Street property owners for paving parking without first applying for a determination of applicability, a process that requires the applicant to submit calculation of elevation, flood water displacement, and, if needed, compensatory storage.
The two property owners involved in the earlier enforcement orders had milled, or ground down, the existing surface of the lots so that the new asphalt was at the same elevation, meaning there was not displacement of floodwater nor the need for compensatory storage.
Devcon had not milled the entrance to their mall and the question was if the new pavement surface was at a higher elevation, and, if so, the volume of compensatory storage needed to resolve the issue.
Rob Levesque of R Levesque Associated was retained, after the fact, by Devcon to resolve those issues with the commission. The corporation had no records of past paving activity at the mall and the elevations calculation required resolving the enforcement order.
Levesque, working with the Conservation Department personnel, finally located engineering documents from 1998 that showed there is a surplus, or bank, of compensatory storage for the floodwater displaced by the recent paving.
“We have the storage available,” Levesque said yesterday. “This (1998) letter should be put into the (Devcon) files to show they have sufficient (compensatory) storage.”
Commissioner James Murphy said the Commission “needs a better way to manage these issues.”
Levesque said this case was unique in that the applicant did not have the documentation, but that the city did in its records, documents found after an extensive search by Levesque and his employees.
“We had to come here to find the files they needed to prove that the compensatory storage is there,” Levesque said.
The commission voted to “approve the resolution of this enforcement order” by a vote of 5-0.
