Shape the Future of Southington

JOHN MCDONALD, CT DRONE SOURCE PHOTO

Change tends to come slowly to towns in Connecticut, the “land of steady habits.” Nevertheless, over time, the constant give-and-take of private and public initiatives can fundamentally alter the way a community looks, sounds, and feels. Southington residents currently have a once-in-a-decade opportunity to steer that transformation – one that requires no more than filling out a survey.

The survey is the product of a joint effort between SLR Consulting, a Cheshire-based environmental consulting firm, and a special subcommittee of Southington’s Planning and Zoning Commission, according to Todd Chaplinsky, who heads the subcommittee. The Plan of Conservation and Development Survey asks participants their opinions on a variety of quality-of-life issues, ranging from sidewalk safety and traffic congestion to light pollution and cell phone service. Views on housing affordability, transportation options, environmental stewardship, and historic preservation are also solicited.

The community survey is just the first of three opportunities residents will have to provide input into the state-mandated plan. Two workshops are scheduled, one for September, the other for spring of next year. At these workshops, officials and representatives from SLR will invite public comments on these matters. Once the results of the survey and the public sessions have been compiled, the subcommittee will turn them into a document that will be sent to the full Planning & Zoning commission, and subsequently to the Town Council, for approval. “The 2026 Plan of Conservation & Development,” as the document will be titled, is designed to guide decisions about land use and development made by Planning & Zoning – preference will be given to projects that advance one or more of the plan’s goals.

Southington’s previous Plan of Conservation and Development was drawn up in 2016. The plans are mandated by the State of Connecticut, which also requires that they be updated every ten years. According to Chaplinsky, response rates to the survey and attendance at the workshops tend to be low. In an effort to collect more responses, the deadline for participation has been extended to Friday, August 15th.  

Merrill’s Food Stories: A Taste of Southington

"Taste" can mean to eat or drink something in small quantities, or to become acquainted with something through experience. This week's Taste of Southington embodied both definitions of the word. Thanks to the efforts of curator Christina Volpe and her assistant Nadia Dillon, the 22nd annual tasting event took place this past Wednesday on the grounds of the Barnes Museum and Homestead. This event is traditionally held on the first Wednesday of August in conjunction with Music on the Green, as a way of giving small businesses in Southington a chance to shine. Thirteen food vendors offered their most popular menu items for purchase. Only vendors that hold food licenses in Southington were invited.

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Live music provided by the Stanley Street Big Band held the crowd captive and kept it dancing.

MERRILL SANDERS PHOTOS

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Emma Tuttle, the creator of Emma's Pearlz, bakes beehive-shaped honey cakes that she sells at the Bread for Life table at the Farmer’s Market on the Green. This past May, Emma’s business was featured on WTNH. Emma, seen here with her mother Donna, is an accomplished loom weaver as well as a baker. Her handmade shawls were also for sale at the booth:

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Many of us have wondered what lies behind the stone walls of LiveWell, the assisted living facility for people with dementia and Alzheimer’s disease located at the intersection of Mulberry Street and Route 10 in Southington. One answer is a café, The Gathering Place, that prioritizes the individual needs of the residents and the social aspect of dining. It is open to the public; see their website for hours. The staff from The Gathering Place had a booth at the event to promote the café.

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The Hop Haüs gastropub in downtown Plantsville is know for their hamburgers and nachos. During August, their special is ‘lobstah rolls.’ Hop Haüs shares an owner (Mike Miller) with The Salty Dog sports tavern on the Meriden-Waterbury road, which features twenty different kinds of wings.

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Paul Gregory’s bistro is run by the mother-daughter team of Theresa and Ashley Malloy, who purchased the restaurant in 2017. No one named Paul Gregory is currently involved with the restaurant, though at one time a man of that name was going to buy it. Many of Paul Gregory's dishes are based on family recipes. The bistro is located on Center Street, in Factory Square.

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Anyone familiar with downtown Southington has experienced the aroma of the Smokin' with Chris meat smoker, which fills the air on West Center Street. Over the last twenty years Chris Conlon, a former firefighter, has perfected his technique. Chris is largely self-taught and had no restaurant experience when he first opened his establishment.

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The Manhattan, a speakeasy-themed restaurant and lounge, recently moved from Eden Avenue to its new, more central location on Main Street. Could this paella they made for the event be the biggest Southington has ever seen?  

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When he is not booked for private events, you can find Marty’s food truck across from the Southington Drive-In. He specializes in burgers and sliced prime rib sandwiches. Are you familiar with Turf or Signatures restaurants in Waterbury? Marty started those! If you want his sandwiches you have to grab them now, since he heads down to Florida for the winter.

Aaron Potthoff and his lifelong friend Chris Barnard embarked on their food journey over 20 years ago. Aaron, shown here, is now single-handedly taking his tacos on the road with Spot on Tacos, a mobile food-truck business. For his taco shells, Aaron uses an old family recipe passed down to him from his parents, who in turn got it from their neighbors.

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No event is complete without our local clown, Valentine! Diana Sheard has been bringing smiles to people young and old, healthy or sick, for over 40 years now.

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We also want to record the presence of Mel from Cookie Ranger, which specializes in ‘stuffed’ cookies and nitrogen ice cream; The Polish Plate, which had a long line of patrons hungry for their kielbasa and pierogis; and the owners of Fratelli’s Italian Restaurant, Chef Hector Delgado and his children José and Christina, who welcomed visitors to their new location at the corner of South End Road and the Meriden-Waterbury Road.

If you missed this year’s event, mark your calendars for the first Wednesday of August, 2026!

Eight Years of Service: An Interview With Town Councillor Bill Dziedzic. (Part I)

Attorney and Town Council Member Bill Dziedzic BILL DZIEDZIC PHOTO

Bill Dziedzic has worn a number of hats over the years, including attorney, father, and developer – he and his partners have played a central role in reviving downtown Plantsville. For the past eight years, he has also been a Republican member of the Southington Town Council. This week Bill sat down with the Outsider for an interview. It will be published in two parts, the first focused on political topics. The transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.

Did you ever aspire to a career in politics when you were in high school?

No, never. That was a surprise. I never had any real aspirations for politics at all.

After eight years on the town council you decided to step down. What lay behind that decision?

I felt like I was being pulled in different directions – between having a young son who’s getting involved in sports, and business interests in real estate development. It was time to make a change, and leaving town council was one of those changes.

Eight years is a long time. When it comes to highlights and lowlights you probably have a long list. What’s one highlight you would point to?

I was fortunate to be chair of the Southington ordinance committee. Some of the decisions we made in that committee regulating alcohol and marijuana use in public parks, and our flag policy, will have lasting impacts on the town.

What is the flag policy?

There was a case out of Boston where a Satanic group wanted to fly a flag on the state house and the Supreme Court had heard arguments on the case but hadn’t issued a decision. We were right in the middle then of writing an ordinance for how to handle flag raising. This was after the [LGBTQ] Pride movement and Southington did raise the [Pride] flag over the municipal building. We realized that that meant opening it up to other groups; the Greek flag and a couple of others had been flown before. So we really worked hard in a bipartisan manner on that ordinance. We had a number of other municipalities that copied our exact flag policy and when the Supreme Court decision came out, it was almost like we had a copy of their law clerk’s draft. The flag policy was right within what the Court was contemplating. So I think that saved the town a lot of unnecessary litigation by just giving a very clear and constitutional policy. [Read the policy here: https://ecode360.com/41125145#41125209]

Tell me about a lowlight.

I think the most difficult vote that I took was during COVID – COVID was in my opinion a lowlight for the town or the world, however you want to put it. We voted to cancel the Apple Harvest Festival. I remember thinking about the 40 or 50 years the festival had been going on, and we were the first people voting to cancel it. So we knew that we were going to be looked back upon 50 years from now with people saying ‘we had 100 years of continuity, except that one year.’ That was a very difficult vote, cancelling something that had been going on for a very long time.

You have some experience developing properties in town, especially in downtown Plantsville. Do you think the town has a good working relationship with developers?

I think the town’s hands are tied on a lot of issues, based on state building code, based on zoning regulations. I think the town is making great steps forward to become more friendly in the way it approaches permits and applications; we’re making progress on our way to that goal.

Is there something the town is doing to improve things?

We’ve got an economic ‘strike committee.’ So for example, let’s say Amazon wanted to come to Southington. You’re going to get this huge influx of money, development, permits, requests. The ‘strike committee’ is set up to handle a large volume of those things. So I think the blueprint is there.

A lot of issues we’ve had were delays in the building department – site plans would sit too long while waiting for revisions. I understand they’re bound by a state code, so they have to follow the law, but it just seems that delays on that end really slowed any type of project that you wanted to do – and that’s coming from personal experience.

The school system is a huge part of the town government. Do you think it does a good job? Are there any changes you’d like to see?

I was educated in the Southington school system from elementary school to high school, and my son’s in a school here, I have a lot of faith in the Board of Education and the current superintendent. Investing in your schools is important because it is essentially an investment in your community.

I think an issue that you have with education in Southington, education in general, is you have state mandates which impact financial obligations. Some are funded, some are unfunded, and the trend is that more are unfunded. So these are issues that are going to come up down the road. We lost some federal funding this year. I don’t think in our lifetime we’re going to get more federal funding, I don’t think we’re going to get more state funding. So the trend line is going to be ‘less funding.’ The shortfall is going to have to be made up by taxpayers.

The town recently increased the mill rate from 31.44 to 33.21. Did you support that?

I did, I voted to support the approved budget. I really feel, when you look at budgets, you have to take a step back and look at the entire timeline. When you look at inflation and where our budget growth was relative to inflation, it basically tracked inflation. There’s nothing you can do unless you want to be a municipality that just cuts services. You want to keep services at least on par, that’s why I was comfortable with the budget.

Is there anything that we can do at the town level to ease the traffic burden or cut down on the number of accidents?

If you were going to construct a perfect city, or a large town, you’d have your primary roads, your secondary roads, your tertiary roads all planned out perfectly and able to handle traffic volume at different points in time. That’s the perfect model. The problem is that you have communities that evolved over time – you start as a mill factory town, then you have growth on Queen Street. It’s a double-edged sword: the growth on Queen Street brings in significant commercial development, which adds to our tax base. Same on West Street – that’s growing. Traffic is the natural result of that.

I think one answer could be, and they’re testing it, is the bus. I don’t know the data on that, whether that’s taking cars off the road, but my gut tells me ‘no.’ When you drive down Dixwell Avenue in Hamden it’s the same situation where you have traffic and buses. When you don’t get to start from scratch, this is what happens.

Is there a serious quality of life issue you want to bring up? And how do you think the town might address it?

Is affordable housing something we can talk about now?

Sure.

I do think there’s an issue with the lack of affordable housing. If you just look at the minimum wage, or a bit more than minimum wage, and the cost of housing, the numbers don’t square – there’s a gap. That gap is being filled by people living longer with parents, people sharing rooms, leaving Southington. You don’t want to see folks who were educated here leave for a place with lesser services or a place that they don’t want to be due to a lack of affordable inventory. That can be debated, discussed, and possibly some action can be taken. The state of Connecticut has a lot to do with that. But in my opinion that is one of the largest issues involving quality of life.

The phrase ‘local control’ has become a rallying cry in politics. [Broadly speaking the phrase signifies opposition to state mandates on matters of zoning, planning, and housing.] In July Governor Lamont vetoed a bill that according to Republicans would have infringed on local control. So let’s say the town still has this control. What do we do with the control that we have? Is there something we can do? Or are we still really helpless?

Just as a preface, I think Lamont’s veto and the discussion he had in connection with it indicated that he wanted to go back and come up with another version. So any comments I make now should be prefaced by saying that six months from now it could be an entirely different conversation – some of those items that he seemed to be in favor of would impact municipalites and how they handle housing.

So, given the cards we have in front of us, my response would be: when you have a developer who puts forth a plan, who’s going to keep the property, manage the property, and who has a good record in the town, I think those developers you should work with to come up with something that’s going to work for everybody.

What concerns me is an out-of-town developer coming in under 8-30g [Connecticut’s affordable housing statute], bringing in a completely underparked site-plan application and never intending to build there, just intending to sell it – I don’t think that’s part of a solution.

I also think we have affordable housing that’s not counted, which should at least be put into the calculus. We have a number of trailer parks in town, we have apartments on Darling Street that are either CHFA- [Connecticut Housing Finance Authority] or HUD- [the federal Housing and Urban Development agency] funded, we have a portfolio of small, post-WWII Baby Boomer development, whether that be small, side-by-side brick duplexes, small 800-square foot houses, but I think that has to be put into the calculus. That does exist, and we’re not getting credit for it, and you might not find that in certain towns.

That’s my list of political questions. Is there one you’re surprised I didn’t ask?

Another issue that should be pondered is how we’re losing access as voters and as residents to community information. It’s happening at a very fast pace. Local issues are not reported on at all unless they tie into state or national issues, and the information that comes out of those reports is sometimes extremely unilateral – it can be posted on a Facebook page and is easy to be confused about. Just in an eight-year period I’ve seen it go from multiple reporters asking questions and writing stories [about local events] to zero. If that trend continues I don’t know how in the future a voter can inform themselves or a community can understand what is going on, without attending the meetings themselves or watching them online.