Mr. Pomerleau has a full page ad in the ‘Weekend Messenger’ that says he is withdrawing the appeal and that his motives have been misunderstood.  He insists he was only looking out for the best interests of the City

You can still make lemonade out of those lemons by looking afresh at how your own property can be improved, “in a responsible manner,” to compliment the downtown restoration so as to benefit the entire community of St. Albans…and I am sure that the City can still find ways in which to assist you with that good deed.

__________________________________________________________________________

Nothing does greater disservice to the legitimate cause of responsible land use and citizen access to that process, than when one business targets another through permit appeals, solely to settle a score or disable competition.

That is the kind of abuse that gives anti-regulatory lawmakers ammunition with which to attack an otherwise valuable citizen interface.

In St. Albans, development giant Pomerleau Real Estate is doing just that in its attempt to punish a small local retailer for having given notice that it will vacate Pomerleau’s ill-conceived strip-mall this summer in order to participate in the City’s long anticipated downtown redevelopment plans.

Now we are learning just how shallow are Pomerleau’s claims that the new ACE Hardware store project will “harm” this ugly little strip mall in the center of the City.

When permit appeals are filed, it is required that the appellant produce a list of “questions” which hone-in on the reason for the appeal.  This list typically cites specific passages of local statutes which the appellant believes are being violated by the permitted project; or, so it is intended to do.

Taken as narrowly as possible, it is an easy job for the appellant to provide this list, as the questions may simply restate the purpose of the individual statute and ask if that requirement has been met by the project, without representing any reason to doubt that it has.  

In order to respond to these questions however, the applicant must be prepared to represent how his/her project is in compliance with each individual statute, placing a burden of evidence and disclosure on the applicant that far outweighs that of the appellant, even at this early stage in the appeal.

So the list of questions, provided by the attorney for Pomerleau’s  St. Albans Shopping Center, is barely ten sentences long while Gordon Winters’ Motion to Dismiss, which addresses each of the ten statutory references cited in the appellant’s “questions,” runs to thirteen pages.

Nowhere has the Pomerleau company suggested how its interests will be harmed in any way by Mr. Winters new ACE Hardware emporium, which will locate on the property next door and represent a significant facelift to that blighted corner.

It is somewhat ironic that Pomerleau will most likely harm its own reputation with this appeal, by drawing attention to the singularly inappropriate land use the St. Albans Shopping Center represents for our historic downtown.  That Shopping Center would never pass muster and receive a permit under the rigorous criteria that Pomerleau seeks to invoke against the ACE Hardware project.

Mr. Winters project has been shaped in such intimate collaboration with the City that both entities have bent over backwards to ensure that environmental and aesthetic concerns have been rigourously observed in the site plan and architecture.

This is the way the benign intentions of regulatory law can be made the cats-paw of unscrupulous powerbrokers who have plenty of money to “lawyer-up” and bleed the other guy dry, even when no issue exists whatsoever.

This case should cause everyone in the state who is concerned about responsible land use and environmental regulation to sit up and take notice; because, if Mr. Pomerleau succeeds in exploiting the law in order to impose costly and debilitating delays on the City of St. Albans in its effort to do the responsible thing to revitalize the downtown, there will ultimately be a price to pay for us all.

It is shameful that a powerful man like Ernie Pomerleau, scion of the Pomerleau Real Estate empire in Vermont, who numbers among his friends Governor Shumlin and Senator Leahy; who prides himself in a reputation for philanthropy and wraps himself in the green of his native Vermont, would stoop so low as to take a swipe at a local independent retailer and the best efforts of the people of St. Albans.  

Is this the same man who gave the following quote to the Free Press just two years ago?

“I learned to use the empirical side and the theoretical side of my brain. Vision without action is just a dream. Action without vision is just running in place. Vision with action will change the world.

Mr. Pomerleau, exactly which side of your brain is telling you to behave in this way now?