Contentious board meetings can go on for hours, and sometimes days.
If you have ever suffered through a contested local planning and zoning commission or inland wetlands and watercourses agency hearing, you know something about torture. I get paid to represent clients at those hearings and in over 40 years I have had hearings run to 3 a.m., one in which a local citizen threatened to kill the moderator and the hearing had to be shut down, and in another a pitched battle over a proposed golf course community requiring zoning and wetlands approval that ran 27 (not a typo) nights with the stakeholders collectively spending millions of dollars on lawyers, consultants and court stenographers.
With the wisdom that has only come to me in hindsight, I now know why California, Oregon, Washington, Idaho, Arizona, New Mexico, Utah, Illinois, Ohio, Maryland, Florida and maybe others have professional hearing officers, often called hearing examiners. As someone who is privileged to represent all the varied interests in land-use matters—applicants, neighbors, advocacy groups, boards and commissions—I believe all of them would be well-served if we adopted the hearing examiner approach to land-use decision-making. Connecticut law currently only allows hearing officers for the limited purpose of hearing challenges to fines for zoning violations (see Sections 8-12a(b) and 7-152c).
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