Burger-Chain Battle Hits Town
April 6, 2003 
By JESSE HAMILTON, Courant Staff Writer 

VERNON -- The land just off Exit 67 isn't Gettysburg. As battlefields go, it isn't even Grenada, but the feud going on there is heated and fierce. The goal: burger supremacy. The battle pits Burger King against McDonald's - the Hatfields and McCoys of fast food.

So far, Burger King holds the field. The town in 1999 allowed the national fast-food chain to build a restaurant on Route 31, just north of the I-84 exit. Neighbors' complaints couldn't make a dent in the good-for-the-tax-base logic. So up it went, making Whoppers by the thousands.

Nearby residents still aren't crazy about it. In fact, one 77-year-old woman who lives in sight of it said, "If you go to Burger King, you're not my friend anymore."

Now they have something else to worry about: The golden arches. McDonald's is moving one of its franchises from the nearby Lafayette Square shopping plaza to a spot right across the street from Burger King.

"We realize now that Burger King was the catalyst," said Glenn Montigny, who lives a few houses from the proposed McDonald's site. He says the burger duo is only an opener for greater ills to come.

"Then it's going to be a Super Wal-Mart. Then a Home Depot," he said. Plans are already being considered by the town to allow those stores to build on either side of I-84 at Exit 67.

But until Burger King arrived in 1999, the area surrounding the interstate exit on the eastern edge of town had only a state park-and-ride lot and a sports complex. Montigny and his neighbors, seeking to stop what they see as further decay of their neighborhood, formed the Rockville Concerned Citizens for Responsible Development, which has already shown strength at land-use meetings. Montigny said developers and town officials "forget there are 50 families in this area."

One town official, though, argued against letting McDonald's in.

"I think we're missing the boat," Alan Humphries, chairman of the town planning and zoning commission, said to other members. He acknowledged that the developers met every local requirement, but he just didn't think it was the right thing to do. "I look at that Burger King, and I don't like it."

But he was the only one to vote no at the September meeting. So, having gained approval, McDonald's forges ahead. The developers have cleared a mass of vegetation from the intended building site, a soggy stretch of land that has been scraped down to a featureless lot.

Watching from across the street, Burger King's forces plotted an attack.

The town's inland wetlands commission had also approved the McDonald's project. But the owners of the Burger King property, MJDR LLC, challenged the approval with two words: stiff goldenrod.

The appeal, filed in Rockville Superior Court, claimed that the stiff goldenrod, a flowering plant considered endangered under state law, grows on the property. The appeal also said there's an "intermittent stream" associated with the property that flows into Gages Brook, which is considered a habitat for threatened species.

But Ken Metzler, a botanist for the state Department of Environmental Protection, said there's a small problem with Burger King's contention. The stiff goldenrod, Solidago rigida, doesn't grow there. Damp areas, especially overgrown areas, are not generally its neighborhood, Metzler said. The fickle flower prefers shallow soil on rocks, coastal outcroppings and limestone ledges. It likes to be pretty dry. In other words, it doesn't like the moist land where McDonald's wants to build.

Fatima Lobo, the MJDR attorney behind the appeal, said she got the plant information from an online U.S. Department of Agriculture database. But the smallest areas that database measures are counties.

And on the question of the intermittent stream, Lobo hasn't produced evidence to back up that assertion, the McDonald's people said.

Lawyers from both sides, including Lobo, agreed in Rockville Superior Court that the appeal would be dropped, and that both sides would sign agreements to stop fighting. But according to Lobo, the attorney representing McDonald's, Stanley Falkenstein, backed out. Lobo said she believes it's because of an unsettled issue: Will McDonald's be able to connect to the sewer line Burger King built for itself?

"I think that what they're doing with the appeal is somehow trying to use it to leverage that issue," Lobo said.

On April 7, she'll argue in court that McDonald's should be held to the agreement. Lobo acknowledges that the spat between the burger franchises has been strange, and "it's about to get stranger," she said.

McDonald's, Burger King says, has been hypocritical. Although MJDR claimed the McDonald's landowner, the Hayes-Conyers Family Partnership, is building on sensitive land near a wetland, the McDonald's developers fire back that the same could be said of Burger King's development in 1999.

"They had wetlands issues where we had none," Falkenstein said. "Do you think they care about wetlands? They care about hamburgers."

In 1999, the Hayes-Conyers group actually helped the Burger King project, Richard Hayes Sr. said.

"We supported their application," and allowed Burger King to put a utility pole on Hayes-Conyers land, he said.

In the hope that a similar utility compromise can be made, Hayes-Conyers got approval last year from the town's water pollution control authority to hook into Burger King's sewer line, if Burger King agrees. Theoretically, the authority's director, David Ignatowicz, said, the sewer line would work fine for both businesses, but he quickly added that it's not his call whether Burger King will allow it.

The McDonald's representatives also said Burger King's environmental activism rang a little hollow given that Burger King was cited by the town for failing to live up to clean-air-filter promises. Town Planner Tom Joyce referred to Burger King as "an odor nuisance" during a September meeting.

At the same meeting, Humphries, the planning commission chairman, confronted Lobo with the idea that her client's environmentalism seemed to coincide conveniently with its efforts to keep McDonald's from building.

"What I'm hearing is, `We got here first, and we don't want competition,'" Humphries said.

Lobo's response: "This is not a plan that is good for this area at this time."

Last week, she said her client's first concern is the traffic McDonald's may bring. So, how did a traffic concern translate into an appeal about endangered plants and wetlands? "You have to appeal to the [wetlands commission] based on wetlands issues," she said.

So far, Lobo's arguments have done nothing to stop McDonald's. It seems inevitable the two burger-slinging operations will stand across the street from each other like Wild West gunfighters. They'll battle for this corner of town, though one Burger King official maintains that the company does business with civility.

"I wouldn't say we're at war with anyone," said Kim Miller, a national Burger King spokeswoman, speaking from the company's Florida headquarters. "We're certainly out to gain a share of the stomach of the consumer."