The Waitsfield Development Review Board has completed its review of a home bakery proposed for Long Road and will issue its decision shortly.
In August and earlier this month, the board accepted information from Suzanne Slomin who is seeking to build a home bakery in a new 2,200-square-foot barn located in the agricultural-residential district.
Slomin told the board that she expects to have herself plus one other part-time employee and said that the bakery would be a wholesale operation and that deliveries would probably be made in town. At the DRB's first hearing on the proposal on August 13 several abutting property owners and residents of Long Road attended the meeting with one expressing concern about the project generating traffic on the road and another voicing concern about whether the bakery would change the character of the residential neighborhood.
Slomin told the board, and her neighbors, that by working from home she would be reducing traffic on the road because the two to three trips she currently makes per day to her current bakery (at Kingsbury Farm) would be eliminated.
She explained that she'd be starting work between 4:30 and 5 a.m. and said that every few hours she'd return to the bakery to proceed with the next step and said that in between she'd tend to her orchard and the rest of her property. She said that she'd deliver bread up to five days a week.
In response to questions about odors and visual impacts, Slomin said that people may smell bread baking but probably only within the bakery. She said that people would see linens drying on a line in the yard. Therefore, the applicant walked through what a potential daily workday might look like at the property. She said she may begin by walking from her home to the barn between 4:30 and 5 a.m. Every three to four hours, she would be in there doing another step for prepping the bakery goods. In between, she would tend to her existing orchard and improve the agricultural value of the land.
In response to a question about how much bread she would produce she explained that when she bakes alone for four days she bakes about 150 loaves of bread and 60 to 80 pizza crusts. The oven would be baking three days a week. With a part-time employee she anticipated that she would be able to produce 250 loaves.
The DRB closed the hearing at its meeting this week on September 10 and will issue a decision within 45 days.
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