Stockbridge Commission Pushes Back on Wetland Mitigation Plan for Rattlesnake Mountain Road Culvert

STOCKBRIDGE -- June 9, 2026, Stockbridge Conservation Commission advances state-funded culvert replacement but balks at wetland mitigation plan. At its June 9 meeting, the commission heard a detailed preliminary presentation from GZA GeoEnvironmental and the Housatonic Valley Association on a proposed replacement of a failing 24-inch culvert on Rattlesnake Mountain Road over Marsh Brook with a 9.9-foot-wide elliptical aluminum structural plate pipe, the top-priority crossing in the town's 2023 road-stream crossing management plan, funded by two rounds of state Division of Ecological Restoration grants. The project would result in 651 square feet of permanent bordering vegetated wetland loss from road grading, with 677 square feet of on-site replication proposed, but commissioners questioned whether replication could succeed given a dense phragmites infestation upstream, with one member stating flatly "there isn't a chance of a snowball in a hot place that that mitigation isn't going to just be covered over by the phragmites again." Members directed the applicants to review bylaw sections 5.2 and 5.3, which allow payment into a compensatory mitigation fund in lieu of on-site replication, a provision that has never previously been invoked. The commission voted unanimously to approve an RDA for a failed septic system upgrade at 42 Lake Drive, a three-bedroom mounded system with an alternative treatment tank estimated by the project engineer at roughly $50,000 or more to construct, and also voted unanimously to extend an order of conditions for Todd Sparks at 13 Rattlesnake Mountain Road.