Public Works Director Richard White explains his plans for the Fairfield Beach area.

Photo Credit: Greg Canuel

Fairfield's new Penfield Pavilion opened last summer, but it will get a new parking lot and more flood protection this spring.

Photo Credit: Greg Canuel (file)

FAIRFIELD, Conn. – Safer walkways along Fairfield Beach Road, more flood prevention near the shore and a revamped, ecofriendly parking lot are all due to arrive near the Penfield Pavilion this summer. Public Works Director Richard White laid out his plans for projects in the area this week.

White told the Board of Selectmen on Wednesday that the town received a $400,000 Small Town Economic Assistance Program grant from the state. He plans to add this to the $182,000 left from the construction of the new Penfield Pavilion to do even more work than originally planned to improve the area.

With the influx of funding, White decided to make the new parking lot at the pavilion more environmentally friendly. He had originally planned to use the allocated cash for a traditional asphalt lot.

Now he wants to use porous pavers, or a special kind of material that absorbs storm water while still remaining drivable. The system filters water that flows over the parking lot rather than letting it run full of pollutants into Long Island Sound.

“It works the same as a septic system or a leeching field,” White said. “You get [the water] back into the ground, and you have microbial action that actually digests and eats those polluted materials.”

Some of the money will also go toward building a new sidewalk along Fairfield Beach Road. The strip will allow pedestrians to walk from Beach Road to the Penfield Beach parking lot without stepping onto the busy street.

“[The neighbors] looked forward to this with great vigor. Every time there was some effort to do it we were always on some list, and never got up high enough,” Fairfield Beach area resident Linda Crowley said of the sidewalk. “So this in itself would be a blessing. It would be a safety feature.”

The third upgrade will fix a problem the town realized during Hurricane Irene. Not only did water reach cross-streets up to a half mile inland during the storm, but DPW crews found a great deal of debris underneath the Penfield Pavilion long after the storm.

The old Penfield Pavilion sat directly on the sand and acted as a barrier preventing water from the Sound from flooding nearby streets. But when the new pavilion was built last year, it had to meet Federal Emergency Management Administration regulations. The town put the new pavilion on stilts, allowing water to flow underneath it during heavy storms.

White now plans to install a bulkhead in the sand surrounding the pavilion on Penfield Beach. He hopes to blend it in with the sand along the beach. But his main goal is to alleviate flooding in the area.

“You never know what’s going to come out of Long Island Sound during a storm,” White said. “So we needed to move to a more permanent solution.”

The Board of Selectmen unanimously approved White’s plan Wednesday. The Board of Finance and the Representative Town Meeting will vote on the project later this month. If they agree, work will begin in the spring.