At its meeting on Monday, the Town Council honored Edward Conlon and Michael Zichelli for their decades of service to Verona’s planning and zoning boards. Conlon served for 12 years on the Planning Board and then 21 years on the Board of Adjustment, while Zichelli spent more than 30 years on the Board of Adjustment. The Planning Board makes decisions on permitted land uses and is responsible Verona’s Master Plan. The Board of Adjustment makes decisions when someone wants to use a property in a way that is not consistent with our zoning laws.
Both men were given certificates of appreciation, and then Dan McGinley, the current chair of the Board of Adjustment, spoke a bit about the two men.
“These gentlemen are wonderful to work with,” McGinley said. The zoning board is one of those boards, people come with concerns and complaints, and they manage to listen to everything, hear what’s being said, and then come up with a decision that is absolutely what we need to have in this community.”
“Ed has been the ad hoc chairman of our tree committee,” McGinley continued. “For as long as I have known him, he can go out around town and say, ‘that’s good, that’s not good, that’s good, that’s not good. And he does it so nicely that everybody says ‘thank you’ when he’s finished.”
“Mike brings the construction. When we lost Mike, we lost an engineer on the zoning board, and that’s a wonderful thing to have. He comes in and he says ‘what about the drainage?’ And when somebody steps up and tries to sell him a line he says, ‘No, that doesn’t cut it, now what about the drainage?’ “
“This is a major loss. Thirty years each. Thirty years is a major loss on a board. We haven’t had a new member in 15 years. We’ve worked very well together and we are going to sorely miss both of them.”
“The community has benefitted from 30 years of their service each, and we can only look forward to what the next few years will bring,” McGinley said. “Hopefully, their replacements will fill in for the next 30 years.”
