By John Schwing

WESTPORT — One of the best-known properties in Westport, a town that hosts many remarkable homes, gained notoriety for reasons most people would consider unenviable.

The infamously unfinished, blue-wrapped structure at 233 Hillspoint Road, where construction was halted amid years of wrangling over zoning violations, has made neighbors and town officials see red.

The property has been an issue regularly dominating the agenda of the town’s Blight Prevention Board, its blue facade a stubborn symbol of the protracted efforts to resolve the impasse since 2019. (The property was removed from the blight list earlier this year under a court-stipulated settlement, while gray siding has been covering over the blue wrap.)

Now, proposed revisions to the town’s anti-blight ordinance are in the works, generally designed to broaden criteria to officially declare a property blighted and to stiffen penalties that can be imposed on owners of sanctioned properties.

Sponsors of the measure, which was introduced at Tuesday’s Representative Town Meeting, say the revisions are not being proposed in response to issues related to a specific property. But the troubled, very public legacy of the Hillspoint house will no doubt factor into RTM members’ review of the proposed ordinance revisions over the coming weeks before a vote expected in October.

Louis Mall, a District 2 member who sponsored the original blight-prevention ordinance in 2013, introduced a “first reading” of the proposed revisions at the end of Tuesday night’s session. (Text of the current blight ordinance can be read by clicking here; the proposed changes — highlighted, ironically, in blue — are attached at the end of this article.)

Under RTM procedures, an ordinance, or potential revisions, are submitted to the body for a first reading and then reviewed by committees for recommendations before a final vote by the full RTM at a later session.

In his brief presentation, Mall said the proposed changes are being recommended at the suggestion of Blight Prevention Board members, several of whom he said have served on the panel since it was established 11 years ago.

The primary changes, he said, would add criteria to the “definitions” of factors used to designate a blighted property, and to bring penalties imposed on owners of blighted properties into conformance with state guidelines. (Those guidelines allow fines of up to $1,000 daily, under certain circumstances, compared to the $100 daily penalty, with some leeway, listed in the current ordinance.)

Seth Braunstein, District 6, the proposal’s co-sponsor, credited Mall with spearheading the anti-blight initiative.

Braunstein said that when he moved to Westport he was “shocked” to learn there were no anti-blight measures on the books prior to adoption of the ordinance in 2013, because “there were actual real-world examples [of blight] throughout the town of properties that had just been ignored … and there’s a variety of reasons why that occurs.”

Mall, at the time, “had the foresight to understand that this was a real problem,” Braunstein said. The original ordinance has worked well, he said, adding that the proposed revisions are designed to improve on that foundation.

Questions have been “raised about whether this is about a specific property,” Braunstein said, but “I would say no …” It’s an opportunity, he said, to make the anti-blight ordinance “even better.”

Proposed changes in the town’s anti-blight ordinance appear below: