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We hope that the information at this web site will be useful, but we cannot guarantee its accuracy. For official information, please consult the printed documents which are available in the Wilton town offices.

About Abutter Lists

When you submit an application to the Zoning Board, you must include an abutter list, both as a typed or handwritten list of all the abutters (including their names, addresses, and the lot numbers of the lots they own), and on two sets of adhesive mailing labels, no larger than 1½ × 3¼ inches, for all the abutters (without lot numbers). Alternatively, you can prepare and submit your abutter list online online using the web tool.

Public Notices

Before it can consider your application, the Zoning Board has to make sure that anyone who might be interested has a chance to know about the meeting. We do this by

Definition of Abutters

Your abutters are defined by state law and the Zoning Ordinance. They include

Abutter Lists

You are required to submit a list of abutters to the Zoning Board along with your application, and the Zoning Board will then send a notice to each abutter on the list. The two critical things that you must realize about this process are:

  1. No Zoning Board decision is valid if the public notices haven’t been properly posted and the abutters haven’t been properly notified. Any abutter who wasn’t properly informed of a hearing can appeal any decision made at that hearing, and probably have it overturned. Unlike other appeals of Zoning Board decisions, an appeal based on improper notification does not have to be made within thirty days of the decision.
  2. The correctness of the abutter list you submit is your responsibility. The Town will be happy to help you find the information you need to prepare your abutter list, but it’s your problem if the list is incorrect. The Town does not have any responsibility or liability, even if you rely on Town-provided information that later turns out to be incorrect.

How to Prepare an Abutter List

There are basically three ways to prepare an abutter list.

    1. Go to the Hillsborough County Registry of Deeds. Start out with the deed, survey, or plot plan for the lot or lots involved in the application, and see what are the abutting lots.
    2. Find the owners of all the abutting lots. Some of them might have been subdivided, so you should also check their site plans. You can also check whether there are any conservation, preservation, or agricultural preservation restrictions on any of your lots.
    3. Go to the Wilton Town Office to check whether the town has a record of any of the abutting lots having been sold more recently than the records in the Registry were updated.

    This is obviously a lot of work, but it is the way of making absolutely sure that the abutter list is right. Most applicants don’t bother, but if the consequences of an error in the abutter list would be severe enough, this might be worth the trouble.

    1. Find the lots you’re interested in and their abutting lots from the tax maps in the Town Offices.
    2. Find the owners of those lots from the printed owner lists in the Town Offices.
    3. Since the printed owner lists might not be up to date, check the owner information with the Town Clerk, who can look up the latest information in the Town’s tax database.
    4. The Town of Wilton only has lot and owner information for lots in Wilton, so if the lot you are interested in has abutting lots in a neighboring town, you will have to go to the Town Hall in that town or to the county registry.
    5. The Town doesn’t have any information about conservation, preservation, or agricultural preservation restrictions (unless they are held by the Town), so you are on your own there.

    The tax maps are not really designed to be used for abutter information, and there is no guarantee that the abutters shown on the tax maps are correct. However, this is so much simpler that many applicants create their abutter lists this way, especially if they only have a few abutters and have a pretty good idea who they are, and if the consequences of a mistake aren’t too terrible. If you are going to rely on the tax maps, be conservative: if you aren’t sure whether a particular lot is an abutter, it won’t hurt to include it in your list.

  3. You can use the abutter list web tool to do part of the preparation of your abutter list and submit it to the ZBA right from your web browser.