Thomas MacMillan Photo
Jim Segaloff and Laura Sklaver, attorneys for Carabetta Enterprises.
Despite lingering reservations about traffic and parking, city planners moved a $150 million senior housing project one step closer to reality on Wednesday evening.
At its regular monthly meeting Wednesday, the City Plan Commission voted unanimously to recommend the approval of a plan to expand the Bella Vista elderly housing complex by two new buildings. The vote came with 14 conditions.
The plan now moves to the Board of Aldermen’s Legislation Committee, which will consider it Thursday evening.
Wednesday’s vote came after an hour-and-a-half discussion, which was the sequel to a three-hour discussion at last month’s meeting. At that meeting, commissioners raised a number of concerns about the project, which would add 399 apartments and new amenities to the Eastern Street senior housing. Commissioners asked about the amount of parking, site drainage, and the need for walking trails.
Between the two meetings, Bella Vista owners Carabetta Enterprises submitted a number of new documents aimed at allaying commissioner concerns. They were partially, but not completely, successful.
Carabetta has been rushing to complete the approval process so that the project can benefit from Connecticut Housing Finance Authority (CHFA) funds. The developer faces an April 4 application deadline. Laura Sklaver, an attorney for Carabetta said the project has already likely missed the opportunity to win some of those funds but still hopes to hit the later April deadline to get other CHFA money.
“To cut to the chase,” said City Plan Commission Chair Ed Mattison on Wednesday, “there are a number of items … we’re not fully satisfied with.” Mattison said he appreciates that Carabetta is working on a tight timeline in order to secure funding. “I’d like to look for a way we can be satisfied without making you lose a year.”
Attorney Jim Segaloff, representing Carabetta, said the commission’s recommended conditions of approval accomplish that goal.
“We are agreeable to almost every single one of these conditions, with a little tweaking here or there,” Segaloff said.
Thus began a lengthy tweaking session, during which Segaloff and other Carabetta representatives won the change or deletion of several words or phrases in the conditions. The changes had to do with things like the timeline of construction, the amount of parking available at certain benchmarks of completion, and the size of parking spaces.
Parking issues remained the sticking point as the plan moved forward. Jim Travers (at right in photo), acting head of the city’s traffic and parking department presented a list of questions that developers still need to answer: How many spots will there be exactly? How will parking passes be given out? How can someone “claim a space? What about visitor parking? Why aren’t the spaces in the garage striped?
Mattison said he’d like Carabetta also to answer to some of the issues raised in a traffic study that the company had commissioned. “I would hope we could ask you to respond to your own study.”
Such a response was made the 14th condition of commission approval. The other 13 conditions include a requirement that the developer “engage in a peer architectural review,” complete parking and traffic impact studies, answer to the traffic and parking department’s questions, and complete construction within 10 years.
The commissioners voted unanimously to approve the plan with those 14 conditions.