Long Wharf Pause OK’d; Truck Lot Squeaks In

A one-year building moratorium on Long Wharf is now in effect — but will almost certainly not stand in the way of a new truck trailer parking facility proposed for the current Sports Haven off-track-betting site.

That’s the latest with the city’s plans for promoting dense residential and commercial development on New Haven’s mostly industrial waterfront, as well as a New York-based investor’s plans for bringing a heavy-duty automobile use to the highway-adjacent 9.75-acre site at 600 Long Wharf Dr.

On Monday night during the latest regular full Board of Alders meeting at City Hall, local legislators voted unanimously in support of an ordinance establishing a 12-month moratorium ​“on the submission and acceptance of applications for building permits, site plans, variances, special exceptions, special permits, lot splits and rezoning amendments within the Long Wharf Responsible Growth Plan,” to quote directly from the title of the newly adopted legislation.

That means that, for the next year — unless the alders decide to end the moratorium early — the city will not allow developers to construct new building projects in the waterfront area bounded by Water Street to the north, the New Haven Harbor to the east, Union Avenue to the west, and Hallock Avenue to the south (with a few key exceptions).

The Elicker Administration’s City Plan Department proposed this temporary building pause on Long Wharf to give the city time to redo the area’s zoning to promote denser residential, retail, and commercial development in the area in line with the city’s Long Wharf plan from 2019.

“This moratorium reduces the impact of development pressures while the city contemplates and implements strategies to achieve the highest and best use of the land corresponding with zoning and other planning principles along with the Long Wharf Responsible Growth Plan,” Board of Alders Majority Leader and Amity/Westville/Beaver Hills Alder Richard Furlow said in support of the legislation Monday night. He also said the moratorium gives the city time to update the area’s zoning to prioritize environmentally sustainable types of development.

City Plan Director Laura Brown praised the alders’ vote during a phone interview with the Independent Tuesday morning. ​“We have started the rezoning overlay,” she said about the work her staff will be doing now that the moratorium is in place. ​“We’re already starting on the implementations on what comes next.”

Click here, here, and here to read previous articles about the now-adopted Long Wharf building moratorium, and click here to read the legislation in full.

Up Next: Truck Trailer Parking?

Included in the now-approved moratorium law is a section called ​“Categorical Exclusions,” which details which projects the building pause shall not apply to. 

The second item on that to-be-excluded list is called ​“Pending Projects.” Those are defined as proposed projects ​“for which complete permit applications … were on file with the City, and all other appropriate regulatory agencies, and all related permit fees were remitted to the City in-full on or before the Effective Date of this temporary Moratorium.”

According to the City Plan Commission’s website and agenda for its next monthly meeting on Wednesday, the city has received an application for a development that would fall under the strictures of the Long Wharf building moratorium — except that it was submitted before the moratorium was officially approved and adopted Monday night.

That site plan and coastal site plan application is for 600 Long Wharf Dr.

For the past several decades, that site has been home to the Sports Haven off-track-betting venue and a capacious surface parking lot. A Queens-based company called the Criterion Group purchased the property for $6 million last year.

According to the City Plan Commission’s agenda for its Wednesday night meeting, the owner / applicant — Hardik Parekh and 600 Long Wharf Drive Industrial LLC — plans to construct a truck trailer parking lot at that site. (The City Plan Commission agenda indicates that this proposal is expected to be tabled, rather than heard and voted on, at Wednesday’s meeting.)

The site plan application itself, submitted on Aug. 16, goes into further detail on what exactly 600 Long Wharf Dr.‘s owners plan on doing at that site.

“The proposed use of the site is a truck trailer parking facility,” the application reads. ​“Truck trailers will be parked on site for short and long-term storage to support various trucking operations throughout New England.”

In response to a prompt to describe the site’s planned structure and construction activities, the application continues: ​“There is one existing structure on site that will [be] demolished and the surrounding parking lot will be regraded to support construction of 264 trailer parking spaces, an office trailer and 4 passenger vehicle parking spaces. The existing pavement, curb, and structures will be demolished.”

The application estimates that construction of this truck trailer parking facility should begin this fall “(pending permitting)” and that construction should be complete by next summer.

Parekh told the Independent in a brief phone interview Wednesday morning that he could not comment on his company’s plans for the Sports Haven site. He encouraged the Independent to reach out to his company’s media relations firm, and then hung up before providing that contact info. He did not respond to an email request for comment by the publication time of this article.

City Plan Director Brown, meanwhile, told the Independent this application to build a truck trailer parking facility would indeed be exempt from the newly approved Long Wharf building moratorium, because the city received the application before the latter went into effect. (Brown also said that her office recently received a second, updated application from the same applicant looking to put a truck trailer parking facility at 600 Long Wharf Dr. She said this second application details a similar project, albeit with some technical modification, and would also be exempt from the moratorium because it was received by the city before Monday night.)

“We’ve given the current application quite a lot of technical review,” Brown said. And, she emphasized, ​“it is exempt because it is pending and it was received prior” to the passage of the moratorium.

“I think it’s unfortunate” that the truck trailer parking project will not be covered by the moratorium, she continued, ​“but we moved the moratorium forth with the idea that we would create at least some time and space in our development process to rethink what” types of developments should be permitted and encouraged on Long Wharf.

She said that the truck project is ​“clearly not aligned with the goals of the responsible growth plan. That’s unfortunate.” But, she said, ​“we’re doing our best to make sure” that the area’s zoning and development projects in the future align with what the city would like to see on Long Wharf.