Allan Appel Photo
Elaine Stetzer had never gone door to door with a petition in her life. Then the main contractor for the rebuilding of I‑95 decided to locate a potentially polluting, noisy concrete plant adjacent to her Goodwin Street backyard.
For three hours on Sunday, Stetzer (pictured) walked the neighborhood around her now mostly industrial street with friends and small team of volunteers including Anstress Farwell of the New Haven Urban Design League and Lynne Bonnett of the New Haven Environmental Justice Network.
“I’ve never spoken up about anything. My husband is worried because it’s a multinational company” that’s moving in, she said.
And her son has told Stetzer that in effect, “You can’t fight City Hall.”
Stetzer is trying, anyway.
The proposal calls for Walsh Construction Company to demolish an abandoned house (pictured) behind Stetzer’s property and to build a 1,000 square foot plant to prepare redi-mix concrete for off-site use in conjunction with The Interstate 95 New Haven Harbor Crossing Corridor Improvement Project, which began in 2000. It would service about 35 trucks a day and operate from 6 a.m. to 5 p.m.
Proponents say the plant would improve a blighted stretch of what’s already an industrial area — and create jobs in a recession.
Potential pollution worries Stetzer. The already-heavy truck traffic would increase. Most disturbing to her is the fact that the plant would have a parking lot and retaining wall coming right up to her house. She’d lose woods that run up to it. All buffer would be lost. She’d feel surrounded, she said.
“My woods disappearing triggered this. And I didn’t realize there were others who would fight it.”
She and fellow canvassers explained to neighbors that the plant, which would back onto houses on Fulton and Fairmont streets in the Annex neighborhood, would increase pollution, noise, and truck traffic. Thirty people signed her petition.
David Harris (at right in photo), who lives in the 12-unit complex at Fulton and Goodwin, said he’d be happy to sign twice, because he already signed up in church earlier in the morning.
In fact, the whole congregation had signed, after the issue was presented by pastor Walter Williams at the Walk of Faith in Christ Church on Fairmont Avenue. Make that about 70 people, Harris said.
Of the neighbors Stetzer talked with, only one person appeared to be in favor of the plant: A young man who lives on Fulton bordering the woods that would be lost if the plant builds and paves behind them.
“Me, I’d rather have ‘em go and do it. Jobs. At night people hide in the house,” he said of the abandoned structure that would be replaced by the plant.
“Two years ago, a kid fell off the roof.”
Then he went on to describe the surrounding woods as dark and beckoning for ill use. He said cops are frequently called and chase kids through the woods and the house, abandoned now for over three years. With the wood shutters yanked off the windows, it has been a magnet for drug use. He and his wife, he added, were planning on moving out of the neighborhood in a year.
Stetzer, Farwell, and other petitioners such as local apartment building owner Richard Forsey (pictured with Farwell), are playing catch up.
In September, the Board of Zoning Appeals (BZA) approved a special exception to build the plant. The zoners said that it was situated in an already IH or heavy industrial zone, and the site is “uniquely suited to accommodate a concrete plant.”
The special exception was required simply as a technicality because a concrete plant was not among the itemized list of enterprises permitted in an IH or heavy industrial zone.
The zoning opinion noted the proposed site comprises vacant lots surrounded by industrial buildings, and that the plan would remove a long-blighted structure.
The BZA sent the proposal before the City Plan Commission for a site plan review Wednesday evening. Commissioners will also consider a coastal site plan review, which is required. And they will consider the recommendation for approval by the BZA.
The meeting is not a public hearing, but a staff-and-commissioners-only discussion of the site plan. Neighbors won’t be allowed to speak.
So Farwell, while helping to accumulate signatures, said Sunday she will also formally petition to intervene at the City Plan meeting based on the Connecticut Environmental Protection Act.
“It’s a process that allows citizens to intervene in any administrative process where an issue that could affect public interest in clean air, water, resources” is at stake.
“The air quality [issue] was not addressed in the BZA [hearing],” Farwell said.
“Concrete plants are notoriously polluting. We are [already] F‑rated [by the EPA]. The combination of all the petroleum facilities, the amount of trucking, ships, this [neighborhood] is the worst air quality in the city.”
Stetzer said that at the September BZA hearing her objections were given short shrift. Zoners were shown aerial picture of the site, which is bounded by Goodwin, Laura, and Fulton Streets. They were not made aware that though an IH zone, some residences still remain.
Guilford-based Triton Environmental Inc, is handling the submission to the City Plan Commission. In the City Plan Department staff report prepared for Wednesday’s meeting, Triton noted that “a vegetated buffer will be left on the east side of the site where it abuts residential property.” That would be Stetzer’s and others.
As to potential pollution, in materials prepared for Wednesday’s meeting, the applicant included a report prepared for Walsh by Triton in July for its permit application. The company wrote that “the new concrete plant will be equipped with a baghouse that will control emissions from the cement silos and scale/mixing operations. The baghouse is designed to eliminate 99.9 percent of particulate.”
Phone messages left with Triton’s president and the senior project manager were not returned by press time.
Farwell also said that the city has not addressed the issues of the prevailing winds, which are northeast, and will blow the particulate matter from the proposed plant up into all of Fair Haven, an area already heavily blanketed by vehicle emissions from the confluence of the highways.
She said that the Environmental Justice Network, which was instrumental in defeating the reopening of the English Station power plant on Grand Avenue in Fair Haven, voted last week to support opposition to the Walsh proposal.
Lynne Bonnett said that last week at least 20 members of the East Shore Management Team also signed the petition in opposition.
Here to Stay?
Another issue just emerging might also give neighbors an opening.
Walsh’s original submission to the Board of Zoning Appeals in September said the plant would be temporary and operate through 2016, the approximate finish date of the I‑95 and bridge improvement project.
In an Oct. 12 letter to the City Plan Department written by William Heiple, a senior project manager at Triton, contained a significant revision: “Walsh has no immediate plans to cease operations in five years or at any particular time.”
Up to now, Farwell said, it was her understanding that Boston-based Walsh had been subcontracting with L. Suzio Concrete Company on Chapel Street. The Goodwin Street project would give them what she described as perhaps a more affordable “toehold” in New Haven even after the bridge and I‑95 work are complete.
It was unclear how many of the petition-signers would be at the hearing Wednesday. Or if any would be allowed to speak.
At least one local business owner, Timothy Taylor, president of the Buckingham Routh Company, a mechanical engineering firm on Goodwin Street, had written to the BZA already objecting to the plan on the grounds that the street cannot support any more heavy commercial truck traffic.