New Brewery OK’d After Jaigantic Debate

A contentious hours-long public hearing ended with a craft brewer winning his final needed city approval to set up shop on River Street— and a host of questions raised about a movie studio that tried to box him out.

That was the result of Wednesday night’s Board of Zoning Appeals (BZA) meeting, which was held online via Zoom.

Zoning commissioners ultimately voted 3 to 1 in support of a special exception for manufacturing beer in a light industrial (IL) zone at 190 River St.

The zoning relief clears the way for Armada Brewing​‘s John Kraszewski to open a small craft brewery and taproom at the two-story former Bigelow Factory building at the corner of Lloyd and River Streets.

The vote comes less than a week after the City Plan Commission also approved Kraszewski’s plans to convert the former industrial site into a venue for brewing, selling, and consuming beer.

“Currently we manufacture beer in East Haven,” Kraszewski told the BZA commissioners Wednesday night. ​“When we establish this facility in New Haven at 190 River St., we will be producing beer on premises,” selling four packs and bottles to go, and serving customers on site who want to stay at the taproom and drink. In his City Plan Commission application, Kraszewski projected that the new brewery would be open by next spring.

“A Bird In The Hand”

Roughly a dozen members of the public, from Fair Haven residents to statewide craft brewing boosters, spoke up in support of Armada’s plans.

“They’ve simply outgrown [their East Haven location] because of their success,” Downing Street resident Carlos Galo said. ​“They’re looking to expand their business and hopefully hire locally.”

Connecticut Brewers Guild Executive Director Phil Pappas emphasized how prepared Kraszewski is to move into the new River Street space. He already has ​“a lease in hand, plans in place, equipment ordered, and beer on the way. Armada Brewing is ready to go.”

Carmine Capasso, who runs a local restoration company that rehabilitated 190 River St. and that is teed up to purchase the property from the city once it pulls a certificate of occupancy, said Armada will be a boon for a district. For years, he noted, River Street has struggled to attract investors that actually follow through on building out grandiose visions.

“Right now it’s a ghost town,” he said. ​“It’s pretty dangerous. John’s putting hundreds of thousands of dollars of his own money into this property to develop it.” And this small craft brewery plan isn’t some pipe dream, Capasso said. It’s a soon-to-be reality.

“You have a bird in the hand,” he told the commissioners. ​“Take it.”

Movie Studio Pushback

While Wednesday’s vote was about the relatively narrow legal matter of whether or not Armada should be allowed to brew beer on River Street, the hotly contested public hearing portion of the meeting quickly turned into a referendum on several loftier questions.

Such as: What should the future of Fair Haven’s former industrial riverfront district look like?

What kinds of development should the city promote in the short and long terms to best make that vision a reality?

And could the city really gain — or will it only be burned — by taking seriously a Shelton-based movie studio​‘s pitch to transform a much larger swath of the derelict area into a bustling, job-filled, movie production mini-city?

Just as they tried to do during a recent equally contentious Fair Haven Community Management Team meeting, Jaigantic Studio’s executive team tried on Wednesday to undercut the brewery and convince the city to hand all of River Street ​‘s municipally owned property over to them instead. They argued that the new brewery’s presence would prevent them from carrying out their plan.

Jaigantic Studios Chief Operating Officer Mayne Berke claimed to commissioners that he helped Tyler Perry’s studio grow into a 20,000-employee enterprise in Atlanta.

“The same thing can happen here, but we need the space to do it and we need the security to do it, and we need to have continuous properties unimpeded,” he said. Berke said having Armada Brewery placed in the middle of River Street ​“is going to cost hundreds of jobs, and it’s going to create a security risk.”

Jaigantic Studios Chief Impact Officer Jackie Buster agreed: ​“Celebrity talent will not come here if they feel like they can’t get from one end of the street to the other without being impeded, or without being approached.” Allowing this brewery to open would stand in the way of Jaigantic’s plans to build ​“25 sound stages, with an average of 150 jobs per sound stage,” Buster maintained.

Jaigantic Studios CEO Donovan De Boer, meanwhile, asked the city to think of the children when agreeing to allow the small brewery to locate in the industrial neighborhood: ​“Our biggest concern beyond the community impact on nearby schools and churches and things like that, [is that] a big part of our studio project involves apprenticeship programs. It involves working with a lot of at-risk youth.” How might those kids feel having to walk by a brewery every day on their way to making movies?

The city is also in talks with New England Brewing Co. to build out a larger new brewery and taproom nearby on River Street.

Neighborhood supporters of the movie studio took a different tack at Wednesday’s meeting. Rather than calling for the brewery to be thrown to the curb entirely, they asked BZA commissioners to table the matter until the city, the movie studio, Armada, and the community had time to hash through their differences.

“We’re not looking to be an obstacle to development,” said Fair Haven Community Management Team Chair Lee Cruz. ​“We are looking to get a maximization of jobs to our community.”

He and fellow community management team leader David Weinreb shared a petition with hundreds of signatures in support of a mediated solution to the movie studio-brewery dispute.

“We are proceeding from a point of fear,” Cruz continued. ​“Fear of losing out on an opportunity that is desperately needed in our community.”

Front Street resident Davante Mallard spoke of how impressed and inspired he’s been by the Jaigantic team’s efforts to reach out to the community to talk about their movie studio vision for River Street. He said everyone interested in developing River Street has one shared objective: ​“To make Fair Haven, or New Haven, a better place to be at.”

Fair Haven Democratic alder candidate Sarah Miller said that the Jaigantic proposal would enrich the community, increase jobs, and expand the tax base ​“at a much larger scale and with more direct benefit to neighbors” than Armada’s plans for 190 River St.

If the brewery placed at that location really is going to impede the movie studio project to such an extent, she said, then the city needs to do everything it can to protect the larger project.

In response to criticisms that the city has no coherent plans for River Street’s redevelopment, city economic development staffer Helen Rosenberg pointed to the River Street Municipal Development Plan. It dates back nearly two decades. She also described the city’s purchase of the former Bigelow buildings in 2006, its efforts to abate environmental hazards and secure and selectively demolish properties on the block, and its working with Capasso to renovate and save the building at 190 River St.

Jaigantic Financials Questioned

For some of the brewery’s defenders Wednesday night, the movie studio’s push to stop or stall Armada’s zoning relief application provoked confusion, incredulity, and some probing questions.

“You don’t get to claim dibs on a huge swath of the neighborhood” just because you’re an out-of-town investor with ambitious plans, said Lewis Street resident Drew Goldsman in the middle of his testimony in support of the brewery.

Former Fair Haven Furniture owner Kerry Triffin, who still owns the Blatchley Avenue furniture building, said that both Armada and — if it comes to pass — Jaigantic Studios would be great for the neighborhood.

“It’s hard for me to imagine that John’s 1,500 square feet would put the Jaigantic Studio in jeopardy. We’re talking about a huge amount of land in the area,” he said. ​“Any notion that the whole Jaigantic Studio would go by the wayside just because John would have 1,500 square feet on the corner, it just seems preposterous.”

And Downtown-Wooster Square Community Management Team Chair Ian Dunn asked the BZA commissioners, and the interested public, to take a deeper dive into the movie studio’s financial motivations.

“I would really ask: Where is the money behind Jaigantic? It just doesn’t make sense,” he said.

With those words of caution, Dunn dropped a few links in the meeting’s Zoom chat.

One link was to a Center on Budget and Policy Priorities critique of federal Opportunity Zones as potential sites of ​“large-scale tax avoidance.” The zones were created under the Trump administration as an avenue for wealthy investors to avoid taxes by investing in urban developments.

Another link, to a New York Times story, showed how some of the wealthiest Americans were eagerly taking advantage of the Opportunity Zone tax incentive designed to benefit struggling cities without benefiting struggling cities.

A third link was to the Jaigantic Studios East investor website which, at the time of Wednesday’s hearing, included multiple references to something called the ​“Jaigantic Studios East Opportunity Fund.” The River Street district, and all of southern Fair Haven, falls entirely within one of the city’s locally designated, federally approved Opportunity Zones.

The point: Was this project a play for Opportunity Zone tax credits?

Jaigantic has pulled all mentions of ​“Jaigantic Studios East Opportunity Fund” from its website. It also has password protected seemingly every page on one of its sites, with a 23-point ​“non-disclosure and non-circumvent agreement.”

That NDA that website visitors must agree to includes this legal warning: ​“The parties acknowledge that the confidential information supplied or to be supplied by each party to another party is proprietary to the disclosing party and acknowledge that it is of a confidential nature. Each party will at all times keep confidential information communicated by another party confidential and will not use the same in any manner (other than for the Purpose) without the prior written consent of the disclosing party.”

Update: In a follow up interview with the Independent, Jaigantic Chief Impact Officer Jackie Buster said that the Jaigantic Studios East website is a private site for investors only. The studio’s public-facing site is here.

She also said that Jaigantic’s website had been hacked back in June, putting the studio on alert as early as this summer to keeping business plan information and investor decks private. She said the NDA and password protections existed on the investor site well before the BZA meeting, and were not put up in response to comments made at the meeting.

And when asked about concerns that Jaigantic is most interested in the River Street district because of the tax incentives associated with Opportunity Zones, she said that Jaigantic plans to use whatever tax credits and tax incentives are available to them — in the same way that any comparable business would— in order to attract investors and help build out the planned studio.

Click here for a ​“fact sheet” that Jaigantic put out on Friday in response to criticism raised at Wednesday’s BZA meeting. That document claims that Jaigantic has already raised $14 million from company founders, the executive team, and private equity. It also states that the company estimates that Phase One of the Jaigantic Studios project — which would include constructing ​“12 World-Class Soundstages” in New Haven — will cost roughly $80 – 100 million.

Final Vote: 3 – 1 For The Brewery

At the end of the nearly two-hour public hearing, the majority of the BZA commissioners wound up supporting the brewery’s application — in part because of the relatively narrow purview of Wednesday’s review.

“We are here to make a decision on a special exception, and a special exception only,” BZA Chair Mildred Melendez said. ​“There should have been many conversations had prior to coming here. Obviously there’s some unaddressed issues. But unfortunately, we’re not the board to hear it.”

Before the vote, BZA Commissioner Alexandra Daum recused herself from the matter because she works for the state Department of Economic and Community Development (DECD), which has invested in River Street’s cleanup and redevelopment.

The only commissioner who wound up voting against Armada’s application was Michael Martinez.

Before he cast his vote, and knowing that three other colleagues on the board already planned to vote in support, he checked to make sure that his dissent wouldn’t actually affect the hearing’s outcome.

“Even if I don’t approve, it still gets approved, right?” he asked.

Melendez encouraged him to vote however he saw fit. In the end, the commissioners voted 3 to 1 in support of the brewery.

“I know this was a very overwhelming public hearing,” Kraszewski said. ​“I’m more than happy to work with our neighbors.” He said he looked forward to Jaigantic being Armada’s neighbor one day. When that comes to pass, he said, he’ll serve them a beer.