Markeshia Ricks Photo
Walker: City Hall’s fault, not ours.
The governor has OK’d sending New Haven $5.5 million to clean up a polluted former state bus depot so a new tech campus can rise there. Now the question is how quickly the project can move through the city’s own delayed approval process.
The State Bonding Commission is expected Friday to approve the $5.5 million for cleaning up the property at 470 James St., where a local development team plans to spend another $16 million to build a technology center called “DISTRICT” on 6.95 acres along the Mill River.
The city chose the developers — David Salinas of Digital Surgeons and Eric O’Brien, a real estate investor who runs a CrossFit gym across the street — in a competition back in July. Since then the developers said they lined up the money for the construction, but needed the state clean-up money.
“This grant will help solidify New Haven’s already well-established standing as Connecticut’s technology hub and will help attract more young tech-savvy talent to our city,” the district’s state representative, Roland Lemar, was quoted as saying in a statement released Wednesday afternoon. Lemar also served on the team that selected the developers.
Paul Bass Photo
Developers O’Brien and Salinas.
Salinas told the Independent Wednesday that the clean-up money approval was one of three key hurdles remaining to construction starting. The next is approval by the Board of Alders of a development land disposition agreement (DLDA) with the city.
Under the agreement, the developers would buy the land for $1 (passed from the state through the city) and then build the tech center along with a kayak launch and riverfront beer garden and bakery run by Caseus’s Jason Sobocinski, featuring suds from his Black Hog craft brewery. The complex would also become the headquarters for Digital Surgeons, a design and innovation firm; and O’Brien’s CrossFit gym, along with local companies like Launch Capital and SeeClickFix.
The third hurdle will be approval of a needed zoning change.
Salinas said he feels the clock ticking; he’s itching to get started on construction.
Digital Surgeons’ and CrossFIt’s current leases run out on Jan. 1 at the former Robby Lens factory building across the street at 1175 State St. That complicates plans for the developers’ own companies, which will be the biggest tenants at the new project. Furthermore, Jason Carter, the owner of 1175 State — who lost out on the competition to buy 470 James St. — has put 1175 State up for sale rather than complete promised renovations.
David Salinas
An initial sketch of the project.
“The biggest problem for us is getting started. The process has been slow getting the DLDA done and in front of the alders,” Salinas said. “I think the zoning hasn’t been reviewed yet and scheduled. The city’s handling a lot of things.”
City Economic Development Administrator Matthew Nemerson said he understands the frustration about the process.
“As you may have noticed there are no [Board of Alders] committees organized and no hearings have been scheduled in 2016,” Nemerson observed.
He noted that the project must come before the board’s Legislation Committee, which East Rock Alder Jessica Holmes chairs: “We are just waiting on the alders to hold the hearing, and there are no other issues holding this up. Working with an old factory building owned by one agency, being remediated with funds from another, under the jurisdiction of a third and then needing to get that building into the hands of a private developer with a city as a provisional owner under certain circumstances is mighty complicated.
“Of course I’d like to have had this done long ago, but we are darn close, all things considered.”
Negotiations between Nemerson’s office and the developers on the DLDA also took longer than expected; they had to iron issues such as competing goals for parking. (The city wanted to reserve extra parking for other neighborhood uses; they agreed to delay resolving that question.)
Jessica Holmes: We’re on board.
Holmes called 470 James “an exciting project” about which she has “heard overwhelmingly positive feedback from neighbors; residents want to grow jobs, make more room in New Haven to incubate new tech businesses, improve access to the Mill River, grow CrossFit, and a lot of us want the neighborhood amenities like the [planned] ampitheater and the possibility of a riverfront beer garden from the Caseus family.”
She praised the developers for “reaching out to neighbors” about the plan as well, and stated that she “looks forward to this item moving forward.”
“That being said,” Holmes added, it still has to go through a public process for approvals. This takes time. All the committees of the Board of Alders dissolve at the end of a term and then need to be reconfigured with new membership. Until the committees are up and running, the item can’t be scheduled or heard.”
Board President Tyisha Walker lay the blame for delays at Nemerson’s feet.
She called it “extremely disturbing” for him to try “to justify his delays by blaming it on the Board of Alders committee selection process. Our committee selection process has been the same for years and on schedule this year.
“That said the development administrator only communicated this matter to the Board of Alders in December of 2015 at the second to last meeting of last term. Even under the most aggressive of scenarios, a board committee would not have heard this item before mid to late January after receipt of the required advisory reports from other agencies. The full Board of Alders then could not have considered this item until this February at the earliest.
“If the development administrator wanted this to be heard sooner than now, he should have submitted the item earlier than the 23rd of our 24 Board meetings in 2015 so that it could have been heard during one of the nearly 100 committee meetings we held last year.”