Pirelli Hotel Plan Survives Surprise Attack

A plan to convert the long-vacant and historic Pirelli Building into a 165-room hotel received approval from the City Plan Commission despite a one-hour push by labor-affiliated alders and city staff to stall the proposal.

That was the upshot of Wednesday night’s regular monthly meeting of the City Plan Commission, which played out over nearly five hours on the second floor of City Hall.

Commissioners voted 3 – 1 in favor of IKEA’s detailed plan and coastal site plan for the conversion of the historic Pirelli Building at 500 Sargent Dr. into a 165-room hotel with 129 dedicated parking spaces.

Only around 10 minutes of the hour-long Pirelli section of the meeting were dedicated to IKEA’s actual plans for the iconic Marcel Breuer-designed Brutalist building, which was built in 1968 and has long sat vacant in a sea of parking lots off of Sargent Drive, serving as little more than a highway-facing billboard for IKEA’s latest home furniture products.

As local attorney Jim Segaloff explained, IKEA has not yet found a developer for the site, but wants to tee up the property for any interested buyers by first receiving City Plan approval for the hotel conversion.

The approved plans call for a 165-room hotel, 129 dedicated parking spaces, 200 square feet of bicycle storage in the bottom of the IKEA sign, stormwater management and landscaping improvements, a reconfiguration of IKEA’s existing 1,241-space surface lot, and the repair and cleaning up of the building’s facade. The proposal does not call for any changes to be made to the building’s exterior.

“Drive by the Pirelli Building and for 20 years, it’s vacant,” said Segaloff. ​“We now all have an opportunity to fill it up. … We have an opportunity to fill up the building, and put in a first-class hotel.”

The vast majority of the hearing was taken up instead by a passionate, repetitive, bewildered and bewildering debate among Segaloff and his colleague attorney Caleb Hamel (both of whom were representing IKEA), the City Plan Commission staff, and the five voting members of the City Plan Commission.

The debate centered on which administrative body — the Board of Alders or the City Plan Commission — has proper legal jurisdiction to act on the IKEA proposal.

As with debates over whether to overhaul city zoning rules and whether to withhold approval of a makeover of the Duncan Hotel, a strong sense in the room Wednesday night was that the intense wrangling had to do with unspoken as much as with spoken arguments and agendas. Hovering behind the IKEA hotel debate, though never mentioned explicitly, was Yale’s UNITE-HERE labor union, a powerful local political player that has close ties to aldermanic leadership and an effective ruling majority on the Board of Alders, and that has a direct interest in hotel worker organizing. UNITE HERE has sought to ensure that hotels built in New Haven have unionized workforces.

The nominal source of the debate was a Sept. 16 letter sent by the seven leaders of the Board of Alders to city Economic Development Administrator Matthew Nemerson, requesting that the local economic development chief pull IKEA’s hotel conversion proposal from the City Plan Commission’s oversight and redirect it to the Board of Alders’ purview.

The rationale the alders offered was that the proposed conversion of the vacant 108,000 gross-square-foot building into a hotel constituted a change of use within the Planned Development District (PDD) #100 zoning regulations that the alders passed in 2002 to help pave the way for IKEA’s move to Long Wharf.

“We are aware through media reports that there is proposal for a change to the current use of the Pirelli Building in the IKEA PDD,” the Sept. 17 letter reads, ​“and it has been forwarded tot he City Plan Commission. As you know the practice is for changes to current uses in a PDD to be communicated to the Board of Alders for review, approval, and referral.

“Given that that practice is the appropriate action for this matter,” it continues, ​“please remove it from the City Plan Commission agenda and communicate this proposal to the Board of Alders so that it may get proper consideration.”

The letter is signed by West River Alder and Board of Alders President Tyisha Walker-Myers, Dixwell Alder and Board of Alders President Pro Tempore Jeanette Morrison, Whalley/Edgewood/Beaver Hills (WEB) Alder and Board of Alders Majority Leader Richard Furlow, Wooster Square Alder and Third Officer Aaron Greenberg, Hill Alder and Deputy Majority Leader Dave Reyes, Hill Alder and Black and Hispanic Caucus Chair Dolores Colon, and Newhallville Alder and Black and Hispanic Caucus Vice-Chair Delphine Clyburn. All were elected with the support of UNITE HERE; three of them have held leadership positions in or work for the union.

Segaloff, who passed around thick packet of papers containing a copy of the alders’ letter, a legal brief he had written, and a copy of the 2002 PDD legislation, consistently criticized the alders’ reading of the law as incorrect.

A hotel falls well within the list of sanctioned uses as defined by the 2002 PDD, he and Hamel argued again and again. That means that the City Plan Commission, not the Board of Alders, is the appropriate administrative body to review the detailed plan and coastal site plan proposals.

“What’s the legal issue here?” Segaloff asked. ​“What’s behind this? What’s it all about?”

Marchand, the aldermanic representative on the commission, and a UNITE HERE employee, asked commission Chair Ed Mattison to table IKEA’s proposal to give the alders and city staff more time to talk with Corporation Counsel about which body should take the lead on IKEA’s hotel plans.

Acting City Plan Director Michael Piscitelli agreed, saying that the City Plan staff had completed its technical review of IKEA’s submissions, but that the city was not prepared for a vote on the matter because of outstanding potential legal concerns.

Mattison was initially sympathetic to that argument.

“If there is an internal city disagreement,” he said, ​“we’re not going to vote on it.” He said that he did not want the City Plan Commission to decide on what was ultimately a difference in legal interpretations of the PDD.

Segaloff pushed back.

“Who doesn’t want a hotel here?” he asked. ​“I think we’re getting screwed here.” He said that he helped write the PDD law back in 2002, and that the law is clear: a hotel is a permitted use of the Pirelli building.

The tide among the commissioners began to shift when City Plan Commissioner Leslie Radcliffe expressed concern about potentially abdicating the legal authority of the City Plan Commission at the mere request of seven alders.

“I’d like to see the letter myself,” she said, prompting Segaloff to distribute copies of the Sept. 17 missive from the alders.

Mattison asked about what would happen if the commission tabled the matter for a month, giving the alders and the city a little more time to pin down Corporation Counsel for a definitive legal opinion on the matter.

Hamel pointed out and City Plan Commission staffer Anne Hartjen confirmed that the commission has to act on a proposal within 65 days of its submission.

Since the commission received IKEA’s proposal on Sept. 20, Hartjen said, the commission simply could not push off a vote until December. A lack of action at Wednesday night’s meeting would by default approve the hotel conversion request.

But, Piscitelli cautioned, the city needed a little bit more time to hammer out a ​“timing issue” behind the scenes. The commission could always ask the applicants if they would be open to an extension of that 65-day window, thereby giving the city a bit more time to decide.

“Is the use permitted in the PDD?” Radcliffe asked the City Plan staff point blank.

“We would not have written a report or even accepted an application if we did not think it fit the regulations,” Hartjen replied.

“I think we should act within our jurisdiction,” Radcliffe said.

The commissioners called a vote.

Radcliffe, Mattison, and commission alternate Jonathan Wharton, who is a Southern Connecticut State University (SCSU) professor and the former chair of the Republican Town Committee, voted for the hotel conversion plan.

Commission alternate Elias Estabrook, who works as a jobs coach for the local UNITE HERE-affiliated job-placement group New Haven Works, voted against the proposal. Estabrook said he voted no because he did not have confidence one way or the other that the commission had adequate legal standing to rule on the matter.

Marchand abstained from the vote.

After the vote, Alder Furlow, who attended Wednesday’s meeting for a separate hearing, said he thought the alder leadership had acted appropriately in sending the September letter to Nemerson and in seeking out Corporation Counsel’s opinion. He said the Board of Alders has broad authority and jurisdiction, but that the intent of the letter was never to circumvent the authority of the City Plan Commission.

He also noted that there are currently two other hotels on Long Wharf: La Quinta Inn and New Haven Village Suites.

“Now there’s going to be three on the block,” he said.

City economic development chief Nemerson said he had expected the IKEA team to be open to tabling the issue until next month’s meeting. Instead, he said, IKEA pushed the issue, and ultimately prevailed.

“In New Haven, we want to be very respectful of our relationship with the Board of Alders,” Nemerson said.

But, from an economic development perspective, he said, he is thrilled to see a long-vacant building finally on the brink of reuse. He said that one of the very first things he did upon assuming office in 2013 was meet with IKEA to talk about how best to develop the Pirelli Building.

“We’re delighted that it’s going to be developed as something,” he said.