NAUGATUCK — Months of back-and-forth over proposed changes to the plans for Parcel C have come to an end.
The Zoning Commission last week unanimously approved modified plans for a building on the vacant lot at the corner of Maple and Water streets.
The plans call for a 34,923-square-foot, two-story building. One side of the building will be medical offices with St. Mary’s Hospital as the tenant. The rest of the building will have five retail spaces on the first floor and five market-rate apartments — three two-bedroom apartments and two one-bedroom apartments — on the second floor. The first floor is 21,592 square feet, and the second floor is 13,331 square feet, under the plans.
The exterior of the building will be entirely brick, said attorney Kevin McSherry, who is representing the developers, Rob Oris and John Lombard, on the project.
“I think, in my opinion, this structure meets the harmony of all of downtown,” McSherry told the commission. “I think it does what we want it to do. I think it makes a statement, and, when this gets built, I think it turns the key for more development for downtown.”
Oris said they want to move forward with construction as quickly as possible.
There is a 15-day appeal period after the commission’s approval is published as a legal notice, then the developers have to submit plans to get a building permit.
Oris told the commission it would take about three weeks to draw up construction documents. He said they didn’t move forward with them yet because they weren’t sure if the plans would get approved.
“Our goal is to advance it as quickly as we possibly can because, number one, we’re developers and we like to get projects built, we don’t like to talk about it. But, number two, we’ve got a tenant putting a lot of pressure on us to get a facility open, and we’re already behind the eight ball relative to that,” Oris said.
Getting to this point has taken some time.
Oris and Lombard, working under the name Heritage Downtown, LLC, originally proposed building a 27,740-square-foot medical office building and a separate 5,000-square-foot retail building — the separate building remains part of the plans, but detailed plans for it haven’t been submitted, yet.
The developers and the Zoning Commission, acting as the Architectural Review Board, went back and forth over using brick for the entire building — Oris and Lombard didn’t propose doing so at first, while members of the commission pushed for it.
Eventually, the plans were approved in June 2016, but the project didn’t move ahead.
Oris and Lombard bought the land from the borough for $150,000 in late March. After closing on the sale, they proposed changing the plans to a 15,000-square-foot, single-story medical building and a 24,000-square-foot, three-story building that would have retail on the first floor with apartments on the two upper floors. These plans never gained any traction.
The third rendition of the plans called for a 27,740-square-foot building with a two-story medical office and five single-story retail spaces, and the back-and-forth continued. Some officials and members of the public opposed these plans, describing the building as a “strip mall.”
In June, the Zoning Commission voted the modifications to the plans constituted a “significant change” and sent them back to the Planning Commission to review. The latest plans were submitted before the Planning Commission’s meeting on July 17. The Planning Commission gave them a positive referral.
The plans approved last week essentially keep the previously proposed building intact and add the five residential units above the one-story section of the building. The extension of the second floor to add apartments apparently appeased officials and the public, as the Zoning Commission supported the plans with little discussion on them last week and no members of the public spoke at the meeting.
Following the meeting, Naugatuck Economic Development Corporation President and CEO Ronald Pugliese said he was happy the plans were approved, especially considering other projects going on in the borough, including businesses opening at the former Prospect Street School and the ongoing conversion of the former train station on Water Street into a restaurant.
“This is in conjunction with the Prospect Street School opening and The Station opening soon, and a shovel in the ground [on Parcel C] within the next 30 to 45 days, I couldn’t be happier,” he said. “Yes, it was a long ordeal, but that’s democracy. I respect everybody’s opinion, and I respect the fact that the developers listened to what the people were saying and made the changes necessary to get approval.”
