Greenwich Hospital rejected several site options for its expansion. Here's why.
GREENWICH — The Greenwich Hospital administration considered
and then rejected several alternate sites for its proposed upgraded cancer
facility, in part because of parking, its formal application spells out.
Responding to concerns from community members that other
locations might be more suitable and less intrusive to the neighborhood than
the main campus on Perryridge Road, the application, filed recently at Town
Hall, says administration looked in particular at the Prescott House, a
nearby housing
facility owned by the hospital, along with a site at the Nathaniel
Witherell, the town-owned senior facility.
According to the application filed earlier this month, those
sites were deemed non-feasible because of problems with parking, “wetlands,
steep topography and inadequate infrastructure.” In addition, the application
stated, neither alternative offered the “ideal proximity” to the main medical
facility that would make patient care more efficient.
The hospital is seeking to build a 56,000-square-foot Smilow
Cancer Center near the main hospital, which is raising concerns in the neighborhood.
An earlier plan was voted down by the town’s Planning
& Zoning Commission in 2021.
A number of modifications have been made in a new version,
including creating underground parking and adding more green space.
The hospital administration is pointing out that it has
shifted much of its outpatient services to medical offices at 500 West Putnam
Ave. and elsewhere in the community, lightening the traffic load at the
Perryridge Road campus.
The hospital administration is also highlighting the amount
of community outreach it has done to alleviate complaints about deliveries,
illegal parking, traffic and noise.
“Recognizing the comments received during the public hearing
on the earlier application, the hospital undertook a proactive approach to
address comprehensively the concerns raised by the community and the immediate
neighborhood,” the hospital administration said. A Neighborhood Advisory
Committee has been meeting every three months to discuss and address
neighborhood issues. Nine community initiatives and meetings have been held
this year, the hospital said.
The application also outlines the extensive landscaping and
upgraded architectural design that is intended to make the proposed 391/2-foot-tall
structure fit into the neighborhood.
“We’ve worked hard to make changes. I do believe this is a
better facility and a better fit in the neighborhood,” Greenwich Hospital
President Diane Kelly said when it was outlined in a preliminary discussion
this spring.
The formal application also lays out a timetable should town
approvals be granted. The hospital administration says site work could take
place from the summer to the winter of 2023, including blasting and excavation
for the underground garage. The construction work would take place in 2024,
with the building frame mostly completed in that year. Interior work would be
accomplished in 2025, with an expected completion time in summer 2025.
Landscaping work will continue into 2025, as well.
The project needs a zoning change as well as a special
permit from the town Planning and Zoning Commission, which has not yet
scheduled a hearing on the project.
A row of medical offices and residences, now empty, would be
demolished to make way for the proposed Smilow Cancer Center along Lake Avenue,
the plan states.
Developer seeks Stratford’s OK for 129 apartments on Hawley Lane
Richard Chumney
STRATFORD — The New Jersey-based development company behind
the Merritt 8 Corporate Park is aiming to build a 129-unit apartment complex on
the same site.
Mountain Development Corporation is seeking the town’s
approval to construct the four-story building on a largely-undeveloped plot of
land off Hawley Lane, according
to an application submitted to the town.
Site plans show the company plans to build the
110,000-square-foot apartment complex, which will also feature a community
building and pool, east of the existing office park and south of the Big Y
supermarket.
“The upside (down) U-shaped building will be directly
accessed from the existing driveway off Hawley Lane,” Christopher Russo, an
attorney representing Mountain Development, wrote in a letter to town
officials.
In addition to the apartment building, the complex would
include a 2,550-square-foot community building and an outdoor pool for
residents. The building would be surrounded on three sides by more than 300
parking spaces.
The application is currently before the Stratford Inland
Wetlands Commission, a seven-member board charged with determining whether
construction projects adhere to local environmental regulations.
Mountain Development needs the commission’s approval because
the property in question, a large swath of land that stretches across more than
30-acres, contains several acres of wetlands on the southern end of the site.
“It is important to note that no wetlands will be disturbed
with this application,” Russo wrote, adding that no portion of the building
will be within 50 feet of the wetlands.
Kelly Kerrigan, Stratford’s environmental conservation
superintendent, said the commission could vote on the application as soon as
Wednesday. If approved, the proposal would then move to the zoning commission.
Along with the main proposal, Mountain Development also
submitted an alternative site plan that would split the single apartment
complex into two individual buildings with 95 units each.
The plan was submitted to highlight an alternative
development, but Russo wrote that the developers prefer the original one
because the alternative would increase the “overall bulk” of the structures and
require builders to duplicate services in each building.
The application was filed under state statute 8-30g, which
allows developers to bypass local zoning laws and regulations if at least 30
percent of the project’s units are set aside for affordable housing.
Municipalities can only deny 8-30g applications if the
project would cause a substantial health or safety concern. Developers,
meanwhile, can only take advantage of the law if less than 10 percent of a
municipality’s housing units are designated by deed as affordable.
As of 2020, Stratford has 1,347 affordable units, equaling
6.4 percent of the total housing stock, according to the Connecticut Data
Collaborative, a Hartford-based nonprofit that analyzes public data.
The project has already sparked backlash from some residents
concerned about a potential increase in traffic, the loss in open space and the
impact construction will have on local wildlife and vegetation.
According to the state Department of Energy and
Environmental Protection, the
area is home to the eastern box turtle, an animal classified as a species
of special concern due to its declining population.
An
online petition urging the developer to sell the property to a land
trust instead of building on the site has garnered more than 570 signatures as
of Monday.
“The development would not only destroy wildlife, but also
flood the space with bright artificial lighting which is bad for migrating
birds and nocturnal pollinators,” the petition organizer wrote.
Plainfield warehouse to be five times bigger than Amazon, but no tenant yet. What we know.
PLAINFIELD - A private real estate company has
received conditional approval to build a 1 million-square-foot warehouse in
Plainfield that is expected to net the town a tidy sum in permitting and tax
revenue.
The Planning
& Zoning Commission on June 29 granted site plan approval to
Scannell Properties for construction of a warehouse on the combined parcels at
91-105, 107, 113 and 143-151 Plainfield Pike currently owned by the Plainfield
Materials company.
In addition to the enormous warehouse, the project,
which First
Selectman Kevin Cunningham estimated will cost up to $100 million to
complete, calls for creating 975 parking and 182 trailer storage spaces, along
with 200 docking doors on the total 137-acre space, according to site plans.
During the June meeting, BL Companies civil engineer Matt
Burton said there were as yet no tenants contracted to use the planned
structure.
“But I was told there is interest already by some companies
to move in,” Cunningham said.
Assistant Planner and Zoning Enforcement Officer Ryan Brais
said it’s not unusual for a real estate company to buy an attractive property
and then move to lock down tenants before beginning construction.
Panel approves plan for apartments on east side of Meriden
Mary Ellen Godin
MERIDEN — The city’s Planning Commission voted unanimously
earlier this week to conditionally approve a developer’s plan to build 32
market rate apartments at 1544 E. Main Street.
Developer 94 Warner Associates plans to build the apartments
on 2.85 acres behind an existing condominium complex. The east side lot is
zoned commercial on the south, east, and west, and residential on the north.
The plan calls for 14 duplex units and one four-unit
building. The developer proposed providing 2.9 parking spaces per unit. An
existing single-family home on the property will be demolished to make way for
the complex.
The plan also includes grading for sightline
improvements on the north and south of the property and installation of a
drain line. 95 Warner will also build an emergency access driveway across
a right of way on East Main Street.
SLR Consultants found that traffic from the development
will not impact the area.
The conditions of approval included some changes to
the site plan, including utility, engineering and landscaping
improvements. It also called for lowering the height of the buildings to 38
feet.
The developer must also post a construction storm water
management plan in city land records. City staff will set a bond on erosion and
sedimentation, public improvements and work in the city right of way. City
staff will also sign off on landscaping.
Planning Commission members generally liked the proposal
because it increased rental housing on the east side.
“I think there is a need,” Commissioner Elain Cariati said
during Wednesday’s meeting. “We have people who don’t want the upkeep of a
residential home, so this is a great alternative. It will be an improvement in
the area and add to the tax base, which is exactly what we need.”
But nobody knows quite what that means yet.
If you encounter it at all, it might be on the highway.
Driving down I-95 from Boston to New York City, you’ll pull into a rest stop
and notice a sign advertising “clean hydrogen fuel.” As you pass an 18-wheeler
parked in the lot, you might catch a glimpse of a decal near the gas cap —
green letters that read, “powered by H2.”
On the other hand, it might be much closer to home. A new
industrial park is proposed in your community. The design plans include a
cluster of nondescript buildings, some large metal tanks, and an array of wind
turbines or solar panels. The project may bring benefits like jobs and funding
for local initiatives. But some are worried about environmental risks and
property values. The specter of a new hydrogen pipeline begins to haunt local
headlines.
These are just a couple of the many possible ways people in
the Northeast might experience the energy transition happening around them if
the Department of Energy chooses the region to become a “clean hydrogen
hub.”
“It does remain really abstract, at this point,” said Rachel
Fakhry, who leads the hydrogen and energy innovation portfolio at the Natural
Resources Defense Council. “We are seeing some hubs and clusters pop up
globally, but it’s still really a nebulous concept.”
The bipartisan infrastructure law that Congress passed in
2021 gave $8 billion to the Department of Energy, or DOE, to support the
development of at least four regional “hubs” for clean hydrogen, which is seen
as a promising alternative fuel to fossil fuels for a variety of industries.
And while DOE has yet to begin soliciting proposals, or even to define what a
“hub” is, governments and businesses all over the U.S. are already coming
together to vie for the funding.
The word “hub” may bring to mind a relatively small area
with a high concentration of activity, like the downtown of a city or a port.
But some of the potential hubs, like a proposed partnership between New York,
Connecticut, Massachusetts, and New Jersey, shows how sprawling the concept
could turn out to be.
“This is more than just a project or a demonstration, it’s
really a broader regional ecosystem that is intended to be advanced,” said
Doreen Harris, the president and CEO of the New York State Energy Research
Development Authority, or NYSERDA.
So what might that ecosystem look like? In some parts of the
country, where hydrogen is already a part of the economy, it might look like
converting existing infrastructure and industries to cleaner processes. But in
the Northeast, it means building something totally new. Grist spoke to state
officials, industry representatives, and climate policy experts to begin to
piece together a picture of how hydrogen could transform the region. Their
answers point to bigger questions about hydrogen’s role in the energy
transition, and the extent to which it might either replicate today’s fossil
fuel infrastructure or play more of a supporting role in the energy economy of
the future.
Hydrogen fuel can power many of the same activities that
fossil fuels power today, without releasing any climate-warming gases. But
unlike fossil fuels, which can be dug out of the ground, hydrogen has to be
manufactured. Today, it’s produced from natural gas and coal in an
energy-intensive process that emits carbon. More than 2 percent of global emissions currently come
from hydrogen production. Most of the hydrogen we make is used as an ingredient
in oil refining, fertilizer production, and other industrial processes.
The trick to cleaner hydrogen is either to add equipment to
the traditional hydrogen production process to capture the emissions, or to
eliminate them altogether by producing the fuel through a different process
called electrolysis, which uses electricity to split water molecules into
hydrogen and oxygen. If the electricity comes from a clean source, like wind
turbines or a nuclear plant, the hydrogen will also be emissions-free.
Currently, there’s a chicken-and-egg challenge to producing
clean hydrogen because it’s still more expensive than fossil fuels themselves,
and there’s little demand for it. The DOE’s hubs program is designed to build
up networks of producers, users, and the infrastructure required to link them,
all at the same time.
The program will also begin to answer key questions about
where hydrogen can compete with other climate solutions. There are many
industries where clean hydrogen could replace fossil fuels, but other
solutions, like using clean electricity directly, might be more efficient and
economical. The hydrogen hub initiative could help prove which applications
make financial and practical sense.
“It’s really a demonstration program,” said Emily Kent, a
policy manager for zero-carbon fuels at the Clean Air Task Force, an environmental
nonprofit. “On the production side, we’re demonstrating that we can produce
hydrogen with really low greenhouse gas intensity. On the end use side, we’re
demonstrating that we can use hydrogen in new ways than we ever have before.”
New York Governor Kathy Hochul announced the agreement
between her state, Connecticut, Massachusetts, and New Jersey to jointly apply
for the DOE funding in March. The press release named 40 additional partners, including
hydrogen technology companies, utilities, and universities, that will
contribute to the vision of a northeast hydrogen hub.
The four states in the Northeast partnership all have laws
in place requiring that they rid their electrical grids, roads, and much of the
rest of their economies of carbon emissions in the next few decades. Harris of
NYSERDA said New York is focusing on converting as much of the economy to run
on clean electricity as possible. “But there’s places where fuels are useful,”
she said.
Some of those places include medium- and heavy-duty
transportation, like those semi trucks parked at the rest stop. One of the
partners listed in Hochul’s announcement is Cummins, a company that builds
engines for delivery trucks, buses, heavy-duty trucks, ships, trains, and
agricultural and construction vehicles. “We are interested in decarbonizing our
industry and have a plan to get to net-zero emissions by 2050 across all our
applications,” a spokesperson for the company told Grist. Cummins has already
built fuel cells that run on hydrogen to power trains and trucks in Europe
and a ferry in San Francisco. (Fuel cells can convert the
chemical energy in a fuel like hydrogen or methane to electrical energy,
without any combustion.)
But heavy-duty trucks are a good example of the uncertainty
around where and how hydrogen will win out over electrification. Companies
like Volvo and Tesla are investing in developing trucks that run on
batteries. “There’s still a question mark,” said Fakhry of the Natural Resources
Defense Council. “Will hydrogen be able to outcompete electric trucks? We don’t
know, because electric trucks are making very strong advancements.” Policy is
going to play a big role in answering that question, she said, including
whether the DOE decides to prioritize investments in hydrogen trucking.
An area where clean fuels like hydrogen
are more likely to outcompete batteries is the shipping industry. New
York and New Jersey host the largest container port on the East Coast. “I know
that we’re not going to be crossing the Atlantic Ocean by battery anytime
soon,” said Arne Ballantine, the CEO of Ohmium, a company developing
electrolyzers to produce clean hydrogen that also signed on to the Northeast
hub as a partner. Today’s batteries are simply not advanced enough to power a ship weighing hundreds
of thousands of tons.
Clean hydrogen could eventually fuel maritime shipping
vessels as well as some activities onshore, like the heavy-duty machinery used
to load and unload cargo. This transition could have measurable health benefits
for neighboring communities that are currently polluted by dangerous emissions
of sulfur oxides, nitrogen oxides, and particulates as ships idle in the
harbor. But that depends on whether ships transition to fuel cells, which
wouldn’t emit any pollutants, rather than more traditional engines burning
hydrogen, which would.
There are other ways that clean hydrogen could transform the
Northeast that may be less visible, like in power generation. There is fierce
debate about the role hydrogen should play on the electrical grid, since using
renewable electricity directly is always more efficient than using that
electricity to make clean hydrogen, only to turn the hydrogen back into
electricity. Hydrogen’s main advantage there is that it can be stored in large
quantities for long periods of time, and turned back into electricity as
needed.
Harris also said the Northeast could use clean hydrogen in
industrial processes that require extremely high temperatures that are harder
to achieve with electricity. Nucor, a steel company with plants in upstate New
York and Connecticut, is listed as a partner on Hochul’s hub announcement. The
company did not respond to Grist’s request for comment on whether or how it
might use clean hydrogen, but studies have found that clean hydrogen
presents one
of the most promising pathways for cutting emissions from steelmaking.
As for the production side, Harris was clear that the
Northeast hub proposal would focus on hydrogen made from electricity, not from
natural gas. That means drawing on the vast hydropower resources that already
exist in the area, as well as new solar and onshore and offshore wind farms
that will be built in the coming years.
But it could also mean the region will have to build a lot
more solar and wind farms than might otherwise be needed solely for
electricity. In comments to the DOE, the Clean Air Task Force urged the agency
to prioritize hydrogen producers that use “additional” renewable energy,
meaning those that build their own renewables or sign purchase agreements with
renewable developers, rather than those that simply tap into existing clean
energy sources. “So that you’re not taking it away from helping to clean up the
electricity sector,” explained Kent of the Clean Air Task Force. “You’re adding
on to that.”
There’s a lot of variation in what these hydrogen plants
could look like. New York is already subsidizing construction of “the largest green hydrogen plant in North America,” in
Genesee County, between Buffalo and Rochester. It will be built and operated by
a company called Plug Power. Site plans presented to the county planning board included a
40,000-square-foot building housing the company’s electrolyzers and a
68,000-square-foot “compressor building.” Company representatives told the
board the hydrogen will be transported by tanker truck to customers throughout
the Northeast, including Walmart, Kroger, Home Depot, and Amazon, which will
use the fuel to power forklifts and other warehouse machinery. The site will
use 280,000 gallons of water per day.
Hydrogen production plants could also be much smaller.
Ohmium’s electrolyzers fit in a cabinet that’s about the size of two refrigerators,
Ballantine said. The system is modular, meaning it can be stacked to produce
more or less hydrogen, and can be installed directly on site where the hydrogen
will be used.
Depending on how the vision for a Northeast hub evolves, it
could also mean blending hydrogen with natural gas in existing pipelines to
transport it to power plants and other gas users. Many environmental groups
oppose this idea for the same reason that the gas industry likes it: It would
extend the useful life of those pipelines and the use of natural gas.
While hydrogen can be transported via truck or produced near
its customers, developing new pipelines in the region to carry the fuel from
where it’s produced to where it’s used could also be on the table.
But Fakhry said that it was too early to start making
decisions about pipelines now.
“In a market that is still so new, where we don’t really
know exactly where the demand comes from, and where the supply’s going to come
from, and we still need to do a lot of learning, making those early, big
investments in pipelines is really risky,” she said.
The DOE will put out an official funding announcement for
the hydrogen program later this year, which is expected to contain more
information about what the agency will be looking for in proposals. But it’s
unlikely that it will resolve many of these uncertainties around hydrogen.
That’s for the hubs themselves to do.