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Planning board approves adaptive reuse of KVH office to 82 rental units, sets conditions on utilities and documentation
Summary
The board approved preliminary and final development plan review for an 82-unit adaptive reuse project at 50 Enterprise Drive, subject to utility letters, a sewer-camera inspection, and TRC conditions; board members requested expanded development-impact documentation addressing traffic, sewer, water, fire flow and possible school impacts.
The Planning Board granted preliminary and final development-plan approval for the adaptive reuse of the KVH Industries office building at 50 Enterprise Drive into an 82-unit multifamily rental building, subject to specific utility and technical conditions.
Attorney Jay Lynch and project representative Christopher Bicchio presented the plan to convert the roughly 72,000-square-foot, three-story office building on a 6.7-acre site into 82 rental units, ranging from studios to primarily one-bedrooms and about a dozen two-bedroom units. The project will reuse the existing parking field (the site currently has 277 spaces) and the applicant said code-required parking for the residential use would be 87 spaces; the applicant expects the adaptive reuse to generate fewer vehicle trips than the prior office use.
The project underwent a technical-review-committee (TRC) review and the TRC recommended conditions. Planning staff said the applicant provided letters from the Newport water and sewer authorities indicating capacity, but the TRC requested a camera inspection of the sewer line on the applicant's property and a hydrant flow test to confirm fire-suppression capacity; both items were made conditions of any approval. The applicant agreed to those conditions and to supply the utility letters for the planning file.
Several board members expressed concern the submitted development-impact statement was a short summary and lacked supporting documentation that typically accompanies such conversions (traffic tables, impacts on police/fire/schools). The applicant's engineer said trip-generation estimates used the Institute of Transportation Engineers (ITE) trip-generation methodology and that, compared with a fully occupied office use, the residential conversion would result in fewer daily and peak-hour trips. For sewer, the applicant reported discussions with the sewer authority and said capacity existed; the sewer authority asked only for the on-site camera inspection.
Board members requested that the applicant supply copies of the utility capacity letters and agreed to include TRC conditions — sewer-camera inspection and hydrant-flow confirmation — before permitting. The board then moved, seconded and approved the adaptive-reuse plan and requested waivers to certain window-design provisions, conditioned on receipt of the utility letters and completion of the TRC-requested checks.
Votes were taken by voice; no roll-call tallies were read into the record.
