Developers present potential brownfield reuse under Connecticut's beneficial-fill pilot; hearing continued after heavy public concern

A development team led by Industrial Development Advantage (IDA) and its consultants presented a technical briefing July 23 on a proposed industrial redevelopment at 303 New Britain Road that would use Connecticut's new large-scale beneficially reclaimed fill pilot to place more than 100,000 cubic yards of engineered fill over a historically impacted brownfield.

Mike Clark of IDA and Steve Sands, a principal with long experience at the site, described the project as a multi-decade cleanup-and-redevelopment effort. Sands said the pilot program and state regulations require a material acceptance plan, routine sampling of fill "every X cubic yards," perimeter groundwater monitoring during construction and up to 30 years of post-construction groundwater monitoring. Licensed environmental professional Brent Hennebrey summarized testing protocols: "These are chemical analyses that are certified by the Department of Public Health," he told the commission, and said composite samples could be taken for each 500 cubic yards of material.

Consultants explained that the project proposes to raise developable portions of the site (roughly 16–17 acres of the 58.5-acre parcel) above the floodplain and to place the fill in engineered lifts with compaction and geotechnical controls. Civil engineer Joe Devine described access constraints and the existing private railroad crossing that will be upgraded for two-way access for trucks. Traffic engineer Nick Moss presented a traffic-impact analysis that estimated about 41 vehicle trips in the AM peak and that construction could produce a peak of roughly nine dump trucks per hour during the most intensive days. Multiple commissioners and many residents said those truck numbers understate impacts and sought a fuller worst-case analysis and a binding construction traffic-management plan. Residents from adjacent Prentice Place and other nearby properties described health and quality-of-life fears including dust, noise and heavy-truck routing through residential streets.

After roughly three hours of questions and public comment, the commission voted to continue the public hearing to August 6 to allow staff and consultants to provide additional detail on truck routing, seasonal traffic counts, sight-distance and parking/turning-radius simulations, and the precise conditions that DEP would attach if the project moves forward under the pilot program. The project remains in the public-hearing stage; the developer asked for conditional site approval to make the DEP pilot application complete but did not seek final construction authorization at this meeting.