By Brandon T. Bisceglia
Milford’s Planning and Zoning Board delayed a vote Sept. 6 on a proposal for a 342-unit apartment complex with an affordable housing component at 553 West Ave. at the request of the lawyer representing the site’s contract purchaser.
The delay gives Milford residents, some of whom have spoken out vehemently against the project, a third chance to voice their concerns in front of the board when it meets again Sept. 19.
Thomas Lynch, who is representing Grillo Services LLC and initially presented the plan for the complex to the P&Z in August, asked the board to keep the public hearing open for one more cycle so that he and his clients could first receive an updated report from the Milford Police Department’s Traffic Division at its Sept. 12 meeting.
Dozens of residents attended the board meeting and took turns speaking out against the proposal. Several had already registered their disapproval at the August meeting, which had to be suspended after dragging on until 11 p.m. The majority lives in or near the Gloria Commons condominiums, which sits across the street from the site.
James Trowbridge voiced concerns regarding the Iroquois natural gas pipeline, which would run between the two proposed apartment buildings. He questioned whether a risk assessment had been done and whether the developers had considered if the complex could handle a mass evacuation should the pipeline be compromised.
“Is it wise to put so many residents over top the pipeline?” he asked the board.
Other speakers harped on the scale of the project. Clifford Mason passed out photos of a similar development in Norwalk to give the board a sense of what the final result would look like.
“It’s like a massive wall, 400 feet long, with garages as a barrier,” he said. He went on to suggest the developers scale the project down to about half its current size.
Jacquelyn Sanford echoed that concern. “A four-story garage is going to stick out like a sore thumb.”
When the residents had finished, Lynch returned to the podium to present his team’s rebuttal. He pointed out that Gloria Commons itself was a large-scale development. That drew groans from the audience. He said they weren’t hiding the fact that it’s a big building, adding that section of town “is not zoned for a quaint, quiet area.”
He dismissed complaints that there would be a massive increase in traffic, saying that a traffic study his clients conducted relied on “empirical, not anecdotal” evidence. He also said that complaints about noxious smells from a nearby by sewer pump station were misdirected.
“We received approval from the sewer commission. These complaints should be directed to public works,” he suggested.
Finally, Lynch reminded the board that the land use courts had ruled against the board in 2015 over another project that ran near the Iroquois pipeline, saying that the development could not be denied absent specific evidence of an adverse impact on the pipeline.