BRISTOL – Bristol City Council voted to approve two resolutions looking to work with the land bank New Colony Development Corporation in remediating the old Sessions Building along Riverside Avenue at its Tuesday meeting.
With the vote, the land bank would assume what meeting discussion described as around $1 million in tax liens placed on the former manufacturing structure in an attempt to move forward on turning it into potential – what the city has called – workforce apartment units.
City Economic and Community Development Director Justin Malley said the city had been working to bring the building up to modern safety requirements and usability over the course of the last 20 years through a variety of discussions with developers, a land bank, grant applications, the state and more.
As a brownfield site, the building is contaminated with hazardous manufacturing substances. Bristol secured a roughly $2 million grant from the state last year in order to reclaim the space, however, due to supply chain and rising construction prices and discussions between partnering organizations – among them; the city, the state, New Colony Development Corporation and Vesta/BHA Joint Venture – the project has been working on details in order to move forward.
In the meantime, the city has been maintaining utilities to the property while waiting for a final resolution. Vesta/BHA Joint Ventures seeks to develop workforce housing rental apartments out of the property in the hopes of providing affordable living spaces to working professionals. Those apartments would be priced with the intention of being affordable for families that earn 80 percent to 120 percent of the Hartford County area median income.
“These are not destitute folks,” said Malley. “These are middle class people. They’re getting up, going to work and trying to make it work.”
He continued saying the idea is to make it so families can rely on rental guidelines as dictated by the state of Connecticut in such housing units.
Dale Kroop, executive director of New Colony Development Corporation, said a land bank’s job is to take control of the site and “clear all the encumbrances like the taxes and any other mortgages” before a developer can get financing on a property as an intermediate step towards further improvements. The land bank also oversees a property’s remediation.
“Probably two-thirds of the remediation that’s been identified in the building; it’s not even that much asbestos; it’s paint and other things that can be quantified and removed. This site has had numerous site assessments going back to 2001, if I’m correct,” said Kroop.
He noted among some of the first steps to remediate a property like the Sessions Building is to do a records search to see if hazardous spills or other such things have been reported to a fire marshal’s office and to update them, if necessary. A second phase also seeks to quantify what the building’s problems are.
The Sessions Building has been entered into a state program for voluntary cleanup. Without the state’s approval and a remedial action plan, the property’s development cannot move forward. The state, the mayor’s office and the landbank met to bring forward resolutions to the City Council in order to continue the remediation process.
“The whole idea is for us to start remediation this fall and start the foreclosure process to clean up the whole title so that when we’re done sometime in the spring or summer of ‘23, which is about when it would be, the new developer would come in and take the town’s position as guaranteeing the cleanup,” said Kroop.
He said he felt confident the project could meet with success and noted much of what the Sessions Building needed for remediation was normal for an old factory building.
The city has taken part in looking to clean up the Sessions Building as a means of further economic improvement in the area as well as turning it into a taxable asset.
