A former office building in downtown Plainville that has remained vacant for nearly 25 years will become home to more than 100 Connecticut families.
The state recently provided the town a $541,000 grant to continue remediation on the former White Oak property site.
The work includes demolishing the existing building, removing hazardous material from the soil, soil testing, and monitoring the ground beneath the building.
The project has already taken up about $50,000 in town dollars along with a previous state grant of about $1.4 million.
On the cleaned up site, there are plans to construct a mixed-use development, with about 110 apartments, according to Town Councilor, Christopher Wazorko.
In 2017, the owner of the former White Oak site, offered the space to the town for development, according to Wazorko.
However, over the last nine years, since the project began, there’s been little visible progress on the development. Wazorko said certain complex projects move slowly.
“When you get many levels of government working on stuff together, it does take a long time,” Wazorko said. “Things just don't move fast. We have our application to clean up the property. We're kind of still waiting for DEEP (Department of Energy and Environmental Protection).”
The property, on West Main Street, is adjacent to town hall, separated from the municipal buildings by an active railway.
“We do have to cross a lot of Ts and dot a lot of Is before we can move forward,” Wazorko said. “It's just part of the process,” Wazorko said.
Work will begin in the spring, beginning with the demolition, according to Town Manager Michael Paulhus.
The apartment construction, done in a collaboration between Manafort Brothers Inc. and Newport Realty, will be mixed income, according to Tony Valenti, who is working on the project.
Ten percent of the 110 units will be considered affordable, rented at 80% of the Area Median Income (AMI), with mostly one-bedroom apartments in the building.
On the ground floor a large medical office and some retail space will also be constructed.
"It's all market-by-market driven,” Valenti said. “It's really, really tough to lay out a timeline or critical path for developments like this. We're only four years into it. These projects take a while.”
