Alright. Mike's on the line. Afternoon, please. 121.
Alright. Good afternoon. Almost evening, everyone. Today is Tuesday, January 21. Two I'm not right.
Yeah. Just mute just mute your, mute your speakers. Two thousand '25. It is 04:46PM. We are calling this regular meeting of the city plan commission to order.
Let's go around and take a vote. We'll start with Noel and go around. Alright. So don't know. Roll call voting on roll call vote.
Noel Sanchez. Yeah. All well.
Sharla Lipschitz. Shion, manager card, DPD staff. Bobby is our staff.
Sharon Garner, legal counsel.
And I'm Michael Ganztaco, the chair. We all have received the minutes for the 12/17/2024 meeting. We hope you had a chance to review them. I think I sent in a little note to you about the clarification of the, what we actually voted on for the last item.
Yeah. So that's contained
in the body of the minutes. Okay.
The actual decision didn't list that, but the the vote was taken to approve what was said at the meeting.
So it's what we was it specifically laid out in that
paragraph before? Okay. It's in the body of the minutes.
Alright. That's I just wanted to confirm that. Anyone else have any comments, notes, edits? If not, we take a motion to approve the minutes of the December 17 meeting. Take a motion to approve the minutes.
Alright. Do have a motion? Do we have a second? Second. Alright.
Let's take a vote. We have a motion. All in favor, aye. Aye. Aye.
All opposed? Any abstentions? The minutes carry. Alright. Up next, election of officers.
Mister Azar, do you have any, anything you'd like to say about that?
All I'll say is that, we thank, all of you who have been officers in the past year. We feel like you've done an excellent job and that and that we appreciate continuity, and we think that the three of you you as chair, Charlotte as vice chair, and Noel as
as secretary would be, great to continue for this year. So, that would be our recommendation. Alright. Are there any, anyone who would like to put forward that or another slate of nominees to the
I'll be the one to put that one forward. Okay. Let's play it according.
be Yes. Yes. So before anyone nominates me for anything else. Yeah.
Alright. We have a we have a motion. Do we have a second? Second. Alright.
All in favor as, nominated, say aye. Aye. Any opposed? Any extensions? Alright.
Congratulations, and I'm sorry. Director's report.
Well, the only thing I have to report on is the progress of the zoning changes that you saw in December. Those have been forwarded on to the city council. Tomorrow night, we will be making a presentation to the ordinance committee on these changes, and the public hearing looks like it's gonna be late February. I think around February 26, given this the amount of time we have to, advertise. So, we're excited to get that moving forward.
And then meanwhile, we have been working behind the scenes on putting together some concepts for the second phase of zoning changes as we've been talking about. So, you should see some of those, ideas coming before you in the coming months.
Great. Thank you, Bob. Alright. This looks like a meeting to just kick off the New Year. Right?
So let's, let's let's dig in. Agenda item number 170 Houghton Street.
The owner applicant is the PRA and College Health Development LLC. Joanne, would you like to introduce this item? Yeah. Sure, mister chair. While the applicant makes their way to the table.
So this is a request for master plan approval for a major land development project on the former American tourster site. And the applicant is proposing to construct three warehouse buildings that that are intended to be used for different uses that are permitted in the MMU 75 zone. They are seeking a waiver from certain items that you typically see at this stage, namely from the height calculation from average grade and elevation and renderings of the buildings. And they will be talking about that and what how that is related to the current condition of the site. So, yeah, applicants here, and they can take you take you there take you from there.
Alright. Good good evening or afternoon still, I guess.
Good evening, everyone. My name is Chris Shay. I'm with Dupree Engineering to Stafford Court in Cranston, Rhode Island. With me, I have the, developer, College Hill Development, Richard Bacardi. And, if you have any questions related to the owner, please let me know.
Do I join as a panelist, Fod?
I'm gonna share my screen. I have a short presentation. So, this is the master plan here, as you know, for the new Providence Business Park. The project is located the project is loaded located in the Northeast Corner of Providence, really on the a portion of the project really touches the municipal boundary between Providence and North Providence. It's located at the terminus of, Houghton Street.
Houghton Street was once upon a time the access drive to the American Tourister Facility, and that is the location of the site, former, American Tourister Building that was destroyed by fire, I think, in the I think I have it written down in 2001. I've been actually involved before I but before I worked at Dupree. About ten years ago, I was first involved in the site, and I assisted on the reconstruction of Houghton Street from a, it was actually although labeled as Houghton Street, it was a private drive. It was upgraded to city standards, so it now is fully full depth reconstruction pavement, sidewalks on both sides, closed drainage, and most importantly, to the site, as well as utilities. So the history, as I started to say, this was the site of the former American tourister, which was destroyed by fire.
It's currently owned by the Providence Redevelopment Agency. Rich and and College Hill Development are working with the Providence Redevelopment Agency and have a an agreement to do the design, permitting, and construction of, of a project at this location. There was a master plan done for this site in 2018. It has since expired. It's very similar development to what we are proposing today.
And as I had mentioned, Helen Street was already reconstructed. There's a little bit more oversight of the existing site. It is undeveloped since the factory was destroyed. Nothing has gone in since 2001. It has only been used as a stockpile area for the city of Providence, most recently by the department, stored some material there.
There's a stockpile of material from the Route 195 relocation project. The site is predominantly flat, although there are areas that kind of grade up towards the North Providence, towards Woodward Road Woodward Road and the Providence North Providence line. In 2017, the site was was cleared in anticipation by the Providence redevelopment agency under a grant to try to prepare the site for development to make it enticing to developers. And since that time, there's been some since 02/1017, you know, the nature has a way of restoring itself, and so there's some brush that has revegetated in in the area that had been cleared for site development. To the south, there's Whipples Pond and some and, that goes into the West River, which flows towards, Branch Avenue.
There are other small isolated pockets of wetlands on the site, Undeveloped land towards North Providence, and then to the south and east is, you can see on the on the left side of the graphic, there's you can see a bus yard. There's also a storage facility, and at the very corner of that plan in the lower right hand corner is the, Goodwill Industries. At present, the site is owned for mixed use industrial, which encourages, you know, new reuse of older buildings, which is obviously not not feasible here. Sorry about that. But also encourages new light industrial, and that is what we are proposing.
The the uses that we are proposing are allowed by right in the zone. And as was mentioned, we are currently asking for a waiver from average grade and building height. But I in the zone, maximum building height is, I think, 75 feet tall, and I don't think any of these buildings would exceed two stories. Most likely, one story for most of the the larger warehouse, possibly office space in one of the warehouses might go up to a 2nd Floor.
Just can I ask a question real quick? Is is the request for the delay on on that just because you're you're finding the the grade currently? Like, you don't know what the grade is going to end up being?
Or We don't know what the grade is going to end up being, but there aren't, specific tenants identified at this point. So, building building design hasn't begun.
But given the uses that, you know, we don't expect the building height to be more than, say, 25 feet or 30 feet.
So the three proposed buildings, and I'll I'll kind of pass by this one this slide, but feel free to ask me to go back. But this is the proposed project. What what you see is kind of a small, medium, and large building. The large building would be a warehouse industrial. The building just south of that is also where proposed to be warehouse industrial.
