Dozens pack zoning hearing to preserve Remington Woods
BRIDGEPORT — Tonisha Cohen-King has a highly personal stake in the future of the 420 acres of privately owned woods on the Stratford line off of Boston Avenue.
“My front door faces Remington Woods,” Cohen-King told members of the Bridgeport Planning and Zoning Commission. “One of the things we love is to see the deer, to see the turkeys crossing the street. I’m in support of leaving it just as it is.”
It was not just residents like Cohen-King who on Tuesday and Wednesday nights took over a public hearing on a 300-page rewrite of the city’s entire zoning code and made it about one section of town. Participants in the teleconference phoned in from neighboring municipalities like Stratford and Milford, other cities — Danbury and Stamford — and even Stonington on the Rhode Island border.
“We’re going in the direction of just being a ‘save Remington Woods’ meeting,” Commission Chairman Mel Riley told the audience Tuesday, which zoning staff said numbered about 130, resulting in the need to continue the following evening. Some people spoke both days.
The commission will meet again later this month to consider adopting the new zoning regulations.
“The reason there is such a groundswell of people testifying on this issue tonight (and) this issue has risen to the top is because there is a complete lack of commitment coming from the administration (of Mayor Joe Ganim) to fully preserve the woods,” testified Callie Heilmann, of the Bridgeport Generation Now civic group.
A former munitions testing ground for Remington Arms Company, the woods is now owned by Sporting Goods Properties Inc., a subsidiary of Corteva Agriscience of Delaware, which is in the midst of a yearslong cleanup of industrial contamination overseen by the Connecticut Department of Energy and Environmental Protection and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.
While still a few years off, Sporting Goods wants to reuse the site and recently made public a list of potential options: Office/research & development; hotel/conference center; “green”/ low impact manufacturing; skilled trades; active recreation; and a nature center.
Recognizing ongoing public demand to preserve the woods, the city’s Office of Planning and Economic Development, which along with consultants spent months drafting the citywide zoning overhaul, is recommending changing the Remington site’s destination from “light industrial” to “residential office center.”
Neither Ganim nor his economic development staff returned requests for comment when Hearst Connecticut Media wrote about activists’ concerns with that proposal in October. But on Monday night Lynn Haig, Bridgeport’s planning director, after spending several minutes summarizing the rest of the zoning rewrite and benefits such as it being online, more user friendly and preserving the character of older buildings/neighborhoods, also turned her focus to Remington Woods.
Haig noted that the new 10-year master plan Bridgeport adopted in 2019 following a big public outreach effort does not call for zero development of the woods, but to work with the owner and conservation groups to complete the clean-up and pursue reuses that “advance” preservation and public access.
Haig noted Sporting Goods would prefer to maintain some form of the “light industrial” zoning because it is “the most permissive code we currently have.”
“It allows intense development without any conservation,” she said. “We have proposed a clean mixed-use zone that requires the owner to submit a master plan to the Planning and Zoning Commission for its review and approval.”
Any such plan would have to include open space, Haig said.
Sporting Goods Properties Inc. in a statement to Hearst Connecticut Media Wednesday evening wrote that the company “has made significant progress on its site cleanup program (and) continues to work with planning experts and maintains its goal of a balanced future use that allows for significant conservation of natural areas along with low-impact development.”
But several speakers — some seemingly under the impression that Remington Woods faced complete obliteration and anything could be done there under the zoning rewrite — referred to the key role trees have in battling climate change, and urged the zoning be altered to either leave the property wild, or to make it a park.
“Mature trees keep carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere. Planting 1,000 or a million saplings somewhere will have no effect in the short run, and we only have a short run,” Stanley Heller, of Danbury, said, referring to the environmental repercussions of global warming. “Preservation of mature woods like the one in Bridgeport is essential. It would be an outrage to destroy the thousands of trees there to develop some office park or cemetery or a dump.”
Mustafa Salahuddin, who heads Greater Bridgeport Transit’s bus drivers’ union, referred to Remington Woods as “Bridgeport’s own Central Park,” referring to the New York City landmark for passive and active recreation.
JoAnn Kennedy, 61, testified she is a lifelong resident and that too many people living in the city, herself included, have concrete for backyards. Remington Woods could be a community backyard, Kennedy said, especially for children.
But others argued even making the acreage parkland goes too far. Lela Florel, who runs the Preserve Remington Woods group, said it should be a preserve with walking paths.
“We don’t want development of any kind or any other uses,” Florel said. “Parks are not what we want for the woods.”
Beth Lazar, who lives downtown, agreed. She said, “Parks have roads, baseball fields, monuments, picnics and event areas.
“You commissioners have the power in your hands to pave over paradise or preserve a paradise,” Lazar said.
Haig said there is only so far the city can go to restrict a private property owner.
“The city cannot take the further step some would advocate and just zone the property as parks and open space,” Haig said.
Not only does that remove Remington’s possible economic vitality — Bridgeport is constantly trying to lure new businesses to help alleviate homeowners’ high property taxes — but the move could be considered “reverse condemnation” and be subject to litigation by Sporting Goods, she said.
“An urban forest would be a great asset for Bridgeport,” Haig said. “But we have to get there the right way.”