Nonprofit, Danbury ‘close’ to settling suit over motel homeless shelter
DANBURY — The city Zoning Commission will decide as soon as next week whether to entertain a proposed agreement to settle the lawsuit filed by a nonprofit when its request was denied to run the former Super 8 motel as a transitional shelter for those experiencing homelessness.
“This settlement proposal that has been submitted by Pacific House is at the point where the city staff is ready to present it the Zoning Commission in executive session, where it will be entirely up to the commission to decide whether to even consider it, let alone adopt it,” said Dan Casagrande, the attorney representing Danbury in the lawsuit.
The settlement, the details of which have not been disclosed, would end a legal battle over the Super 8 motel run by Pacific House.
The Stamford nonprofit sued Danbury in 2021 after the Zoning Commission ruled that making it a permanent home for those who are homeless “may result in detrimental impacts to the public health, welfare and safety of the residents and businesses of the surrounding area and could decrease property values.”
The two sides arriving “sufficiently close” to an out-of-court agreement comes as City Hall promotes a complex deal with Pacific House to buy a dormitory building and run it as a 20-bed shelter in exchange for giving the nonprofit all the permits it needs to convert the 86room motel into “not less than 40 units of permanent
affordable supportive housing.”
A meeting of city leaders and department heads about that proposed deal with Pacific House was planned Tuesday night.
Casagrande on Tuesday would not comment on the relationship between the proposed out-of-court agreement that the Zoning Commission will consider as soon as Feb. 28 and the deal Mayor Dean Esposito is encouraging the City Council to approve with Pacific House.
“The two issues are related, but they are not dependent on each other,” Casagrande said. “That is as far as I can go.”
An attorney for Pacific House would not comment.
“I don’t want to get ahead of myself,” attorney Timothy Hollister said on Tuesday.
In a legal memo last week, Hollister asked a state Superior Court judge for time because “the parties in the underlying agreement are sufficiently close to agreement,” which could be reached as soon as mid-March.
How and when the two sides agree remains to be seen. The disagreement reached a peak in November
2021, when after 17 hours of heated public hearing testimony the Zoning Commission voted against what would have been the city’s long-term plan for housing people who are experiencing homelessness.
Meanwhile, the clock is ticking. Gov. Ned Lamont’s emergency order from the COVID-19 era that allows people experiencing homelessness to say in the Super 8 motel without zoning permission expires at the end of June.
In response, the city is piecing together a plan for those experiencing homelessness that includes the newly opened Danbury Support Center at 41 New St., which is at capacity with 20 men and women, and the proposed new partnership in which Pacific House would buy and run the 20-bed dormitory building on Spring Street.
Casagrande said that any settlement considered by the Zoning Commission would be subject to a public hearing, with all the details of the out-of-court agreement publicly available.