A CRUSHING DISCOVERY
Inspectors look at possible rockprocessing operation in North Stamford
“It’s so blatant now, with the leaves gone.”
Greg Chuckas, a West Haviland Lane resident
STAMFORD — Until the leaves fell, North Stamford residents weren’t sure what was going on at the site of the old Twin Lakes Swim & Tennis Club on West Haviland Lane.
There was a rumor that a Silicon Valley millionaire had purchased the rocky, hilly, forested 13 acres to build an estate. Another rumor buzzed that a developer had subdivided the parcel with a plan to put up five houses.
Action was welcome, residents said, because the land has been vacant since 2008, when the memberowned club went bankrupt. It had become a hangout for teenagers and a hazard because of the pool full of water and the crumbling buildings, they said.
But once the trees were bare, residents saw what they say looked like a rockcrushing operation, not a homeconstruction site. One resident said he followed some of the large dump trucks that came and went Monday through Saturday, making as many as 40 trips daily.
Greg Chuckas said one truck brought the material to some type of yard on the West Side.
“I followed another truck to I95 headed south. Another one went to a yard on the South End,” Chuckas said. “This stuff is going all over.”
He first noticed the operation in October, he said.
“It’s so blatant now, with the leaves gone, that last week I saw a big excavator loading a dump truck right from West Haviland Lane,” Chuckas said. “You could see it from the road.”
Neighbor Mike Miller said he saw trucks bringing material into the site at
the end of October.
“I don’t know where it’s coming from. I thought, ‘Are they burying it? Are they processing it there and then bringing it somewhere else?’ ” Miller said. “If so, it’s a zoning violation.”
The neighborhood is zoned for singlefamily homes on 1acre lots.
“They have some kind of operation there that I can see from my yard,” Miller said. “There’s a pile of boulders, a pile of unprocessed soil, and a third pile of processed material. The first two piles don’t move, but the third one gets higher and lower as the trucks come in and out.”
Land Use Bureau Chief Ralph Blessing said city officials learned about the operation within the last month. The parcel is owned by General Portfolio Properties, a Massachusetts investment firm that bought it in 2012 among a bundle of foreclosed properties.
“We reached out to the property owner because there seems to be more going on than is allowed,” Blessing said.
It involves a rockcrushing company the city has been battling for a decade — A. Vitti Excavators LLC and A. Vitti Recycling Inc. at Rugby and Harbor streets.
Zoning laws prohibit rockcrushing in the mixed manufacturing and residential South End neighborhood, but neighbors have long reported trucks delivering slabs of concrete and blacktop, rocks, bricks and other material that is then jackhammered and crushed six days a week, creating noise, vibration, dust and flying stones.
The city obtained a ceaseanddesist order in 2010 and the case has been in and out of court ever since.
Zoning inspectors have visited West Haviland Lane several times in the last month, Blessing said.
“We don’t know exactly what is going on,” he said. “Garbage was being dumped there — it was a serious blight situation. Vitti was hired as a contractor by the property owner to fix the blight. Now there appears to be something else happening there.”
Blessing said someone from General Portfolio Properties told the city Vitti has been given two weeks to finish the work and leave.
Vitti’s attorney, Tom Cassone of Stamford, said the company, owned by Antonio Vitti, is doing what it was hired to do.
“There are three swimming pools they were hired to crush and backfill, along with some tennis courts and the foundations of two buildings. So it’s just a demo job. Anytime you do demo, you break up material to get it in the truck,” Cassone said. “It’s not what the code refers to as a rockcrushing enterprise, which you need a special exception for. That’s not what they are doing.”
Miller, who like Chuckas reported that he tried for weeks to reach someone in City Hall, said a zoning inspector came to his house Monday afternoon and watched the operation from his yard.
“All the blight is still there, and they were crushing rock,” Miller said.
Chuckas said he saw the same, along with big piles of gravel.
“The pool is removed but the remnants of the clubhouse are still there. The light poles, the snack bar, a building that looks like it was a garage are still there,” Chuckas said. “At two trucks an hour, six days a week, all that stuff should be gone by now.”
Miller said his fear is that the situation on West Haviland Lane will end up like the one at Rugby and Harbor streets.
“I don’t want it to be a yearslong issue,” Miller said. “That’s what I’m trying to avoid.”