City gets state grant to study the future of Amphenol site
DANBURY — City officials will use a $200,000 state grant to study the cost of removing the contaminants that remain at the site of a former Amphenol warehouse on East Franklin Street and to determine how the property might be reused.
The crumbling warehouse now stands fenced off on a 2.5-acre lot behind the Danbury Police Department’s headquarters in a mostly residential neighborhood. The city owns both that property and its adjacent former parking lot at 72-80 Maple St. The condemned property was seized by the city in 2019 from its former owners, Aberdeen Development, which owed $1.1 million in unpaid property taxes at the time.
“The $200,000 the city has been awarded to assess a brownfield property will help pave the way for revitalizing our city’s unused spaces, unlocking potential for sustainable development and community enrichment,” Danbury Mayor Roberto Alves said in a statement.
The Connecticut Department of Economic and Community Development’s Office of Brownfield Remediation and Development awarded the grant. Danbury and eight other municipalities across Connecticut will receive a total of $7.2 million in grant funds to support the remediation and assessment of blighted properties across a total 713 acres of land, according to an announcement issued by Gov. Ned Lamont’s office.
The funds “will support these communities with investigating and cleaning up these properties so they can be redeveloped and put back into productive use to support economic growth,” Lamont’s office said.
“Nobody wants to live in a community that has old, polluted, blighted properties that sit vacant for decades when this land could be used for productive purposes, such as business growth and new housing,” Lamont said in a statement. “By partnering with municipalities and developers, we can clean up these lifeless properties and bring them
back from the dead.”
DECD Interim Commissioner Dan O’Keefe, in a statement, described his department’s brownfields program as “critical to building vibrancy in our communities. We continue to invest in remediation and assessment activities because they are the linchpin to opening up new opportunities for private investment and economic growth at the local level.”
The amount of contamination at the site has been the topic of past public discussions, and whether the site can be rehabilitated.
Former state Rep. Ken Gucker was once in the middle of that discussion when he floated the idea of building a school on the site, to accommodate the city’s growing student population.
Gucker has since walked back that idea, maintaining he was chided over the suggestion that he wanted to build a school on a contaminated site.
Still, he maintains the property still has value, while other elected officials previously described environmental assessments as deeming the property unsalvageable and uninhabitable.
Through past public records requests with the state Department of Energy and Environmental Protection, Gucker said he learned that while contamination is still present at the site, significant remediation has already been completed.
“There was contamination, but the site was remediated in 2012,” Gucker said, adding that some of the structures have already been demolished.
Gucker said he is pleased that the Alves administration is revisiting the idea of remediating the property and exploring its potential reuse.
“I’m happy to see that this was brought up, that the city is thinking a little more outside the box,” he said.