Not so fast? Kimco’s Wilton Center Redevelopment Hit with Design Critiques as P&Z Review Nears Deadline

In May, GOOD Morning Wilton reported on a comment made by attorney Casey Healy of Gregory & Adams, the law firm that represents Kimco in its redevelopment of the southern portion of its Wilton Center campus. In a meeting with the Inland Wetlands Commission, Healy said that after working through five pre-applications discussions with Planning and Zoning Commission over two-and-a-half years, “We were approved to move forward with our applications.”

We wrote then that the comment suggested that Kimco was under the impression that P&Z’s pre-application reviews had granted the application a degree of implicit support, a greenlight to move forward for a quick approval.

That presumption seemed to come to a halt Monday evening, July 8, as the Commission expressed new and deepening reservations about the project’s design. P&Z had opened the public hearing process on the project on June 10. Feedback from the Commission in that initial kick off discussion was broadly positive, although the commissioners requested several additional pieces of information. That evening, Chair Rick Tomasetti requested more explicit diagrams and depictions of how the proposal conforms to the different elements of Wilton Center’s new form-based zoning code and which areas are being counted as civic space. Kimco returned on Monday night with more detailed explanations for these elements of the project, which ignited concerns from several commissioners about whether the company was holding to the spirit and letter of the new zoning overlay.

These concerns also come after a surge in public emails to the Commission over the last few weeks, more than 75% of which have criticized the Kimco redevelopment plan. To date, the Kimco project — which has not yet entered the public comment stage of its public review — has generated 35 emails directly to the town and nearly 200 comments on the Wilton 411 Facebook page. P&Z’s public comments file for 15-21 River Rd. was last updated on June 26, so any emails received in the last two weeks are not included in this tally.

How Did Wilton Get Here?

The Kimco redevelopment project was first introduced informally to P&Z in a pre-application hearing in December 2021. The company, the largest landowner in Wilton Center, is proposing to demolish the southern portion of its River Rd. property (21 River Rd.) and redevelop it as a 169-unit mixed-use residential/commercial complex. Pre-apps are a way for applicants to present preliminary designs for a development project to P&Z for non-binding feedback from the Commission. In recent years, the role of the pre-app has ballooned, with projects like Kimco going through multiple design overhauls based on unofficial comments from the Commission.

However, these pre-apps differ from a true public review process because only members of P&Z are permitted to comment. Without feedback from the broader public or even fellow government entities, the discussions are insular and designs evolve in a kind of echo chamber. No outside feedback is permitted until a project is formally submitted and enters public review, and even then, P&Z only allows public comment in the very final moments of a project’s months-long review process.

In Kimco’s case, the company has overhauled its design proposal at least five times since December 2021, based on feedback from these limited P&Z pre-app discussions. The P&Z subcommittee that drafted Wilton Center’s new zoning overlay also invited Kimco for a special meeting to help shape the regulations that now govern downtown development. Each of these conversations and the relevant renderings have been covered by GMW in real time:  

• December 2021: P&Z Signals an In-Depth Process to Come in Kimco’s Redevelopment Plans
• May 2022: P&Z Praises Kimco’s Redevelopment Ideas, Is Less Enthused about Glover Ave., and Considers Airbnbs in Wilton
• July 2022: P&Z Takes Another Look at Kimco’s River Rd. Redevelopment Plan, Hears Updates on ASML & Pedestrian Bridge
• November 2022: Easy P&Z OK for Painted Cookie’s New Wilton Center Location but Kimco Wants Speedier Answers for Redevelopment
• April 2023: Kimco to P&Z: We Want 5th Floor, but New Movie Theater in Wilton Center “Not Realistic”
• February 2024: New Kimco Proposal, New Apartments for Danbury Rd., and More at P&Z

As Nick Brown, Kimco’s Vice President for Development, would later point out, all but one of these P&Z pre-app discussions took place when several members of the current Commission had not even been elected by the public yet.

In its own formal review of the application this past March, the Architectural Review Board/Village District Design Advisory Committee initially expressed fairly critical comments on the project, which various members called “generic,” “searching for character,” “cold and blank,” and “just too high.”

ARB/VDDAC Member Kathy Poirier in particular, questioned the shadows that would be cast by the project and pointed out that the renderings provided by Kimco show the project’s public spaces in full daylight exposure. A shadow analysis provided by Kimco this week demonstrates that the public space shown in the renderings will indeed be in shadow during the evening hours when the proposed gathering space and restaurant are most likely to be in use. The following images show Kimco’s shadow projections for the 60-foot building at 5 p.m. in March, June, September, and December respectively.

However, the ARB/VDDAC final report that was delivered to P&Z largely omitted these concerns, instead calling the project well-conceived, well-planned, and “extremely well-designed.”

What Are the Major Concerns?

“[Commissioner] Ahasic caught flack for calling it a dorm last time but I agree with him. It’s not pleasing to the eye.” Commissioner Anthony Cenatiempo

Although the project received mixed reactions from the Commission in this most recent go-around Monday evening, a few specific concerns rose to the forefront of discussion.

Qualifying for the Fifth-Story Bonus

The new zoning overlay for Wilton Center passed last fall includes a mechanism for a fifth-story bonus, described as follows: “The Planning and Zoning Commission may grant Bonusable Building Height as described in Table E3 for projects that provide exceptional public benefits, such as 12% affordable housing, preservation of important historical structures, additional civic space and exceptional levels of sustainability in construction, building performance, and landscaping design.”

Representing Kimco, engineer Craig Flaherty explained that the company does intend to meet the above requirement of an “exceptional public benefit.”

At Tomasetti’s request, Flaherty described for the first time the “exceptional public benefits” Kimco is providing in exchange for the right to build a fifth story, explaining that the company intends to meet that requirement by applying for LEED Silver certification.

In the zoning overlays developed as part of the Master Plan process for the Wilton train station and along the east and west corridors of Danbury Rd., all new buildings using the updated zoning regulations must meet the requirements of LEED Silver, although the zoning stops short of requiring that developers receive formal LEED Silver certification because the process is lengthy and expensive.

However, unlike the other areas, the overlay for Wilton Center does not mention LEED Silver. As explained by Flaherty, Kimco is proposing that it will meet the sustainability goals required in the surrounding areas, and also take the additional step to apply for certification for it. In exchange for providing this as an exceptional public benefit, Kimco would like approval to build a fifth story.

Commissioner Jill Warren expressed some skepticism. “Obviously LEED certification is important, but that just doesn’t seem very compelling.” She asked if the project could increase its portion of affordable housing, even by one or two percent. Flaherty responded that other elements of the design required by the zoning overlay already make the project too expensive to increase the affordable housing component.

Commissioner Mark Ahasic took aim at the height of the building more broadly, and framed it as one reason why so many of the letters received from residents noted that the building ‘doesn’t feel like Wilton.’

“If we go back to when we deliberated on the Master Plan, one of my concerns was the fifth story,” Ahasic said. “A number of the other commissioners said, ‘Don’t worry about the fifth story, it’s not really a fifth floor, it’s an architectural feature.’ Yet when we look at this design, it’s clearly a fifth story.”

Providing Meaningful Civic Space

One of the most progressive elements of the new Wilton Center zoning overlay is that it requires all new buildings to incorporate civic spaces, defined as “publicly accessible open spaces permanently dedicated to public use.” Parks, courtyards, greens, plazas, pocket parks, playgrounds, outdoor places of celebration, and squares are listed as examples.

As a property greater than five acres in size, the Kimco project is required to set aside half an acre for civic space on the new site. After being pressed by Tomasetti and others to spell out what is being counted as civic space in the prior discussion, Kimco’s representatives returned with a map denoting its required amenity areas.

Shown in the maps below, the areas being calculated as civic space amenity are depicted in green. The area appears to include planted beds of shrubs along the face of the building, as well as a series of tree beds along River Rd., and, oddly, the front half of 15 parking spaces that line the street. It also includes an oval-shaped corner plaza that Kimco has proposed either landscaping as lawn or designing as a paved seating area, a more traditional civic space but one that several commissioners worried would be underutilized.

In presenting the civic space component, Flaherty noted that the walkway in front of the building [depicted as the gray speckled area in the rendering above] was not being counted as civic space. He later referred to this sidewalk as “the embellished pedestrian promenade, which is effectively a gift to the town.”

Referring to the language in the zoning regs, Commissioner Anthony Cenatiempo challenged Flaherty’s offering. “I take it your position is that the civic spaces, i.e. the landscaping along River Rd. and Village Dr., that would be something that would ‘promote gatherings for educational, cultural, and recreational uses’? That’s your position? I don’t necessarily agree with it.”

“A lot of what you highlighted in green on your map looks to me like parking lot plantings and buffer strips,” Vice Chair Melissa-Jean Rotini, who worked on the Wilton Center zoning regulations as a member of the subcommittee, said. “It doesn’t really feel like civic space to me.”

For his part, Commissioner Chris Pagliaro, who also sat on the subcommittee, took a broader view, “I don’t think it’s too far off from what I envisioned when we were going through this. I do think it creates space. I know that not everyone here will agree with that but I’m not offended at all.”

Hiding Parked Cars Behind Frosted Glass

Finally, several commissioners objected to the design plan for the southern corner of Building A, which features large windows of frosted glass that disguise cars parked within the building.

Pagliaro called the design, “eerily reminiscent of what I drive by now: an abandoned storefront.”

“It’s a dead corner,” Cenatiempo added.

How Will Kimco Respond?

At the conclusion of the Commission’s feedback, Flaherty pushed back. “I don’t expect things are going to look miraculously different next time you see it. As far as civic space and the frontage, I’m not sure what else we could do to make this a better space,” he warned.

He asked for concrete suggestions for ways to improve the project and noted, “We’re running out of time.”

For his part, Kimco Development VP Brown said he was “a little concerned” with some of the comments he heard during Monday’s meeting.

“Where is our next step forward, when some of what we’re talking about sounded almost like wholesale changes to a design that has been baking and marinating for quite some time with a lot of feedback?” Brown asked, adding, “At a certain point, we need to advance the ball forward.”

As the evening’s discussion wrapped up, Town Planner Michael Wrinn agreed to work with the applicants on some of the concrete suggestions for improvement that were posed during the evening’s discussion.

Looking Ahead

The next meeting of the Planning and Zoning Commission is scheduled for Monday, July 22. Unless a special meeting is called, this will be the final meeting of P&Z until September, due to the group’s August recess.

Several elements of the Kimco application review process remain open. The Inland Wetlands Commission has twice had to postpone its hearing on the project due to quorum issues; the project is currently slated to begin its review and public hearing there on Thursday, July 11. An independent peer review of the project’s traffic and road safety implications just commenced this week. The application also needs to be approved by the Water Pollution Control Authority, where it is one of six properties vying for attention on tonight’s July 10 agenda.

P&Z applications have a statutory limit on the time they can be under review. On June 26, Healy submitted a letter granting P&Z a 65-day extension to the public hearing period. This is the maximum extension that can be granted. If the public hearing for an application cannot be completed in the allowed timeframe, it would have to be withdrawn and resubmitted by the applicant.

Per its Commission process, P&Z typically does not allow members of the public to speak in favor or opposed to the project until Kimco has completed its presentation and secured approvals from these related town entities. Public comment could be held on Monday, July 22 should these pieces come together, although at this point, it seems a tall order. Members of the public can also submit written comments at any time but emails must reference a specific project in order to be entered into the relevant public record.