MONTVILLE – On Tuesday night, the Montville Planning and Zoning Commission gave green light to plans for Gateway to expand its existing street salt business across eastern Connecticut by redeveloping an empty property on the Thames River.
Gateway Terminal attorney Harry Heller told the commission that New Haven-based port operators intend to open the road salt distribution plant before winter. The new facility fills a void left when street salt supplier DRVN of New London State Pier was pushed to make room for its recovery in an offshore windhub – leaving the area without local suppliers of salt.
A street salt business is allowed “as of right” in the industrial-zoned properties, and the commission voted 7-0 for an approved gateway site plan for the project.
Heller said the site had been used for industrial purposes for “well over 100 years” – most recently the AES Thames Cogeneration Power Plant and the WestRock corrugated packaging plant, both outside the store and demolished.
Montville city planner Liz Burdick told the CT examiner that this is the first effort to redevelop the property she has been aware of since the two stores closed. Gateway leases the properties of Uncasville, LLC, a Missouri-based holding company registered in St. Louis. Louis developer Tom Roberts.
“This is an intermodal facility, it is intended for the movement of goods into the region, as well as potentially exporting goods from the region,” Heller said. “It has deep water access for barges. It has the former Central Vermont – I mean now Genesee & Wyoming – railroad track that runs to Worcester and New London, and has the potential to improve the site for intermodal capacity. of the site.
The first phase of the project will excavate the area southwest of where Depot Road crosses with the railway to create a 2.3-hectare concrete road, where up to about 120,000 tons of road salt will be stored.
Gateway co-chief operating officer Mark Augur said the size of the salt heap at the site was about the size of the heap at New London State Pier.
The plan of the gateway is to keep a concrete pier that was previously built on the river to handle the supply of coal for the power plant, and to use the pier to bring shipments of salt, Heller said. The company will install a conveyor belt to unload salt from barges stored at the pier, and will then be loaded onto trucks that take the salt across the railroad tracks into the storage area, he said.
Trucks will access the site via Depot Road, loaded with road salt, crossing a series of scales, then across Depot Road back onto Route 32 or Interstate 395, Heller said. According to a traffic study by Hesketh & amp; Associates, the site would expect about 25 trips per hour during morning and afternoon peaks in winter, and about 65 trips per hour at its peak in the days leading up to a winter storm.
Traffic engineer Scott Hesketh said he expected to leave almost all of the trucks on I-395, and that over 10 percent would use Route 32, mainly trucks serving Montville or neighboring cities.
Heller said phase two of the site development will begin with the removal of material excavated in phase one, which will be used to fill the properties on the other side of the railway line next to the river.
The company would also need to provide additional filling to bring the entire site up to date, and to prepare for future commercial or industrial use, Heller said. Phase two also includes new railroad tracks to “accommodate the transfer of bulk building materials from rail to barge and from barge to rail,” the Gateway proposal said.
Burdick said the gateway did not specify what additional future uses it would envision for the site. Augur declined to answer questions from the CT examiner after the meeting on Tuesday night, and the company did not immediately respond to questions from the CT examiner on Wednesday morning.
The commission was originally scheduled to hear the application later this month, but the gateway asked the special meeting Tuesday night so it could start working sooner to get ready in time for the winter season.
“We have a tight timeline for this project to be ready to deliver salt to the region,” Heller said. “So even if it’s only a few weeks, a few weeks will make a material difference in our construction.”
Road salt will be used in eastern Connecticut, where snow removal companies were forced to drive their trucks an hour to either Providence or New Haven last winter, at a cost of hundreds of dollars a day.
Gateway was chosen in 2019 to be the operator of the New London State Pier for redevelopment. The DRVN distributed road salt on the pier from 2014 to 2014, until it was printed last year to make way for the sanitation of the pier. Gateway is also the operator of the Port of New Haven, where it operates a large street salt distribution business.
Rick Whittle, owner of Mystic-based Allied Snow Removal, said he hopes a street salt distributor back in the area will solve some of the logistical problems and costs he had to deal with DRVN from New London last winter. But he said it all comes down to cost and how streamlined the line is in Montville.
“If they pay more than what I can currently buy in Providence, it will not help me,” Whittle said. “Providence, I can get in and out pretty quickly, so I need the prices to be competitive with everyone else. And no one knows what that will be, because presumably shipping prices are through the roof.
The location in Montville could potentially provide a great fit for the Allied snow, which does a lot of work in Montville, Norwich and the surrounding cities, he said. But it all comes down to the cost and ease of access.
Contractors have complained about long lines and a slow process that picks up salt from Gateway to New Haven in the past, and Whittle said he hopes the Montville location will work more smoothly.
“So I need competitive prices, and then I need to get a good order flow for trucks in and out,” Whittle said. “But instead of running to New Haven or Providence, it could potentially be a home run.”
The project comes as another major redevelopment is proposed almost directly across the Thames River and the Gales ferry, where Cashman Dredging and Marine Contracting are proposing to redevelop the former Dow Chemical plant and a hub for its dredging business in New York and Connecticut.
This project examined the residents of the Gales Ferry, which deals with heavy truck traffic on Route 12 – the main artery through the community – and on the Thames River and railway, with the content of dredging materials handled on the proposed . Facility, and with potential additional use on the Site. An information meeting about the project had to be canceled from its original June date after residents flooded a meeting room at the Ledyard Public Library, and will now be held Monday at 6:30 p.m. at Ledyard Middle School.
