Dramatically different projects underway in Yorktown

BY PETER KATZ Pkatz@westfairinc.com

Two development proposals with very different objectives recently received approvals by Yorktown officials. Both will offer sleeping accommodations, but one will feature luxury for humans while the other is especially designed for some very special canines.

The Planning Board gave its approval for the construction of the town’s first boutique hotel in the Yorktown Heights business corridor to be known as The Gardena. The hotel became possible when in 2021 the Town Board voted to adopt overlay districts in the Yorktown Heights and Lake Osceola business hamlets. The overlay districts were intended to expand the types of new development that would be allowed. as being a small, luxury hotel that does not have more than 25 rooms and that offers an enhanced level of services with unique accommodations. The Gardena will be in a three-story structure at 1952 Commerce St. at the corner of Veterans Road and Commerce. It will have 18 rooms along with a café, a rooftop bar and grill and off-street parking.

At 3241 Crompond Road (Route 202) in Yorktown Heights, Guiding Eyes for the Blind is moving ahead with plans to construct a new 30,000-square-foot two-story seller was represented by Garry Klein, managing director of Houlihan Lawrence Commercial. The buyer was represented by William Cuddy Jr. and Jacqueline Novotny, both affiliated with CBRE.

Joseph Riina of Site Design Consultants explained to the Planning Board that the proposed hotel would use existing parking spaces on the property. The existing building would be demolished and the proposed building will overlap the footprint of the existing building and some of the parking. The main entry to the building will face Veterans Road. The Commerce Street side will have a prominent clock tower feature with an interior stairwell. A patio area is proposed on the Veterans Road side which is adjacent to the café that is to be located on the first floor. Riina said that the developer believes there is ample parking available in the vicinity of the proposed hotel and that would make up for the proposal including fewer parking spaces than required by code.

After a zoning text amendment was approved by the Town Board, Guiding Eyes was able to go ahead and submit its site plan application to the Planning Board.

Attorney David Steinmetz of the White Plains-based law firm Zarin & Steinmetz noted that Guiding Eyes has been operating in Yorktown at their existing facility located ing facility which would accommodate up to 200 dogs. He noted that while the proposed facility is similar to the Granite Springs facility, it will be further advanced in technology and noise control.

Tom Panek, president and CEO of Guiding Eyes, who is blind, said that the organization has been around since 1956 and they continue to care about the community. He said that they have taken a thoughtful approach to this proposal and the property. Panek was accompanied at a Planning Board meeting by his guide dog named Blaze, who showed the good manners taught by Guiding Eyes by quietly relaxing on the floor.

Riina, who is an engineering consultant for the Guiding Eyes project as well as for the boutique hotel, explained that to the north of the Guiding Eyes site is the Lowe’s shopping center and Old Crompond Road. A storage center, BJ’s and Signs Ink also are next to the site. To the south are residential properties which are accessed off Carpenter Road that borders the southern property line of the site. The Guiding Eyes site is currently improved with a single-family dwelling that has been abandoned for quite some time. Other than the area around the existing residence, most of the site is wooded with some mature trees. A wetland bounds the west, north, and east with the exception of the pandemic from 2020 into 2021. Just prior to the pandemic, we were handling about 7 million passengers per year, and that makes us a goodsized medium-hub airport.

If you look in terms of nonstop destinations, we've grown nonstop destinations at Bradley by 30% to 35%. We're able to bring transcontinental and transatlantic service to the airport, as well, and we've made a lot of improvements — the most visible improvement is our Ground Transportation Center, a $210 million project that substantially enhanced how rental cars are obtained. We've also undertaken an additional $74 million worth of runway and taxiway improvements and another $87 million with roadway upgrades and realignment.

We are now undertaking two very large projects. One is a checked baggage screening system that we're going to build — that's a $151 million project that will allow us to have people check in directly at an airline ticket counter, have their bags checked, and they're taken away and then they're processed remotely. Versus today, where people have to check in at the airline ticket counter, then drag their bag over to a TSA screening machine to undergo the security check. We're also investing another roughly $58 million into the terminal building to enhance passenger circulation throughout the building — that's also being done with an eye towards enhancing overall capacity of the building, so that we can defer construction of a new major terminal year well into the future. Because if you were to build a new terminal, you're talking well in excess of a billion-dollar investment.

Bradley Airport is now supporting well over 20,000 jobs here in the state. So, when you're talking about a state the size of Connecticut, that's a significant economic impact. And I think some of the things that we've done as the airport authority have really led to national recognition — last year, the Conde Nast readers’ poll ranked it as the second-best airport in the U.S., and we were also recognized by USA Today's Readers’ Choice Award as the seventh best small airport in the country.

Since the beginning of the summer, there have been a lot of news stories about problems at airports across the country, with flights being canceled and delayed. Have these hiccups impacted Bradley?

I think every airport gets impacted because this is a unified system. So, if New York airports are having a problem or Baltimore's having a problem, aircrafts rotate through those airports all day long. So, if a flight is delayed getting into New York and then it ultimately goes from

New York to Raleigh-Durham and then it makes a flight up from Raleigh-Durham to Bradley, that is going to impact that flight because the aircraft that's been on that circuit all day long got impacted by that stop it had to make in New York.

But when you look at delays or cancellations that emanate as a result of operations at a given airport, Bradley has one of the best track records here in the country. For example, we're frequently cited during snow season — our snow removal process allows us to keep the airport open when many other airports may have to close during winter storms.

And how are things at the other airports operated by your agency?

We've been very successful, particularly at Waterbury-Oxford Airport. We've gotten a lot of private investment made into that airport and we've been able to pull quite a bit of traffic from general aviation traffic from New York as a result of some of the investments and developments. We also operate Groton-New London that's another what's called Part 139 Airport, meaning we have a certificate there to bring commercial air service passenger to the airport. We are working towards trying to get an airline to start service at GrotonNew London Airport.

We also operate Hartford-Brainard Airport, Wyndham Airport and Danielson Airport. When you look at the economic impact of those five general aviation airports, they're generating about $410 million worth of economic impact here in the state as well.

Groton-New London Airport had commercial service at one time. What type of airlines are you looking for at that facility? And do you think that this would be a viable destination for a commercial carrier?

We're talking about what I call niche service. We're looking for a carrier that will connect Groton-New London into the greater aviation system — for example, that could be a flight from New London into Philadelphia, where there would be great access to the American Airlines system out of Philadelphia. For the businesses that are located down in that area, to have a carrier like American or Delta or any number of carriers to start a level of service out of Groton-New London into one of their hubs is really what we're after.

For a number of years, there were flights from the shoreline to Philadelphia from Tweed New Haven Airport, although that venue now has a wider range of flights courtesy of Avelo Airlines. What is the CAA’s relationship like with Tweed?

We do not own or operate Tweed — that's owned by the city of New Haven and operated by the Tweed New Haven Airport Authority. Our only relationship there is that we have regulatory oversight over all of the airports here in Connecticut, whether we own them or not — that's a responsibility we inherited from the DOT.

There is no direct relationship, so to speak, although it's something that I do caution folks about quite often because service development needs to be coordinated between Tweet New Haven and Bradley. Because you don't want Tweed doing something that's going to impact Bradley's market and vice versa. The service level development should be coordinated between both airports.

What is the status of CAA's relation with Sikorsky Memorial Airport, which is located in Stratford but owned by the city of Bridgeport?

We continue to talk to the city of Bridgeport. At one time, we were interested in potentially acquiring the airport, but our due diligence got us to back away from that because of the costs involved in potential environmental cleanup related to the transfer act. But we are still talking about the potential of an operating agreement, meaning the CAA would operate the airport on behalf of the city of Bridgeport.

While we’re looking back at the first 10 years of the CAA, what is the agency going to be doing for the next 10 years? What do you have anything on your upcoming agenda that you're able to preview?

We're going to continue to invest into the infrastructure at Bradley Airport and we're constantly looking to improve our service. Everything we do there — whether it's updating our restaurants or bringing an actual new concession — is always done with an eye towards how is this going to benefit the passenger experience at Bradley.

One of the specific things we really want to work on over the next couple of years is enhancing our international network out of Bradley. We're also going to be working to enhance our long-haul domestic route network, and a primary focus there is to get service into Seattle. But that doesn't mean we're not going to focus on what I'll call the medium haul destinations — to add cities like Austin or Milwaukee. That would do quite a bit to our route network.

The cornerstone of any airport is how healthy is your airline system. Because the more routes you add, the more seats you add — and the more seats you add, the more passengers you can accommodate the more passengers you accommodate and. And that's what allows us to continue to invest into the aviation system here in Connecticut, if we can continue to develop that revenue stream.