The 140,000-square-foot warehouse proposed on the border of Manchester and East Hartford could impact wetlands enough to require an extensive hearing, Manchester’s Planning Commission has decided.
Greenwich-based Luzern Associates plans to build the warehouse, which will have 28 loading docks and nearly 130 parking spaces, on a 50-acre site at the end of Commerce Street.
Lucerne’s is one of a handful of warehouse plans in central Connecticut, where developers have been busy building in 2022 and 2023. Cutbacks in expansion by Amazon, national retailers and logistics companies have largely halted the flow of proposals for large warehouses and mega-warehouses.
The new building is a speculative investment, Luzern said, meaning there is no pre-registered commercial tenant. Luzern did not specify whether it sees the facility as a single large tenant or two or more smaller ones.
If Manchester approves the wetlands permits and zoning, the Lucerne building would have two drive-through doors and 15 trailer storage spaces. The company has said it would regrade the land and create new wetlands to replace what would be covered by the building itself.
The Planning and Zoning Commission concluded Monday night that there is enough potential for wetland disturbance that a full-scale hearing will be needed before a wetland permit is issued. The commissioners did not set a date, but indicated it will be sometime this summer, perhaps as early as their July 15 meeting.
Luzern and her consultant, TRAC Consulting of New Fairfield, met informally with commissioners last winter to discuss a slightly larger version of the warehouse. It would have been 150,000 square feet, but after considering comments from commissioners, the final version was scaled down by about 6,000 square feet. Luzern also promised tree buffers to protect East Hartford homeowners from noise or light coming from the warehouse.
“The properties are zoned “I” industrial and part of an industrial subdivision approved by the PZC in 2000,” TRAC wrote in a letter to the city in May. “Access to the site is via Commerce Road and is bordered by industrial zoned properties to the east and south, residential zoned properties to the west in East Hartford, and Interstate 291 to the north.”
At 1.5 million square feet, the project would be much smaller than most of the logistics centers proposed in central Connecticut in recent years. Two of the largest are in East Hartford, where Wayfair and Lowe’s are both moving into newly constructed 1.2 million-square-foot warehouses.
Luzern has done other industrial construction or redevelopment projects in Massachusetts, as well as in Wilton, Stamford and Westport. The company is redeveloping about 80,000 square feet of former office space in two buildings on Day Hill Road in Windsor, with plans to create warehouse space.
Windsor has become a hub for new distribution centers over the past decade, but even there, new construction has slowed sharply. In a spring study of the national outlook, Cushman & Wakefield’s Jason Price reported that the industrial space market — primarily warehouses — has softened since late 2023.
“The pipeline under construction has fallen 10 percent since the end of 2023 and is down 40 percent year-over-year as developers scale back starts, particularly speculative developments, amid weaker demand for space and higher interest rates,” Price wrote. “This is the lowest level of the future construction pipeline in three years.”
