In a CT city it’s an iconic restaurant fighting a development vision. So leaders brought a new idea.

It’s a matter of perspective in a Connecticut city where people are known to speak their minds.

In West Haven, lots of people are talking about losing the chance to have a brewery and taproom in the old Savin Rock Conference Center on Rock Street, foiled by a lawsuit by Jimmies of Savin Rock across the street.

But Mayor Dorinda Borer, elected in November 2023 , and her new economic development director, Steve Fontana, the city’s first in seven years, say they are undaunted by the setback and see bright days ahead for the city.

“We have a lot of activity that’s just on the verge of busting loose, busting open,” Borer said.

Borer said the conference center — originally the old Phyllis’ Restaurant — will be going back out to bid; there is a new restaurant, beer garden and ice cream parlor planned for the old Chick’s Drive-In about a mile away; and there are several developers looking at the Haven site between First Avenue and New Haven Harbor, originally planned as a $200 million premium shopping center with 100 outlet stores and six restaurants.

New England Brewing Co. , now based in Woodbridge, had planned to move to the beachfront spot, but were stymied by Jimmies’ suit against NEBCO and the city Zoning Board of Appeals. The suit was based on zoning issues and variances NEBCO had sought.

“I think the brewery would have brought people outside of West Haven … into West Haven to go to the brewery, spend money,” Borer said. “But also, they weren’t going to be serving large-scale food. So the thought was that people would visit the brewery, it would be more of a destination area, and then they would go to our local restaurants as well.”

That would have included Jimmies, she said.

“Not only did they bite the hand that would feed them … because that would have literally fed their business,” Borer said. “So not only would it have brought people in to frequent our businesses, but expose West Haven to others so that they want to come back and visit and spend money.”

The conference center is about to go out to bid, she said.

“There’s a couple of large-scale restaurants, one that wants to combine a restaurant with potential banquet hall,” Borer said. “I don’t know that that will pan out because I don’t know that the space is there for that, the footprint is there for that. So we’ll see.

“I’m actually excited to see what the next chapter is. It’s time,” she said. “Unfortunately, we have gone through so much legal and a roller coaster ride, and while we’re disappointed that NEBCO is not coming, it’s time to close the chapter and I’m excited to see what the next chapter brings.”

Jimmies’ attorney, Kevin Curseaden of Curseaden & Moore of Milford, did not return calls seeking comment. Rob Leonard, owner of NEBCO, also did not return calls, nor did his attorney, Brian Lema of Berchem Moses of Milford.

Hot dogs to restaurant and beer

A more current development is east of Jimmies on Beach Street, where Texas-based CDM Holdings is planning Riva, a restaurant and beer garden with an attached ice cream parlor on the site of Chick’s, another iconic West Haven seafood and hot dog stand. The company had previously built 12 luxury condos on the site.

Christopher Marone, a principal of CDM Holdings and CEO of New Haven County Credit Union , did not return a call seeking comment.

Riva is benefiting from a long-term project to raise Beach Street 11 feet above sea level, completed earlier this year. “The road raising was for coastal resiliency because of Irene and Sandy (storms) because we lost 23 homes down there,” Borer said.

“That was an $8.5 million project,” she said. “I had fought to get $5.2 million to finish that road raising because I knew it was going to be a catalyst for that area. We had an old skatepark with graffiti. We had Chick’s that had been sitting there abandoned and falling down. We had parking lots that were not usable.”

Borer said the project is one of several being leveraged from the raising of the street, including the closed Debonair Motel, which Borer said may be close to selling, and a bait shop, the last remaining structure of the old Savin Rock amusement park , which a couple is planning to turn into a coffee shop.

Onetime mall to new development

As Long Island Sound turns around Sandy Point into New Haven Harbor, the onetime vision of Mayor Ed O’Brien — expected to create 1,200 jobs and generate $3 million in taxes — sits as a 24-acre wasteland between Main and Elm Streets, First Avenue and the water.

Owned by the Simon Property Group of Indianapolis, the Haven site is a prime spot for development, Borer said.

“I have met with probably 15 developers on a parallel track, looking to purchase the site, and we have been weeding them out,” she said. “And I’ve been working hand in hand with the Simon Group to do that because the Simon Group really looks at the financials … and I look at the concept.”

Now, Borer said, “I would say we’re down to four viable developers and this week the Simon Group is working on last best offer with them. So I’m going to guess — I don’t want to pin myself down — I want to say probably in a month we’re going to know who the buyer is, and then there’s going to be a 60-day contingency and then a 60-day close.”

Another area Borer and Fontana are focusing on is downtown, particularly the block of Campbell Avenue between Main and Center streets.

“I’ve met with the owner of the Main block in downtown to talk about what it would look like for a private/public partnership and is he willing to sell, and then I’ve talked to a few developers that are potentially interested in buying,” Borer said.

The city has also started a storefront facade-upgrade program, with $350,000 in ARPA funds. “So businesses can get up to $10,000 to upgrade their storefronts, because when you drive through here, if you’re a developer, and you’re looking to come here, we needed a facelift,” Borer said.

“We need to look a little better when we’re trying to attract major developers,” she said. “So that kind of stuff people don’t talk about, but it’s important.”

Becoming more business friendly

There were also changes needed in City Hall, Borer said.

“There’s other things we had to do, though, when I came in, to get us situated, to get our system in place to be ready for development and to be more business friendly,” she said.

“Our Building Department, our permitting process, our hours, we had a bad reputation for being one of the worst building departments to work with,” she said.

“So with limited hours, it was a very cumbersome process,” she said. “So we reorganized the Building Department. I hired Steve and somebody who works for Steve because you can’t just have an economic development director. You have to have a project manager that helps execute.”

The city also created a Downtown Merchants Association. “We’re actually doing that this week and had a small business forum to communicate resources,” Borer said.

Borer said a lot of the economic development work had simply gone undone during previous administrations.

“Facts are facts, right? So there was no economic development director in the city of West Haven for the past I would say six or seven years,” she said. “No budget for economic development, no marketing budget, no project manager. There was literally no one driving the bus to bring business here, to focus on retention to create a vision that the city can aim for.”

She brought in Fontana, who served as deputy director of economic development in New Haven for 10 years, who in turn hired Kathleen Krolak as his deputy.

Leveraging business interest

“There’s just a lot of opportunity here, a lot of underutilized real estate, a lot of opportunity to pursue small business and entrepreneurship, to revitalize the downtown village district and to leverage a lot of interest there is out there in the market for development, particularly industrial commercial development,” Fontana said.

Those include properties on the Boston Post Road in Allingtown, he said. “Route 1 actually has a significant amount of, again, underutilized commercial/industrial property,” he said. “The interesting thing there is what is Route 1 going to become? It’s not necessarily going to remain the same kind of commercial strip that it was back in the ’70s. It may be some combination of housing, warehouse, retail, office.

“Obviously, we know what Route 1 is like in Orange and Milford, but in West Haven, it perhaps can become something a little different, so that’s an exciting idea,” he said.

As for the Haven’s future, Fontana said, “I imagine it will have a variety of components. It could have some retail, it could have recreation, entertainment, it could have housing, it could have office. We don’t quite know. It’s a large property. It’s 24 acres, and so it’s got a lot of potential. The question is, how can we best harness it? And different developers have slightly different ideas.”

Fontana said Borer “is changing the narrative with regard to West Haven. I think that West Haven has obviously been through a lot of challenges over the last decade or so.”

A city under state oversight

Among those challenges has been that the city has been under the oversight of the state Municipal Accountability Review Board since 2017 as a city “experiencing various levels of fiscal distress.” However, in January, its credit rating was raised and the city was given a “positive” outlook.

Fontana credited Borer with having “really refocused people’s attention on the underlying strengths of West Haven, which are a tremendous shoreline, largest shoreline in Connecticut for any town, city, as well as a great location to do business because of the highways and train station, as well as the fact that there’s so much underutilized potential.”

He pointed out that West Haven’s neighbors, New Haven and Milford, have been improving in their economic development. “I think what’s happened over time is a lot of economic development has bypassed West Haven for different reasons,” he said.

“And the question really presented itself as to why it is that West Haven, positioned between those two cities that were both doing well, wasn’t doing better,” he said. “And so I think the larger narrative is this, there’s no single reason. But there’s also nothing that we can’t address and change about West Haven’s economic development trajectory.”

Fontana said he sees “a lot of interest, pent-up interest if you want or deferred interest, but interest nonetheless in West Haven, because of its location, because of its infrastructure, and then the attractions.”

In addition to the shoreline, he mentioned the University of New Haven , which is expanding, and its location close to the Veterans Affairs medical center and Notre Dame High School.

Positive interest in the city

“The initial response we’ve been getting from people we know, the development community, has been very positive,” Fontana said. They want to come here and see what we’ve got. And it’s gratifying, but it’s still early days.

“One of the things that I used to tell people is, economic development is a long game,” he said. “You don’t really have somebody walk in your office and say, I want to build this building or this development tomorrow to make it happen. It’s a process where you develop it over months, if not years.”

‘Uplifted and upgraded’

Longtime West Havener Carroll E. Brown, president of the West Haven Black Coalition, said she didn’t agree with the idea of a brewery at the conference center because she sees too much alcohol being sold in the city as it is. She would have liked it to return as a banquet hall.

“You have nowhere to hold functions,” she said. “We all have to travel when we hold a function. I thought that could be developed into a community center where people could use it for having their wedding receptions. Churches could have dinners there. They had a nice-sized kitchen, two bathrooms.”

Brown said she would put restaurants on the Haven site to complement the different cuisines West Haven offers. But she lamented how numerous houses were torn down and the residents evicted to create the site that was never developed.

“It’s disgraceful and disgusting. The homes were beautiful. And there was no reason to treat them that way,” she said. “These are all registered voters. They took their homes. Ten years! So they’ve got to do something differently.

“West Haven is an urban city,” she said. “People aren’t poor, but it’s an urban city that needs to be uplifted and upgraded.”

Ed Stannard can be reached at estannard@courant.com .