New warehouse proposed for 20-acre tract with wetlands in CT town

The 144,000-square-foot warehouse proposed at the Manchester and East Hartford border potentially could affect wetlands so much that it has to undergo a full hearing, Manchester’s planning and zoning commission decided.

Greenwich-based Luzern Associates wants to put up the warehouse with 28 loading docks and nearly 130 parking spaces on part of a 20-acre tract at the end of Commerce Street.

Luzern’s is among just a few pending warehouse plans in central Connecticut, where developers had been in a building spree in 2022 and 2023. Expansion cutbacks by Amazon, national retailers and logistics companies have largely shut off the flow of proposals for large warehouses and mega-warehouses.

The new building is a speculative investment, according to Luzern, which means there is no pre-enlisted commercial tenant. Luzern has not specified whether it sees the facility serving a single large tenant or two or more smaller ones.

If Manchester approves wetlands and zoning permits, Luzern’s building would have two drive-in doors and 15 trailer storage spaces. The company has said it would regrade the land and establish new wetlands to replace what would be covered by the building itself.

The planning and zoning commission on Monday night concluded that there’s enough potential disruption to wetlands that a full-scale hearing will be necessary before a wetlands permit is issued. Commissioners did not set a date, but indicated it will be in the summer, perhaps as soon as their July 15 meeting.

Luzern and its consultant, TRAC Consulting of New Fairfield, last winter informally talked with commissioners about a slightly larger version of the warehouse. It would have been 150,000 square feet, but after considering commissioners’ comments the final version was reduced by about 6,000 square feet. Luzern has 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 May letter to the town. “Access to the site is off of Commerce Road and bounded 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 144,000 square feet, the project would be far smaller than most of the logistics centers that were proposed around central Connecticut over the past few years. Two of the biggest are in East Hartford, where Wayfair and Lowe’s each are moving into freshly built 1.2-million-square-foot warehouses.

Luzern has done other industrial construction or redevelopment projects across Massachusetts as well as in Wilton, Stamford and Westport. The company is in the midst of redeveloping about 80,000 square feet of former office space in two Day Hill Road buildings in Windsor, with plans to establish warehouse space.

Windsor has become a center for new distribution centers in the past decade, but even there, fresh construction has slowed sharply. In a spring study of the national outlook, Jason Price of Cushman & Wakefield reported that the industrial space market — mostly warehouses — has weakened since late 2023.

“The under-construction pipeline has declined by 10 percent since the end of 2023 and is down 40 percent year over year as developers have pulled back on starts, especially speculative developments amid the backdrop of slowing demand for space and higher interest rates,” Price wrote. “This is the lowest the future construction pipeline has been in three years.”