Thomas Breen photo
Engineer Jeff Bord presents the Wendy’s site plan for 129 Amity Rd.
An Amity parcel previously slated to house a medical marijuana dispensary will instead be developed into a Wendy’s fast food restaurant.
The City Plan Commission unanimously signed off on the site plan for the new proposed Wendy’s at 129 Amity Rd. during its regular monthly meeting on the second floor of City Hall.
Glen Greenberg, the parcel’s owner who also runs the downtown cigar bar The Owl Shop, had previously won City Plan Commission approval back in May 2018 to open a medical marijuana dispensary on the 0.74-acre site that is bounded to the southeast by the Merritt Parkway.
But that planned development was contingent upon the state’s decision on where to award one of the limited medical marijuana dispensary licenses.
State regulators ultimately bypassed Greenberg’s Amity Road site, selecting instead the former Tommy K’s Plaza at 1351 Whalley Ave., which is now home to the recently opened dispensary, Affinity Health & Wellness. According to the state Department of Consumer Protection, that’s the only one of the state’s 14 licensed dispensaries that is located in New Haven. Nearly a quarter of the state’s registered medical marijuana patients, meanwhile, live in New Haven county.
City Plan Commission meeting.
At the City Plan meeting this past Wednesday night, Rocky Hill-based engineer Jeff Bord presented site plans for the new planned use of the Amity Road parcel, which currently houses a vacant former garden center. The site is still owned by Greenberg through the holding company 129 Amity Road LLC.
That use will be a 2,584 square-foot Wendy’s drive-through restaurant, which, Board said, is allowed as of right in the BA (General Business) zone in which it sits. Another Wendy’s restaurant opened up at 67 – 81 Whalley Ave., which is around 3.5 miles away from the 129 Amity Rd. site, earlier this year.
When still used as a garden center, Bord said, the site was well over an acre large. But since then, the state Department of Transportation (DOT) has taken several rights of access to various parts of the parcel, dropping its overall size to 0.74 acres.
“Now it’s under an acre,” he said, “which really limits development of the parcel.”
There will be 26 parking spaces on the site, he said, including two handicap accessible spaces. There will also be two Frosty-shaped bike racks, which should be able to accommodate between two and four bikes each.
“I frequent that area,” City Plan Commission Chair Ed Mattison said, “and traffic backups are constant there. It’s very crowded. Wendy’s would, I believe, be quite successful there. It’s just hard to image how you manage the ins and outs.”
The applicants are working with the state DOT, Bord said, on traffic signal modifications that would allow for a signalized entrance and exit at the proposed new Wendy’s, he said.
What a waste.