To Nancy Hadley”™s way of thinking, Bridgeport needs a fairy godmother to come in as a developer.
Since leaving the city”™s employ as economic director, she is doing her best to make one materialize as head of Hadley Group L.L.C., which works to match developers and tenants with suitable properties and financing ”“ and she is not alone.
In April, the Bridgeport Chamber of Commerce launched a weekly seminar highlighting elements of Bridgeport”™s opportunities for economic development, opening with an overview and then featuring a review of the city”™s restaurant scene and opportunities.
Just a few people attended the first session in Bridgeport, but the chamber promises the series is just part of a coming “road show” to showcase the city to developers in other Fairfield County municipalities.
Only weeks earlier, Gov. Dannel P. Malloy took that message to a wider audience ”“ attendees of a U.S. Environmental Protection Agency brownfields conference in Philadelphia, where Northeast states and communities met to share ideas for jumpstarting development of polluted properties.
At the conference, Malloy highlighted his success as mayor of Stamford in helping push the city”™s Harbor Point development into what has become one of the largest projects on the East Coast ”“ then in the next breath touted the potential Bridgeport offers with its own waterfront.
Hadley, who attended the conference, said it was a needed boost for Bridgeport, which saw a flurry of proposals for redevelopment at the height of the last economic cycle, only to see some of them evaporate in the 2008 credit crisis, recession, and collapse of the real estate markets.
“We have 22 miles of waterfront,” Hadley said. “You”™d die to have a New England city with that kind of waterfront.”
The anchor of that waterfront, of course, is the proposed Steelpointe project that has idled the past few years despite ongoing infrastructure work to ready the 50-acre property for a proposed mixed-use neighborhood.
Bridgeport is spending $13.5 million of mainly federal funding to improve streets that crisscross the peninsula, to include pedestrian walkways and bikeways.
“To bring jobs to Steelpointe ”¦ we need even more vigorous support from federal and state agencies like EPA,” said Mayor Bill Finch, in a statement issued following an April roundtable highlighting challenges and opportunities with the city”™s brownfields. “We want to keep the momentum going, with sites that are ready to go so we can take advantage of the economic upswing to bring development income to the city.”
At the roundtable discussion, businesses and developers shared their experiences in Bridgeport, including Jan Cohen, owner of the Barnum Business Center and neighboring Barnum Lumber Co. Cohen said after buying a former scrap yard on the calculation that the cleanup would cost $800,000 at most, crews discovered previously hidden hazardous waste that tripled the estimates.
Because EPA was able to provide loan financing for 80 percent of the remediation, the project continued. Now the toxins have been removed and the site is home to an industrial park with two completed buildings and two additional concrete slabs that are available for construction.
In the past month, Bridgeport”™s biggest economic development story has not been about a building going up, but rather a set of buildings coming down ”“ the demolition of a facility in the city”™s east corridor originally built as a World War I factory for Remington Arms and subsequently used by Fairfield-based General Electric Co.
The city is considering plans for a proposed 700,000-square-foot campus north of the proposed Seaview Plaza, tentatively dubbed the Lake Success Eco-Business Park.
“Certainly we hope there is going to be a lot of interest on that and a lot of bidders,” Hadley said.
