Pride Stores changes plans on expansion

Feb. 10, 2017 | Chris Goudreau
cgoudreau@thereminder.com

Pride Stores CEO Robert Bolduc proposed plans for an additional pump station at Pride’s Longmeadow Street location to the Planning Board at its Feb. 1 meeting.
Reminder Publications photo by Chris Goudreau

LONGMEADOW – Pride Stores has scrapped an idea to expand its Longmeadow Street location along U.S. Route 5 by adding a café/bakery with a drive-thru on an abutting parcel across the state line in Enfield, but still hopes create a new fueling station on the Longmeadow side.

Pride CEO Robert Bolduc met with the Planning Board at its Feb. 1 meeting and stated dealing with two Planning Boards and two states became “unwieldy as witnessed by the fact that Enfield didn’t come tonight.”

He added, “As much as we wanted to do the café/bakery, we simply shelved it. We may come back to it at a later date, but we’re the developers and we have the option to take something off the table, so we did. But we kept the good part and the good part is we have 16 feet more of land in Massachusetts from that site that we purchased, which we are now using for the Pride site.”

Bolduc said the parcel Pride purchased has property in Massachusetts and Connecticut.

“It had 16 feet in Massachusetts and it had the remainder of the property in Connecticut,” he explained. “And so we took what we really wanted all along, which was the 16 feet.”

Bolduc said the market currently consists of four fueling bays and would seek to add a fifth.

“This won’t bring in any extra traffic,” he noted. “This will handle the traffic that’s there now better.”

Planning Board members expressed concern about traffic issues at the location, which is already considered to be an area where collisions are higher than average. In 2011, the Longmeadow Planning Board rejected Pride’s initial plans to update the location.

“Okay, Bob, I’m going to be very blunt here,” Planning Board member Walter Gunn told Bolduc. “I’m within several hundred yards of this gas station. I walk and ride my bicycle quite frequently to the restaurants on that side of the street in Enfield, specifically the McDonald’s [and] the Dunkin’ Donuts. I would have gone to your bakery if it would have been built. I’m a pedestrian. This current traffic light does not work for pedestrian traffic and I will stop this project unless there’s an agreement to a left hand turn signal, changing the signalization, because right now you’re going to kill a pedestrian … All I know is people want to dash in there to get an open pump and what happens is you’re going to knock off somebody at the crosswalk.”

Bolduc said he agrees the traffic light needs to be updated.

Town Manager Stephen Crane said the location receives approximately 700 customers on a daily basis.

“I congratulate Pride – the station is so successful it is off the charts from the International Traffic Engineer’s modeling,” he explained. “It blows away their metrics for gas stations – two fold, I think … So, that’s why we have said from the beginning the number of vehicle trips generated by the station certainly merit changing the right turn only lane into a shared right through.”

The top factor that would need to be addressed is the volume of traffic, Crane said.

“The second factor is the overwhelming moving out south,” he noted. “There are four ways of getting into the site in the proposed circulation plan and two ways of getting out and one of those ways instructs you to go north, but 90 percent of the cars coming out of here are going south.”

Crane said he views the project as a way to reconfigure the intersection and make the entire area work better for its traffic flow.

“I actually believe that the bakery project was a key component of really rethinking the site and giving it more opportunities for exiting south and that’s where we left it,” he explained. “And I just want to say the record will show in Enfield that he did withdraw the project, but it was more of zoning issues. It wasn’t a lack of commitment on the Enfield Planning Department to work with them.”

Bolduc asserted the project was properly zoned in Enfield.

“We addressed that particular issue on page one of our application to them and they didn’t read it – Not until about one hour before the meeting when the planning director read it,” he explained. “And so at the meeting he said, ‘You know, it doesn’t meet the zoning issues, therefore we can’t even consider it tonight,’ which was totally inaccurate, but the chair heard that and only that, did not want to hear from us, and said, ‘Okay, close the book.’ And we all walked out.”

He added Pride has found a case in 2000 where the town of Enfield’s Planning Board approved a former café/bakery at the same site.

“Everyone’s saying we have legal problems there and it’s our position, legally, that we don’t,” Bolduc said.

The next step for the project would be for the town to complete its own independent traffic study, which would take a month until someone is hired, Crane said.

“Now you’re telling us it’s going to be a month off the bat until you even get to it,” Bolduc told Crane. “This is not fair. You’re holding up progress here,” to which Crane responded that he would work as expeditiously as possible to make sure the project moves along.

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