EASTHAMPTON — As the project continues to work its way through the Planning Department, revisions and permit plans have been put in place for the Tasty Top Development in Easthampton.

Frank DeMarinis, president of Sage Engineering and Constructing Inc., the firm proposing and building the Tasty Top Development, said that the property was initially purchased in February of 2022 and has been in the permitting process ever since.

“We’ve been working on this since then and we paid $2.2 million for the property, and we have hundreds of thousands of dollars in engineering associated with permitting it. This is going to bring in the realm of $140 million of construction and that’s a whole lot of jobs. We’re going to have guys working here for probably five to seven years,” he said.

Currently DeMarinis said the development is preparing permit applications with both the

Massachusetts Department of Transportation and Massachusetts Environmental Policy Act Office.

“We just had a meeting with MassDOT and we’re filing a curb cut permit with them on [June 15] and we’re also filing an [environmental notification form] with MEPA on the same day, the applications go hand in hand. We have GZA that’s preparing the MEPA application,” he said.

DeMarinis explained that the MEPA application process will take about six to eight months before it is approved. He estimated that construction likely would not begin for another year if everything is approved.

Throughout the project DeMarinis said the development has been working closely with the city.
“They asked us to try to reduce a little bit of land clearing, so we got one of the buildings on the far east corner of the property,” he said.

DeMarinis also explained that efforts to mitigate traffic stem directly from city requests.

“They also asked us to mitigate the traffic and we have done that, we’ve mitigated the traffic by adding an intersection or a roundabout, MassDOT is going to make the final determination which one they want, it’s their road,” he said.

Overall DeMarinis said the project has made several changes based on requests from the city.

“We reduced a lot of hard surface, 28 parking spaces and some loading area, and reducing some building surface, we added more tree planting and we reduced the wooded clearing. We also reduced the proposed traffic counts by reducing 13,000 square feet of retail space and we reduced another 2,500 feet of retail space with the bank site,” he said. “We’re trying to work with the Planning Department, they felt that the scope was a little large, so we reduced the traffic counts by making these modifications.”

DeMarinis added that the determination would be forthcoming in the next three to four months, after which the project would need to be approved with the condition that it meets the determination of MassDOT.

“The roundabout I think is the best solution, it will slow down traffic. Two pedestrians were killed about three or four months ago right in front of Burger King. MassDOT hired [Vannesse Hangen Brustlin, Inc. a Boston-based engineering firm] to upgrade the roads or add some crosswalks into the area, so now VHB is taking our intersection improvements into their design, so we are working together as a team,” DeMarinis said.

DeMarinis also noted that the construction would not result in a large loss of trees.

“It’s a 34-acre site and we are probably cutting trees down in about 3.5 acres. For every tree that we are cutting down, we’re planting two new ones. There’s virtually no direct impact to a resource area when we’re going through conservation. We’ll be working within buffer zones, but not natural resource areas,” DeMarinis said. “It really is an environmentally sensitive project.”

While the housing units are going to be affordable, DeMarinis said they are going to have features that separate them from other rental units.

“They’re oversized units, you’re going to have a modern, up-to-date building with sprinkler systems in it — there’s not sprinklers in residential units or like duplexes and triplexes, there’s nothing like that. It’s going to meet all environmental codes, so the energy costs on these things are probably going to be 1/8 the cost associated with one of the duplexes and triplexes in town,” he said. “They’re super-efficient.”

By building affordable housing on the property, DeMarinis said the project would be in line with the city’s goals for the property.

“The city did a study a few years ago about what do we do about the housing issue, and they slated this property with multiple renderings and concepts on this property. The city themselves slated this for housing and was in support of it,” he said. “That is the reason I purchased this property.”

DeMarinis explained that the rate for each of the units will be determined by the state, since they will be affordable.

“The state determines the mix of affordable units. So, they’re all affordable, but how they are priced are based on the individual’s income. Our goal is to have 208 units that are affordable,” he said. “It’s fixed rates so the state will determine what the rates on all these units are. It’s based on the median income in Easthampton.”

DeMarinis explained that the project was initially supposed to include an additional building of affordable housing, but that was cut from the project. He also explained that while there were plans for two restaurants on the site, that has also changed.

“We had two restaurant sites for like an Applebee’s or Texas Roadhouse, we only have one now, we changed the other to a drive through banking site and we have someone interested in that right now,” he said.

The site will also include an additional Roots Learning Center, currently there are two in Westfield and a third in East Longmeadow. DeMarinis explained that recently the development also entered into a lease agreement with Our Lady Daycare, which went into effect on June 5.

“Our intention is to move that daycare onto this new site with a brand-new state of the art daycare with a playground into everything,” he said. “We’re just buying the business per se, we’ll be leasing the building back to the church that the current daycare is in. Soon as our building is built, we’ll just move the kids and the furniture over into the new property.”

Because the property will be private, the city will not have to maintain any of the roads.

“It’ll have a great impact on tax revenue for the city. These are all private streets and private roads, we have to maintain them, the city doesn’t have to incur that cost whatsoever, but they’ll still be collecting property taxes,” he said.

DeMarinis added that the development will not require any special permits or waivers as it fits into the zoning for the site.

“We’re really following the zoning laws without any exceptions. People are telling us to do other things but then you have to get zone changes and have ZBA approval for higher buildings. We have a certain set of rules we have to abide by, and we are following them,” he said.

The Tasty Top Development was scheduled to appear before the Planning Board again on June 6, after Reminder Publishing’s deadline.