Crossroads Plaza gets a green light
After two years of hearings, reconfigurations, and changing engineers, developer Joseph Wong has finally received a go-ahead to build Crossroads Plaza, a cluster of retail buildings planned for the Four Corners intersection in Groton.
The Planning Board voted unanimously last week to sanction the plan, which is expected to create a small commercial hub at the junction of Sandy Pond Road and Route 119.
The plans call for four buildings at the site, including a bank, a restaurant, and a Dunkin' Donuts. The fourth building is expected to have anywhere from one to four tenants and will be 7,500 square feet, said Brian Levey, a lawyer who represents Wong.
Levey said the developer hopes to break ground by October.
``We're hoping that will happen fairly soon," he said.
The approval comes just three months after Wong resubmitted his plans. He had initially asked the board to approve a project with a total of 34,000 square feet, a plan the board sharply criticized for overburdening the property.
The new plans call for a development roughly half that size, at 17,500 square feet, diminishing the negative impacts that had concerned the board, such as drainage and parking, said Bruce Ringwall, the project's engineer.
Levey said that after the Planning Board lambasted his plans last fall, Wong switched his engineering team. Ringwall's firm helped create a commercial center that fit with the zoning of the property, he said. In addition to scaling down the size of the project, Ringwall halved the number of parking spaces to 133.
Members of the Planning Board had been concerned about the amount of pavement on the property.
``Things really started to happen" when Ringwall's company came in," Levey said.
The plans also call for elaborate landscaping to improve the aesthetics of the intersection, currently a barren strip of vacant property where the Groton Jade Restaurant used to sit. Ringwall said the landscaping design calls for 32 shade trees at the intersection, 15 of which will border the street along the junction.
The Planning Board also had objected to aesthetics of the Dunkin' Donuts shop, and Wong responded by changing the architecture to a Colonial-style building that ``fits with the character of the town," Ringwall said.
The project is just one part of an economic and residential surge at the Four Corners intersection. The first phase was a 60,000-square-foot Shaw's supermarket, which opened last fall, and an 84-unit residential development approved in 2005.
Shaw's also has another 48,000 square feet of building space approved for its property, said Michelle Collette, planning administrator.
The development in and around the intersection has prompted the Massachusetts Highway Department to install the town's first traffic signal.
The Four Corners Neighborhood Group, an organization concerned about the rapid pace of development at the intersection, has not attended the recent hearings on Crossroads Plaza, Collette said.
Sarah Campbell, a member of the group, wasn't available for comment about Crossroads Plaza, but she has said in the past that the project has less ``heavy retail," such as a pharmacy that was originally planned, so the group is less concerned about it than it is about other areas of the intersection.
