Houses to Be Razed to Make Way for Childcare Facility

Trees have been taken down and ground up along Farmington Avenue across from Winding Trails and soon two houses will, too, to create space for a new daycare.

The Goddard School, a franchised daycare and preschool with 360 facilities around the country, has Connecticut locations in Brookfield, Glastonbury and Orange.

The plan for the 8,000 square-foot facility at 1125, 1141 and 1145 Farmington Ave. was approved, with a change to a business zone at the Town Plan and Zoning Commission’s April 27 meeting. The facility is expected to open in January 2012.

“The Goddard School is a very high end childcare facility,” said Peter Fishman, president of PKT Development, which owns and manages the property and surrounding area. “I just felt this was a very high quality product to offer the town. I wasn’t looking to put something in there that wasn’t going to fit."

“I’ve been marketing the property for a number of years through our real estate broker and this is just one of the things that finally fell into place, that is, one of the things that the town can use and that is the right kind of use for the land,” Fishman said.

“The TPZ has been looking at the area for years,” said Town Planner Jeffery Ollendorf. “We had all the individual homeowners approach us in the early ’90s asking us to rezone the property to commercial and we said we were not interested in doing that at the time because we were not interested in seeing six or seven individual proposal but rather something more comprehensive.”

Part of the issue, Ollendorf said, was potential traffic that would be created by several business driveways along Route 4. The PKT Development plan avoids the issue by routing The Goddard School driveway up Melrose Drive, where there is already a traffic light.

Fishman owns six contiguous properties in the area and said he will continue to look at other options for the remaining parcels. Fishman said real estate, insurance brokers, small medical offices, retail stores, a bank or a restaurant are all options he’s considering.