Construction-weary Danbury residents make noise about proposed $80M cancer center on the West Side
DANBURY — A group of West Side residents who are tired of construction and ripped up roads are not sure what is worse — the prospect of a new $80 million cancer center on Wooster Heights Road, or the fact that they’re just now learning about it.
“We have rallied ourselves to let our neighbors know what you’re doing, and I think there should have been better communication,” West Side resident Janet Murphy said during a public hearing last week. “This could be another potential nightmare, especially just having gone through the (Eversource) gas line replacement.”
Murphy is referring to plans launched a year ago to create what would be Connecticut’s first cancer center to use proton therapy — a technology that aims to kill tumors with a minimum of damage to healthy tissue. The state Office of Health Strategy is considering Danbury Proton and a second proposal by Hartford HealthCare and the Yale New Haven Health System to use the novel therapy.
The state’s decisions are expected before the end of the summer.
Meanwhile Danbury Proton is seeking permission from Danbury’s Planning Commission to build a single-story 16,000-square-foot treatment center on a 3-acre site across Route 7 from the Danbury Municipal Airport and the Danbury Fair mall.
The Planning Commission closed the public hearing last week after hearing from a handful of construction-weary residents of Wooster Heights, setting up a vote by the five-member elected board on July 21.
Planning Commission Chairman Arnold Finaldi, one of four board members who signaled they supported approving Danbury Proton last week, said the proposal should not trigger neighborhood fears that construction will be like the Keystone Place assisted living facility across the street because that project was 10 times the size of Danbury Proton.
“While I empathize with a lot of the neighbors and what they have been through — I have sat in that same traffic — I think that I am fairly comfortable that the scale of this project is much smaller, and will be much less impactful,” Finaldi said.
A small group of neighbors who joined the public hearing on the videoconferencing platform Zoom said city planners didn’t know the half of it.
“We’ve had nonstop uproar here on the streets … and although you keep saying it’s going to be a small amount, you keep adding and adding,” said Kim McCormack, a resident of Terre Haute Road. “There’s days where you’re backed up trying to get up Wooster Heights, and days when getting out of Terre Haute is like taking your life in your hands.”
The proposed site at 85 Wooster Heights Road is on the periphery of the city’s hot West Side, where a $36 million rehabilitation hospital has been approved in the sprawling Reserve residential development, and where owners of a 1.2 million-square-foot office park at the former Union Carbide headquarters are building apartments, medical offices and a 1,400-student academy.
Danbury Proton’s attorney said the specialized treatment center would add 300 trips a day to the 12,000 traffic trips that are already happening daily to the west of the site, and the 10,000 traffic trips that are already happening daily to the east of the site.
“I certainly understand the concerns of the neighborhood that they may be tired of construction, but we are here to tell you that this is going to be less impactful than any of those items you have suffered through,” attorney Thomas Beecher said during the July 7 public hearing. “Once this project is done, there will be very little impact on the neighborhood.”
None of the residents who voiced their concerns had a problem with the cancer center itself.
“I am 100 percent supportive of the outcome — so after it is built I have no issues whatsoever,” said longtime Dartmouth Lane resident Jackie Reizes during the public hearing. “We’re community people .. .and our issue is we were not informed about anything.”
Stephen Courtney, a managing member of Danbury Proton, said during the public hearing that it was not his intention to “secretly do an $80 million project in this town.”
“When we started this project over a year ago, we created a website with numerous tabs of information because we wanted to be a good neighbor and be transparent with our project,” Courtney said. “We are quite surprised to find out that anybody in Danbury didn’t know about the project because we spent a lot of time energy and money getting that news out.”
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