It’s by no means a first, but the industrial park set for completion next year in Bristol’s southeast corner is the first new one the city – and region – has seen for quite some time.
And a manufacturing business is slated to be the first tenant for the aptly named Southeast Bristol Business Park.
“It’s basically a done deal,” Jonathan Rosenthal, executive of the Bristol Development Authority, said of the first pending sale for the industrial park, which will go to a yet-undisclosed manufacturing business. The buyer plans to build an 11,500-square-foot building on one of the park’s smaller lots, Rosenthal said.
When done, the new industrial park will comprise 13 lots on 51 acres adjacent to Route 229. The park itself will run north and east in an “L” shape around the privately developed, already-existent Superior Business Park, named for the former Superior Electric Co.
At the moment, it’s a single, 211,000-square-foot building owned by Winstanley Enterprises that will be substantially occupied by Bristol’s most-watched company, ESPN, based a mile down the road. But plans for the 40 acre-site call for a second, 100,000-square foot office building that will connect into the town-developed park, Rosenthal said.
The town-sponsored development for Southeast Business Park – the single, simply named “Business Park Road” – should be completed by next summer. However, Rosenthal estimated it would take up to three years to sell and put in place deals to build on the land.
“Realistically, once the roads are built, we will be committed to building most of the lots within three years,” he said.
The end of the line may be in sight for Southeast, but it’s been a long time coming. Plans for the site began nearly a decade ago, and most of the land to build the park was taken over five years ago in a bitter eminent domain case.
The development of the park marks an uptick for a type of development that had boomed 20 years ago in Bristol’s southeast corner, but slowed in the 1990s as the market for easier-to-build residential developments eclipsed industrial and business parks.
The 1980s saw a bloom of town- and privately-built business parks flourish in Bristol, just down the road from the current site, when 229 Technology Park and Halcyon Industrial Park were built by the town, and Industrial Builders completed an informal industrial park along Dolphin Road.
But in Bristol, as in the rest of Central Connecticut, towns ceased developing such parks through most of the 1990s and early part of this decade.
“It’s probably the only one going right now,” Rosenthal said. “We couldn’t find any comparables when we began looking at this project, other than a park set up in the past decade in Plymouth.”
In Rosenthal’s mind, the town-sponsored parks have an advantage over private ones in that they care little about who is contracted to build the park – only that they do in fact complete a building which meets designated design criteria.
The market for manufacturers looking at industrial park space in Bristol appears strong. US Machine Tools Co. for instance recently bought its 70 Horizon Dr. building in 229 Technology Park for $2.6 million
There is also a little bit of a price advantage, Rosenthal said. The town’s goal is to make money from tax revenue – not the sale of a property – so it’s willing to break even on a sale to bring in an owner that will generate tax dollars.
In the last few years, the western edge of the Greater Hartford market has been a booming area for buildings between 10,000 and 50,000 square feet, said Mark Duclos, managing director for Sentry Commercial in Hartford, which oversaw the sale of the US Machine Tools building.
“In that region in particular, if a manufacturing company is looking for a building, they really don’t want to move,” he said. “Even if the price is higher to build than buy, companies will opt to build if they can’t sit tight.”
Given that fact, there’s likely plenty of demand to fill a new business park, Duclos said.
