Proposed Expansion to Cheshire Retirement Center Draws Protests

For almost 40 years, Marsha Wheeler has lived in her Jocelyn Lane home and coexisted with her neighbor, the Marbridge Retirement Center on West Main Street. 

But now she is terrified that her quality of life, and that of her neighbors, will be destroyed with the center's plans to expand.

Wheeler and many of her neighbors were at Cheshire Town Hall Wednesday night for the public hearing on Marbridge's application for a special permit to tear down the existing building and build a new facility that will almost double its capacity.

"Half of our neighborhood is here," Wheeler told the commission. "We don't want this to destroy our neighborhood."

Lewis Bower, president of the Bower Group which owns Marbridge, as well as several other nursing home and the home health care agency Keep Me Home, said they want to expand and update the facility to provide the facilities needed to stay competitive. 

Plans call for a new building to be built in the back of the property and the existing building to be torn down and replaced. The new building would be a replica of the existing building, Bower said, which was built in 1900. The project would increase the center's size to 28,000 square feet.

Most of the new clients will likely be in their 80s and 90s, he said, so the project won't have much of an impact on traffic. The proposed 17 parking spaces will be more than enough to accommodate visitors and staff, which usually number three per shift now and will rise to about six per shift with the expansion, he said.

The new facility will meet modern building codes, he said, and allow them to provide elevators and bathrooms in each room, which isn't the case now.

But neighbors claim it's already trying having to deal with some of the center's residents who, they say, are considerably younger than 80 and some of whom they suspect have substance abuse problems.

"I want to see in writing that they will be in their 80s and 90s," said Carter Lane resident Matthew LaFrance. "We have a lot of strange characters walking around the neighborhood in their 40s, 50s and 60s and I really don't feel safe having my kids playing outside."

The city of West Haven earlier this year rejected a similar application for Seacrest Retirement Center, another of Bower's properties, because of the affect it would have on the neighborhood, LaFrance said.

"We have on a smaller scale what's currently there," he said.

If approved, the project will hurt property values, LaFrance said.

"We are a young family who decided to buy a home in Cheshire, and we based our decision on what we knew at the time," he said. "If this goes up, we will have no choice but to stay in our starter home forever."