Churchill officials will host a public hearing Monday for a set of zoning amendments that would pave the way for a walkable mixed-use development complex at the site of the former Westinghouse Research and Technology Park.
The development project by Commonwealth Commercial Real Estate, dubbed Legacy Crossing, was first presented before council in November. Council subsequently voted to schedule Monday’s public hearing to revise the zoning protocols for the project to continue.
The project is located on the 150-acre site of the George Westinghouse Research Park, which dominated the space throughout the 1970s and 1980s and employed nearly 1,500 people until its closure in the late 1990s.
The proposal would revive the original walkable footprint of the site, anchored around two grocery stores, a gas station, a medical facility, an early childhood education center, and several restaurants and retail locations.
The draft zoning ordinance for Monday’s hearing includes the addition of definitions for data centers, tattoo shops and vape stores in order for them to be excluded from the final project, borough solicitor Gavin Robb said during the council’s March meeting.
The ordinance proposal requires that data center developments have a maximum footprint of 25,000 square feet and be set 500 feet back from property lines.
Should the zoning ordinance be approved, the project would need to undergo more administrative loops, including conditional and land use discussions, in order to start the first phase of the project by demolishing 1 million square feet of original infrastructure throughout the site.
The location has sat vacant for decades following Westinghouse’s closure, and in 2020, Amazon proposed a massive distribution center for the site. Amazon’s proposal for a 2.9-million-square-foot warehouse faced years of community pushback, ultimately leading a group of people to sue in court. Amazon dropped its development plans in 2022.
The hearing is scheduled for 6 p.m. on Monday at Churchill’s municipal office building.
