SMITHFIELD – Plans to construct a car wash and small-scale retail development at 270 Putnam Pike are waiting on a larger project across the road.
Attorney Timothy Kane told the Smithfield Planning Board on July 16 that they need the mixed-use Churchill & Banks project, located across the busy four-lane roadway near Route 295, to move forward with development and get its own traffic light, which is why they needed an extension.
The board approved a one-year extension on a master plan granted to the project on the 8.5-acre property in 2023.
The project from Sunn Builders Inc. and Clover Leaf Ret, LLC is located on a group of properties extending into Johnston, where the developer previously said some residential development is planned.
Kane said that after that master plan was approved in May of 2023, they went to zoning for a special use permit and dimensional variances, items that can now simply be approved by the Planning Board, he noted.
The major condition the Zoning Board placed on the approval then was that they needed a traffic light to get people in and out of the development, said Kane. His client pursued that option with the Rhode Island Department of Transportation, but RIDOT would not approve it, saying the traffic here would not justify the numbers for a light.
They went back to zoning in 2024 and asked that the condition be removed, he said, but they received a hard no in the name of public safety, which they didn’t quibble with and went back to the drawing board.
They’re now waiting on the Churchill & Banks project, he said, which has been scaled back from hundreds of apartments plus retail development to an 80,000-square-foot office building and 100 apartments. Though it’s smaller now, he said, it will still generate enough traffic to justify a light, and the Churchill & Banks project now seems to be moving forward.
Kane said they absolutely need that other larger project to progress to get the light and make their project possible. They hope to come back next year sometime with a more detailed preliminary plan for the second phase in a three-part approval.
