Jonathan Hudson of Hudson Companies (left) speaks to Harrisburg residents at a community meeting at Camp Curtin YMCA.
Parking, traffic and local contracting were among the concerns of Harrisburg residents on Monday night, as the builder of a proposed state office building presented an overview of the project.
About 50 people attended the community meeting at the Camp Curtin YMCA, where Jonathan Hudson of Hermitage, Pa.-based Hudson Companies offered an overview of the three-story office building planned for the 2500-block of N. 7th Street.
Several residents asked pointedly about opportunities for disadvantaged business enterprise (DBE) contractors, including Harrisburg-based companies.
“I want to know about accountability as far as dealing with jobs,” said one resident. “A lot of developments have come here, and there’s no accountability to the local contractors.”
Hudson said that his company, which is the general contractor, planned to reach out and try to connect with local subcontractors and vendors, including at a March 18 meeting specifically for this purpose.
“The entirety of that is working and connecting with local vendors, minority-owned businesses, women-owned business enterprises and other distressed business entities,” he said. “That’s a very special, important task for us. We’re taking it very seriously.”
Hudson Companies plans to construct a 130,000-square-foot office building on the former headquarters site of D&H Distributing, which last year moved to a new location in Lower Paxton Township.
The company will build and own the building, Hudson said, for a single tenant—the commonwealth of Pennsylvania, which plans to locate about 850 Department of Human Services and Office of Administration workers there. Most employees will move from offices at the former Harrisburg State Hospital grounds, which the commonwealth is trying to sell.
Hudson plans to demolish the existing, low-slung building and construct a modern-style, mostly brick-and-glass building in its place. The company then plans to retain ownership, leasing it to the state for 20 years, with potential lease extensions.
A slide shows artist’s renderings of the proposed building.
Demolition, he said, would take place in late March. The project would wind its way through the city approval process in April and May, with groundbreaking expected in June. Construction should be complete in the third quarter of 2021.
Many other questions from neighbors in the largely residential Uptown neighborhood concerned parking and traffic.
“Do you plan to widen the road?” asked one resident. “Will you have street parking?”
Hudson said there were no plans to widen 7th Street, but that enough parking would be built on site to accommodate more than 1,000 cars. He further said that he expected no more traffic than was generated by D&H, which had about 750 workers at the location.
Mayor Eric Papenfuse, who attended the meeting, said that the city would like to make road improvements to the N. 7th and Division Street area.
He also said that the city hopes, at some point, to be able to build a bridge to connect Division Street with the Farm Show complex area, which might alleviate some of the traffic concerns. The city has been trying to obtain state funding for this project.
Other residents had questions about environmental issues.
“Will you be incorporating green infrastructure in your building, like a permeable parking lot, taking care for the solar array and a green rooftop garden, for instance?” asked Garvey Presley, secretary of the board for Capital Region Water.
Hudson said that the plan doesn’t include a rooftop garden or a permeable parking surface, but that the company plans to reduce the current percentage of impermeable surface on the 10.5-acre site from the current 99 percent to about 75 percent.
The site also houses a vast solar array farm put in place by D&H. Hudson said that the project would not utilize those panels, but Papenfuse said that the city hopes to repurpose the panels, potentially raising them in places such as the city’s Public Works property and on City Island.
Hudson said that the building would meet Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) green building standards.
“It will perform to LEED standards,” he said. “We’re just not pushing for buying the LEED symbol. We’ll perform just like a LEED building, only without certification.”
The building, he added, would be set back on the site, not near the street like the current D&H building. That would make the property more aesthetically appealing, he said.
The other main area of discussion involved the economy and taxes. Because the building will be privately owned, Hudson Companies will pay property taxes on the site, Hudson said.
Papenfuse added that the 850 workers would pay a total of about $125,000 a year in local services taxes to Harrisburg. That revenue would be new as most of those employees currently work in Susquehanna Township, not the city. Hudson and Papenfuse both mentioned that they believed that businesses in the area would benefit, including at the struggling Uptown Plaza.
“We know this is a big project in the city, a big project in the neighborhood,” Hudson said. “We want to make sure we’re good stewards of our development.”
For more information about Hudson Companies, visit www.hudsoncompanies.net.
