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DANBURY — A downtown day care center that wants to buy out its landlord and triple its space to accommodate a 45 percent growth in business has been given the green light by city planners.
Twinkle Little Star Learning Center, a day care center that has been renting 5,000-square-feet of a multi-tenant building across White Street from Western Connecticut State University’s downtown campus since 2008, can finalize plans to buy the building, expand the outdoor playground area, and add parking.
The 1.3-acre site, which once housed a church in part of the 15,000-square-foot building, would be used in full by the day care, which serves infants, toddlers and preschoolers.
Twinkle Little Star’s expansion comes at a time when Danbury schools are scrambling to build enough classrooms to house a surge of enrollment.
City Hall got a boost in June when voters approved a $208 million classroom expansion and support plan that would make Danbury the first place in the state to incorporate a career-academy model of workforce training for all high schoolers.
In addition to creating a $164 million middle school and high school academy on a former corporate campus, the spending package calls for $44 million to pay for a 16-classroom early childhood education center at Great Plain Elementary School. That is on top of a separate seven-classroom addition the city is completing at the overcrowded Ellsworth Avenue Elementary School.
The city is expected to maintain its pace as one of the fastest-growing cities in the state, with some projections calling for Danbury to grow by as much as 12 percent over the next two decades, from 85,000 to 95,000. At the same time, the population in Fairfield County is expected to drop 4 percent by 2040.
The city’s Planning Commission gave the day care center the green light last week, with conditions.
“The parking lot and all onsite crosswalks will have to be restriped in accordance with the approved plan,” said Jennifer Emminger, the city’s deputy planning commissioner, during a July 6 Planning Commission meeting.
Another condition of the day care center’s approval is removing storage garages on the property “which were previously deemed non-conforming by the Zoning Enforcement Officer.”
“[T]he department questions the compatibility of such a storage area with the expanded daycare facility,” Emminger wrote in a memo earlier this year.
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