WILLISTON — The developer of a beleaguered hotel project illegally housed workers in a building it owns next door to the job site — and continued to do so after being ordered to take down the makeshift dwellings, according to local and state officials.
In October 2022 and again last month, officials found evidence that people constructing the four-story hotel on Blair Park Road were living on the second level of the adjacent building. The latter building, also on Blair Park Road, houses Williston’s post office and several other businesses on its first floor. The buildings sit just off of U.S. Route 2.
In both cases, Williston officials notified Swanton-based J & J Vermont Properties that the developer and landowner violated town bylaws by creating housing in a location that wasn’t permitted for it. The notices are addressed to Jin Hao Zhang and David Zhang.
The makeshift housing is the latest in a string of zoning violations associated with the hotel project, which has been under construction since 2020, town records show.
The Williston Observer first reported on the illegal housing.
During a fire inspection in October 2022, town and state officials found mattresses and personal belongings for about a dozen people as well as a makeshift shower in the bathroom, on the second floor of the post office building, according to zoning records.
The inspection also found “storage violations in electrical areas,” records state.
Matt Boulanger, Williston’s planning director and zoning administrator, said the town received evidence shortly after that inspection from the property manager that the living quarters had been removed.
But during another inspection in March 2023, officials “once again found signs that this is being used as a residential sleeping area,” Timothy Gerry, Williston’s deputy fire chief, wrote in a memo. Officials found “clothing, bedding, personal hygiene supplies and food,” he wrote, and “the original unpermitted shower was removed and a new one constructed in another location.”
As of Monday, J & J Vermont Properties had sent the town evidence that the mattresses and shower had been removed, according to Boulanger. He is consulting with Williston’s attorney to determine the town’s next steps.
“The hotel construction — and the disruption to the site that has gone along with it — has been uncharacteristically lengthy,” Boulanger said last week. “We don’t really have something in the zoning that says, ‘You’re forbidden from taking a long time to build your project’ … but it does mean that I’m keeping an eye on the site for zoning compliance.”
The Vermont Division of Fire Safety investigated the safety violations at the post office building, but it does not plan to fine the property owner, Michael Desrochers, the office’s executive director, said in an email last Friday.
J & J Vermont Properties did not respond to phone calls requesting comment on the bylaw violations. A person identifying themselves as “Liz,” the property manager for J & J Vermont Properties, emailed a reporter a brief statement Monday afternoon saying that the issue “no longer exists,” and that “it is J and J’s plans to comply with the town of williston (sic) municipal ordinances.”
Last Thursday, the hotel was flanked by construction equipment and workers appeared busy putting up siding. Two workers directed a reporter to a man whom they identified as a manager. When asked whether workers have been living in the building next door, the man said, “I don’t really know,” before quickly turning around and walking back inside the building, ignoring the reporter’s follow-up questions.
Lisa Golding, who owns a children’s consignment store in the building with the post office, recalled Thursday that she saw a mattress in a second-floor window around June 2022. She emailed the property manager about the mattress but didn’t hear back, she said in an interview — though sometime later, she said, the mattress was gone.
“It was obviously upsetting to me that, you know, I’ve been expected to uphold terms of a pretty intense lease — and then I find out that this is happening upstairs,” Golding said. “It doesn’t feel good.”
Golding said she has been frustrated by water leaks in the building, which local and state officials told her could be the result of the makeshift plumbing upstairs. She said she’s seen water flowing out of a makeshift drain and freezing over an electrical panel outside.
Golding wants to keep her business where it is, she said, and probably doesn’t have the money to move to another location. But she said she’s been left in the dark about many details related to the hotel project — which has had a significant impact on the area around her business — by the property manager, whom she said is based in Albany, New York.
“I only have an email for (the property manager). I’ve never been given a phone number for her,” Golding said. “I just want some clarity. I just want some honesty, and it just feels like we’re kind of being put through the wringer here as tenants.”
Steve Doherty, a spokesperson for the U.S. Postal Service, referred questions about workers living illegally above the post office to J & J Vermont Properties.
The hotel’s developers have run afoul of Williston zoning officials in the past. In January 2019, the town found that multiple cars without license plates were being stored illegally in the parking lot on the site, according to records. And a year later, construction was started on the project before the developers had secured a necessary town permit.
Both violations were resolved, according to Boulanger.
