Norfolk’s newest business will boost town tax revenues

By Lloyd Garrison

Construction is set to begin this spring on a 130 unit self-storage enterprise on Route 44, about 200 yards east of George’s Garage.

Once in operation, it is expected to net the town between $800 and $900 a month in taxes. The one-story, three-building project is expected to cost up to $650,000. Unlike many similar self-storage structures in the area, the Route 44 complex will be discreetly located 200 feet from the highway.

The four-and-a-half acre site is one of the few properties left in Norfolk available for commercial development. It was bought last year by Mike Travaglini and his wife, Anne Marie. Travaglini is head of Stonecraft Northeast Inc., a Norfolk-based firm doing heavy stone masonry work up and down the eastern seaboard.

The new self-storage units will be managed full time by Travaglini, who took over the family business in 1997 and continued to work on contracts far from Norfolk, including 10 years spent constructing bridge abutments and a granite seawall in the Fort Point section of South Boston.

But the itinerant life of a stone mason had a price, and Travaglini finally decided to phase out the business to be closer to his wife and their three children.. “When I was working on the Big Dig in Boston,” he says, “I got tired to of staying in hotels and began driving back and forth to Norfolk every day just to be with the family.” Once the self-storage endeavor is up and running, his commute will take only minutes from his home on Colebrook Road, where he lives next to the house where he was born and raised.

“When I decided I wanted to work locally I noticed that the nearest self-storage units were 10 miles away in Canaan and Winsted,” says Travaglini. He is confident that his new enterprise, which will be accessible 24 hours a day, will meet a mounting demand for temporary storage.

The price for renting the smallest space available, five feet by five feet, will be around $50 month. The maximum available inside storage space will be 40 by 40 feet. There are plans for a parking apron behind the complex for RVs and boats on trailers. The hope is that none will be seen by passing motorists.

As a fourth generation Norfolkian, Travaglini didn’t want his new business to clash with the town’s long-standing rural character. Instead of bulldozing everything in sight and making the storage units widely visible from Route 44, he carefully cleared around a number of existing trees and shrubs along the property’s perimeter. “In the summer with all the foliage,” he says, “you will have to slow way down on 44 to see anything.”

Illustration by Ken Musselman.