Danbury hospital opens new $150M addition
DANBURY -- Danbury Hospital opened its largest and most expensive addition Friday, funded in part by an unprecedented $30 million gift from city resident Peter Buck.
The $150 million addition, named the Peter and Carmen Lucia Buck Pavilion in honor of Buck and his late wife, is an 11-story, sleekly modern structure connected to the existing Tower Building.
Buck, the 83-year-old founder of the Subway sandwich chain, chuckled Friday when asked about the new building."So far, so good," he said. "It's beautiful."Buck said people have asked him why he's been so generous to the hospital. "Because I live here," he said. "Where else am I going to contribute?" Dr. John Murphy, the president and chief executive officer of Western Connecticut Health Network -- the umbrella group that manages Danbury, New Milford and Norwalk hospitals -- said the network had 12 donors who each gave more than $1 million to the project. CLICK ON TITLE TO CONTINUE
$200M in bonding, $100,000 bid on agenda Monday for New London committees
New London - The City Council Chambers on the third floor of City Hall will be a busy venue Monday night. Though the full council will not meet, some of its committees will convene to tackle weighty issues facing the city: a proposal to bond more than $200 million to fund a school construction project, a resolution to designate almost $1 million for Riverside Park improvements, and what to do about the $100,000 bid for the Lighthouse Inn. First, at 5:30 p.m., the council's Finance Committee and Education, Parks and Recreation committees will hold a joint meeting to discuss the bonding ordinance. "My committee will be dealing with the financial bonding package, to take a look at the bonding and be able to hopefully pass it on to the full council," Wade A. Hyslop, the council's president and chairman of the Finance Committee, said earlier this week. "Hopefully all of it will be vetted and then any questions that come up can be answered." Mayor Daryl Justin Finizio announced the project and its associated costs June 13 and said the council will have to approve it by June 30 in order to "lock in" funding commitments from the state. The project, which would complete the facilities portion of the city's transition to an all-magnet school district, would involve renovating as new Bennie Dover Jackson Middle School and New London High School, and constructing a building to house a science, technology, engineering and math middle school at the high school campus. CLICK ON TITLE TO CONTINUE
Cleanup at Higganum Cove in Haddam to begin this summer
HADDAM — The federal Environmental Protection Agency says it will begin cleaning up a 20-year-old Superfund site near the Connecticut River where officials envision a park with hiking trails and a kayak launch.
The 12-acre Higganum Cove property, beside a scenic waterfall, has been included on a list of Connecticut Superfund sites awaiting cleanup since 1989 because of the presence of PCBs, lead, and arsenic "at levels of concern to human health and the environment."
The cleanup is expected to begin in July. Officials from the EPA and the state Department of Energy and Environmental Protection have scheduled a meeting on the project July 8, at 6:30 p.m. at town hall on Field Park Drive.