Farrel staying in Ansonia
Farrel Corp., whose buildings take up a prominent portion of Main Street in Ansonia, will be staying in the city under an agreement reached with the Board of Aldermen last week.
The company dates to before the Civil War and manufactures process equipment for the plastics industry. Under the agreement, Ansonia will pay $1 million to build an access road into an as-yet-undeveloped industrial park where the company plans to move. Ansonia officials are pursuing state and federal grants to help pay for the road.
"We don't have much space available, and this is one of the only remaining parcels left for industrial expansion," said Sheila O'Malley, who heads the city's economic development department. "We're so small that there's very little room for growth, except for brownfields."
Brownfields are former industrial sites that are contaminated by toxic remnants of manufacturing. Ansonia, once a thriving industrial town, has numerous brownfields, especially downtown.
The plans for Fountain Lake Commerce Park date back almost a decade, though there are no tenants. R.D. Scinto, the Shelton-based developer, was approved last year for construction of a 60,000-square-foot building there, contingent on the construction of an access road.
Farrel, which also has space in Oxford, is to employ 90 people at the new Ansonia space. The company is owned by a German conglomerate.
At the same time, some buildings downtown once occupied by Farrel that had been proposed for a new mixed-use development are instead the subject of penalties under the city's blight law.
The city has threatened the building's owner with fines up to $20,000 per day in the absence of viable proposals. CLICK TITLE TO CONTINUE
Cars, trains, planes, bikes in Malloy's transportation plan
HARTFORD -- Gov. Dannel P. Malloy showed off an ambitious $100 billion vision for Connecticut's transportation future on Wednesday that would finish when today's kindergarten students are in their mid-30s.
There's something for every type of traveler, from harried rail riders and bumper-to-bumper highway motorists, to air passengers, bicyclists and even hikers. Malloy's plan barely mentions highway tolls, but it's understood that lawmakers will consider them as a new revenue stream.
The 30-year proposal starts with a five-year, $10 billion plan, including $2.8 billion in new capital funding for a variety of improvements, from $18 million for better bus service to $32 million in commuter rail upgrades. There's also $10 million to replace the state's aging snow plows.
There's a $5.7 billion widening of Interstate 95 in southwestern Connecticut.
For Interstate 84 from the New York line to Exit 8 in Danbury, there is a similar two-phase $800 million project.
A $500 million program linking I-95 to the Merritt Parkway in Norwalk along a new Route 7 that had been stalled in recent years is back on the front burner.
"There are 12 million individual trips taken on Connecticut's roads each and every day," Malloy told lawmakers who will be reviewing his shorter-term proposals to include in a final budget that has a June 3 deadline.
"Our roads are relied on by companies to ship their goods and transport their employees to work," Malloy said. "Right now, those commuters are each spending an extra 40 hours a year in traffic due to unnecessary congestion. That's an extra full-time week of work, every year, sitting in traffic." CLICK TITLE TO CONTINUE
East Hampton official demands changes to 'worst road in state'
EAST HAMPTON >> The state Department of Transportation has announced steps to improve safety along a portion of Route 66 through The Ledges.
But an East Hampton town councilor and former fire chief says more can and must be done to improve what he says is “the worst road in the state.”
Councilor Philip Visintainer is calling for dramatic changes to the road — eliminating curves and cutting back some of the rock faces that line the roadway and give the area its name. As both a former fire chief and fire marshal, Visintainer said he is all too familiar with the carnage that has been wreaked by the twists and turns through The Ledges.
He called the road “a disaster.” Just last month, former East Hampton Republican Town Committee Chairman Don Juan Martin was killed in a single-car accident along The Ledges in Portland.“There have been too many crashes along that section of road,” Visintainer told the East Hampton Town Council last week.
“That piece, those two miles, that’s as bad a piece of road as any in the state,” Visintainer said.
For years, a portion of Route 6 in eastern Connecticut outside Willimantic earned the grisly nickname “Suicide Six,” and had the dubious honor of being labelled the worst road in the state.
But now, after improvements were made to Route 6, Visintainer says the portion of Route 66 through The Ledges has displaced Route 6 as the worst road in the state.
Councilor Ted Hintz Jr. however said he thought the state had taken steps to improve the situation.
The state has installed some guardrails and has largely eliminated the ice that use to fan out across the road, Hintz said. CLICK TITLE TO CONTINUE
Malloy's budget funds design for route 9 changes, river access
HARTFORD >> The budget Gov. Dannel P. Malloy unveiled Wednesday raises tax revenue by $914 million and cuts spending by $1.3 billion in an effort to close a $2.5 billion two-year budget deficit.
The two-year tax-and-spend plan is the first of Malloy’s second term as governor. When he addresses the legislature Wednesday, he is expected to argue that the nearly $1 billion in revenue increases included in the budget do not violate his campaign pledge to not raise taxes.
The budget’s revenue hikes include a delay in restoring the Earned Income Tax Credit for poor families. Currently, the state pays 27.5 percent of the federal EITC to Connecticut residents. It was supposed to go back up to 30 percent in 2016, but that would cost the state about $13 million. Malloy said the state’s roadways are so full of traffic tieups that commuters spend an unnecessary 40 hours annually trying to get to work.
“That’s an extra full-time week of work, every year, sitting in traffic,” he said.
When the portion of Route 9 that runs through Middletown was built decades ago, Malloy said, it disconnected the downtown from the Connecticut River.
Local officials have been working in earnest to improve access to the river by holding summer concerts and a portion of the July Fourth fireworks at Harbor Park.
Common council members have approved the upgrading of 36 light fixtures along the riverfront with high-efficiency LED lights and decommissioning the water treatment plant on River Road by linking up the Mattabassett Sewage Treatment Plant in Cromwell.
Last year, the Planning and Zoning Commission began to look into updating the city’s Plan of Conservation and Development with the board considering a “floating zone” to permit new or different uses for redevelopment at and around the riverfront.
“The city of Middletown was cut off from its historic waterway nearly 60 years ago with the construction of Route 9,” Malloy said Wednesday. “This corridor has long been a congestion point and source of frustration for drivers.” CLICK TITLE TO CONTINUE
Malloy proposes $10B transportation spending plan without funding source
Without actually saying specifically where all the money would come from, Gov. Dannel P. Malloy on Wednesday proposed spending $10 billion on Connecticut transportation projects over the next five years, the start of a program he is branding Let's Go CT!
Malloy's budget guru – Ben Barnes, secretary of the Office of Policy & Management – was elusive Wednesday morning when asked where the increase in spending would come from, saying the governor right now has it budgeted as transfers from the state's cash-strapped general fund, although Barnes didn't think that would be the actual revenue source once the legislature approves the plan and Malloy signs it into law.
Barnes did list tolls as a possible source of funding, although he added an increase in state taxes could be another source.
"[Tolls] are not an obvious magic bullet to solve these problems," Barnes said.
The leadership in the Connecticut House and Senate have supported tolls as a way to raise revenue for transportation projects and Malloy said he would support tolls on the state's highways if the legislature set up a special lockbox to keep the government from raiding transportation funds to pay for other state spending.
The five-year plan calls for projects such as the redesign and engineering of the Hartford I-84 viaduct; the I-95 expansion between Stamford and Bridgeport; completion of the New Haven-Hartford-Springfield rail line, including new train cars, repairs to the New Haven rail line, additional stations on the New Haven rail line, building more parking facilities near rail stations; and expanding the state's bus service. CLICK TITLE TO CONTINUE