STAMFORD — After destroying the Brewer’s Yacht Haven boatyard in 2011, Building and Land Technology saw no action on the processing of new phases of its massive Harbor Point development in the South End.
One application for a 16-story residential tower has been pending before zoning officials for nearly two years. On Monday night, the developer was forced to wait once more. As of deadline, the Zoning Board had yet to open a public hearing scheduled for the housing plan.
The fourth public hearing on a lengthy agenda that was taken out of order, the application appeared on track to be pushed back a week as the hour got late and the board had yet to hear the issue.
The public hearing scheduled to take place Monday was part of a compromise reached with BLT recently.
For several years, zoning officials had declined to hear new applications while they waited for BLT to file a plan to replace a 14-acre boatyard it destroyed in 2011.
Because the former Brewer's Yacht Haven boatyard and marina was supposed to have been preserved under the city’s agreement with the developer, the two are now locked in a court battle over the issue. CLICK TITLE TO CONTINUE
A quick recap of Bridgeport schools
Bridgeport – There is a whole lot of construction activity going on around the city this summer. Here is a quick recap.
- A new Longfellow school – Good news, bad news. Good news is that steel is going up on the site. Bad news is that delays may push back the finish line to late fall of 2016 which may be an issue for the school district. Longfellow students have been scattered across the district for three years now.
- A major redo of Central High School which will take place while kids are in the building. Right now, the site, as described by the city building committee is a “beautiful disaster” being orchestrated by a “rat’s nest of people.” Completion is planned by December 2017 because it is being done in pieces. There are asbestos and PCB issues to deal with. Students will be dealing with no ceilings for the duration of construction.
- Dunbar alterations have started. Many of the restrooms are being redone, parking lots are being replaced. Don’t even think of using the sidewalk in front of the school on Union Avenue. It is fenced off and filled with construction equiptment.
- Black Rock is basically done. A major addition was completed in the past school year. There are a few odds and ends being completed. There may even be some money left over.
- Bassick is getting a new roof on one of its buildings. It’s about 30 percent complete. The new dome over the school’s observatory probably won’t be replaced until December, weather permitting. It is being custom-made in Illinois.
- Harding High School. Bids for the first phase of the project – site work – have been received and were about $3 million over budget. Reportedly there is enough contingency in the project budget to cover it. After years of delay because of site contamination concerns, the project is finally moving along, the school building committee was told this week.
- Roosevelt School is essentially done as well. There is a little bit more in terms of library shelving to install. Once there is an electrical inspection there should be a certificate of occupancy issue. It is set to open in the fall.
A principal in the Middletown company that is looking to build a 63.3-megawatt fuel cell power plant in Beacon Falls says the plan for the project will be submitted to the Connecticut Siting Council by the end of month.
William Corvo, president of CT Energy & Technology, said once the plan is submitted to the Siting Council, the agency has 180 days to decide whether to allow the project to be built. The Siting Council is the state agency that is responsible for determining whether energy infrastructure projects can be built and where they should be located.
Plans for the Beacon Falls Energy Park were first made public in May. The facility will be built on part of 24-acre site near Lopus Road west of the Naugatuck River.
The project is a joint effort involving:
• Torrington-based O&G Industries, which owns the land the facility will be built on and is one of the Northeast’s largest construction companies.
• FuelCell Energy of Danbury, which manufactures the fuel cells that will be used to generate the electricity and will operate the plant once it is completed.
• CT Energy & Technology, a Middletown-based development company that develops energy projects, will own the facility once it is completed.
The partners in the project made a presentation to Beacon Falls Open Space and Land Use Committee earlier the month. Members of the committee heard from 19 consultants associated with the projects and viewed a 52-page PowerPoint presentation, Corvo said. “We believe this project has a lot of benefits, both for the state and the community,” Corvo said Monday. “We have all Connecticut-based companies preparing this project which will return a former sand and gravel mine to the tax rolls with a modern renewable energy facility. We believe doing so with Connecticut manufactured fuel cells that are clean and quiet is a home run.” CLICK TITLE TO CONTINUE
Key Washington republican visits CT to assess transportation needs
After touring some of Connecticut’s rails and roads, a national Republican leader agreed Monday to take what he saw back to Washington to help construct a national transportation policy. U.S. Rep. Bill Shuster, the Pennsylvania Republican who chairs the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, met Monday with Connecticut officials to address the infrastructure needs of the region and to discuss solutions. “We need to make sure that we can move people and goods in and out and through the Northeast corridor,” Shuster said during a press conference in Union Station in Hartford. “It’s absolutely critical to the rest of the country’s economy.” The Northeast Corridor is home to 18 percent of the U.S. population and produces 20 percent of the Gross Domestic Product in the country, Shuster said.
Shuster said that federal lawmakers were gathering information across the country to form a national policy regarding the how much federal funding to reserve for the nation’s transportation infrastructure.
“Washington needs to get out of the way” to allow states “to build these projects faster with less money,” Shuster said.
DeLauro, who has long been pushing for a national infrastructure bank to leverage public and private dollars toward local and national infrastructure projects, highlighted what she understood as the cost of inaction. CLICK TITLE TO CONTINUE
New England planning $4.8B in power grid upgrades
Regional power grid administrator ISO New England is planning $4.8 billion in transmission infrastructure upgrades that will be underway or complete by 2023, bringing the total investment in the reliability of the system to $12 billion since 2002.
Transmission project upgrades are a relatively new way to improve electricity usage in New England, having been seen 15 years ago as an alternative to building new power plants to make sure electric supply meets demand. Transmission projects provide better linkages between large power generators and large power users.
New England has 210 transmission reliability projects proposed, planned or under construction, along with the 25 projects already in service. Another five still are in the conceptual phase while 14 proposed projects have been cancelled. CLICK TITLE TO CONTINUE
Plainville get $600K for more school demo
PLAINVILLE — A new $600,000 state grant will help the town demolish the former Linden Street school, a century-old elementary school closed since 2009.
The additional grant is in addition to a $1.5 million grant appropriated by the state legislature in 2014. The price of knocking down the building is $2.46 million.
The $600,000, included in a school construction bill recently signed into law by Gov. Dannel P. Malloy, will broaden the scope of how state funds can be used at the site, state Rep. Elizabeth Boukus, D-Plainville, said Monday.
The new scope means state funding can pay for abatement and site restoration and improvement for site access, parking and connecting areas to the new Linden Street School, which was built a few years ago abutting the former school and will need some exterior work once the old school is demolished.
The 2015-16 town budget passed in April includes funds to tear down the school. Town officials want to build a small park at the site of the former school. The town has set aside $1.1 million from surplus funds to pay for the project. Most of the cost will be covered by the state grants. CLICK TITLE TO CONTINUE
Teardown of terminal B at Bradley Airport begins renovation effort
Almost a year after the Connecticut Airport Authority awarded the demolition contract, the walls of Terminal B at Bradley International Airport — the old Murphy Terminal — are finally starting to come down.
In August, the newly formed authority awarded S&R Corp. an $18 million contract to level the terminal to make way for a new "transportation center" for rental car agencies and bus transfers.
To a traveler seeing the old hulk at the airport, it might not look like much progress has been made, but the airport authority's executive director Kevin A. Dillon said there has been a flurry behind the scenes.
"There was a lot of environmental remediation that had to take place up front," he said. "There's been a lot of work occurring inside the structure that people on the outside haven't seen as part of the demolition." CLICK TITLE TO CONTINUE
Ideal Forging demolition in Southington draws spectators
SOUTHINGTON — "The End of Ideal Forging" is the hit show in town this summer, judging by the people who are flocking downtown to watch the demolition of a century-old vacant factory complex that has been closed since 2003.
Spectators have been coming to watch the action since March, when workers began knocking down the building on the 14-acre site.
The stage is huge and features heavy machinery battling steel-ribbed buildings to a soundtrack of falling masonry, diesel engines and the scraping of metal against concrete.
"There's always people parking here to watch the work," police Officer Tom Gallo said Friday as he patrolled the path that runs past Ideal Forging. The complex is being razed by a New York developer who plans to build a retail and residential complex once the property is cleared.
"I've even come here, myself, to watch," Gallo said as a massive hydraulic machine used its jaws to rip out steel beams, masonry and wood from the rapidly disappearing main factory.
Once the roof section crumbled, the machine operator picked up a beam and used it like a waiter crumbing tool, scraping debris from a tablecloth. Except in this case, the debris was brick, metal and timbers. CLICK TITLE TO CONTINUE
Jobless rate falls below 6% in state
Connecticut's unemployment rate fell below 6 percent for the first time in seven years, according to new data from the state Department of Labor. The unemployment rate in Connecticut in June was 5.7 percent, down from 6 percent in May.
The U.S. unemployment rate in June was 5.3 percent; because of the margin of error in the Connecticut survey, the gap is not considered statistically significant, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, but Connecticut's rate has generally remained higher than the national rate over the last four years.
The reason for the weakness was a reported 2,100 positions cut at local governments. But that could be illusory, labor department officials said, because of a problem in seasonal adjustment related to the closing of public schools. CLICK TITLE TO CONTINUE
Managing suspected drug use on the jobsite
The issue: Construction work sites, by their nature, are generally hectic and less staffed due to work-saving technology and the raw reality of today’s economy, which favors lean staffing.
When all employees working at a construction site are at the top of their game, it is poetry in motion….a beautiful and impressive scene to behold. If 17.4 percent of construction workers are impaired by drug use (a statistic from the 2010–2011 national survey data, Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, SAMHSA), the work site choreography can turn dangerous.
The behavior of the stumbling, slurry drunk or the slow-mo, unfocussed marijuana stoner are easy to spot. What’s more challenging to catch is impairment from abuse of prescription pain medicine and heroin.
Many will recoil at the association of a doctor-prescribed drug, like oxycontin, and an illegal street drug like heroin, but here’s the 4-1-1, they are both opiods and are like kissing cousins. (Think of your home being ravaged by a nest of squirrels. To the hired exterminator, squirrels are no different than rats — same destruction and same methods to get rid of them — it’s just that squirrels are basically rats with good PR.)
Here’s the sad reality, the drug prescribed to a construction worker to relieve back pain or pain from an injury, for example, can be highly addictive. When the physician refuses to refill the prescription after a couple of times, the worker still wants the pills — the new addiction needs to be fed. CLICK TITLE TO CONTINUE