STAMFORD — When a team of educators and city officials visited the site of a new magnet school this week, they were pleased to find many of the historical features intact.
The century-old building, which will begin housing students this fall, still has several elements from its past, including original ceilings, brick walls, a historic barn and even a fireplace mantel.
“What they’ve done is just incredible,” Board of Education member Jackie Heftman said after an hour-long tour Wednesday of the New School at 200 Strawberry Hill Ave.
“It was very important to maintain the integrity of the old building and they’ve done just that,” Heftman said. “That’s what the city wanted. That’s what the Board of Education wanted.”
The tour, led by City Engineer Louis Casolo, marked the end of the first phase of the project. It began in January and cost $4 million.
“We’re almost ready now,” Casolo said. “We’re at the tail end of construction, we’re cleaning, finalizing site work outside and getting the building ready.”
Staff is expected to move in sometime in August. As many as 120 first-graders and 120 kindergarteners will kick off the New School’s first year on Sept. 1.
The building, once home to Sacred Heart Academy, an all-girls Catholic high school, is an extension of Rogers Magnet Elementary. Grades will be added each year until it becomes a K-8 school by 2023, with construction expected to be complete in three years. CLICK TITLE TO CONTINUE
Meriden, Southington bridges to be re-examined after inspector’s arrest in New York
Six area bridges are among 35 statewide scheduled to be re-examined by the state Department of Transportation after the inspecting engineer was arrested in May on allegations that he falsified a report for a bridge in New York.
Locally, the DOT will reinspect bridges carrying Interstate 691 in both the eastbound and westbound directions over Spoon Shop Brook in Meriden. A bridge over Ten Mile River on Route 322 in Southington will also be inspected again, as will a bridge carrying Route 72 over Cronk Road in Plainville. In Berlin, a bridge carrying Christian Lane over Route 9 will be reinspected, as will a Route 9 bridge spanning a private road.
The list of 35 bridges were inspected by Akram Ahmad, of Bridgeport, who was arrested in May on charges of offering a false instrument for filing, forgery, and criminal possession of a forged instrument in connections with inspections he did in New York.
The DOT identified bridge inspections since 2014 on which Ahmad served as team leader.
Bridges in the state are normally inspected every two years.
The estimated cost to reinspect all 35 bridges is $500,000.
DOT spokesman Kevin Nursick said bridge inspections are done by a team of engineers, and that “one person would not be able to compromise safety within those protocols.”
“The exposure associated with these 35 structures is virtually infinitesimal, but in the business of bridge safety we don’t operate within the realm of probabilities, we work with certainties,” Nursick said in a statement released on Tuesday.
“Accordingly, to gain the certainty that we desire, we are re-inspecting all 35 bridges.”
On May 23, DOT engineers sent emails — obtained Tuesday through a Freedom of Information request — to consultants requesting lists of projects that included Ahmad.
Nursick said Ahmad worked “in one way, shape, or form” on an estimated 600 bridges, but some 400 of those simply involved identifying “bridge-like structures” to help municipal leaders catalogue structures in their towns. CLICK TITLE TO CONTINUE
A recent study from national highway researchers ranks Connecticut’s interstates as being among the most congested in the country.
TRIP, a private, nonprofit transportation research organization, said 60 percent of Connecticut’s urban interstates experience congestion —defined as delays during peak travel time — ranking eighth in the country. The national average is 43 percent, according to federal data.
Connecticut’s congestion problems are largely because its urban interstates rank as the third busiest nationally, behind only California and Maryland, the TRIP study found.
In addition, the TRIP study found that 7 percent of Connecticut’s interstate bridges were structurally deficient, according to federal data. That ranked fifth nationally and is more than double the national average of 3 percent. Another 19 percent of the state’s highway bridges were rated structurally obsolete, roughly on par with the national average of 18 percent, the study states.
TRIP noted in its study that the U.S. Department of Transportation estimates the backlog of needed improvements to the interstate system nationally is $189 billion.
The study’s release last week coincided with the 60th anniversary of President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s signing of the Federal Highway Act, which authorized the expense of $25 billion for the construction of 41,000 miles of highway.
It was the largest infrastructure project at the time. American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials Executive Director Bud Wright said the country now “moves in large part thanks” to the act.
“Now, as we commemorate the 60th anniversary of the interstate act, it’s clear that our investments in preserving the system are not keeping up even as our nation continues to grow,” he said.
The authors of the TRIP study said that the interstate system, initially built to transport goods between urban areas and for national defense purposes, has increasingly become essential for even local travel. CLICK TITLE TO CONTINUE
HARTFORD — Hartford Mayor Luke Bronin said Tuesday that a settlement proposal from the former developers of Dunkin' Donuts Park was nothing more than "posturing" and that it did not warrant serious consideration.
The city received the proposal from Centerplan Cos. on Friday, and on Tuesday the mayor made his first public comments after reading it.
"What we got from Centerplan is not a serious proposal, and it's nothing like what Centerplan described to the press and to the public last week," Bronin said in a statement emailed to The Courant.
"Even though Centerplan's CEO Bob Landino said that Centerplan would offer to fund the balance of the work to complete the ballpark, their actual proposal includes no such commitment and — once again — expects the taxpayers to foot the bill for Centerplan's mistakes and cost-overruns," Bronin said. "We're willing to have good faith negotiations about real proposals, but it's clear that Centerplan was posturing to get some headlines last week and wasn't serious about taking responsibility." Landino declined to respond to Bronin's comments.
The city is expected to make a formal response to the proposal, possibly this week.
The Courant on Tuesday obtained copies of both the proposal and a letter to city officials from Sean Fitzpatrick, the city's development director.
According to Fitzpatrick, under the agreement, the city would be required to cover cost overruns beyond the current $63 million price tag and to agree to binding arbitration, limiting the city's rights to sue for damages later.The proposal also would require the city to rescind its termination of Centerplan and DoNo Hartford LLC, Fitzpatrick said.
Rescinding the termination would "effectively preclude our ability to recover [cost overruns] under the surety bond," Fitzpatrick said in the letter.
Beyond the baseball stadium, the proposed agreement would reach into the surrounding $300 million mixed-use development project in the neighborhood surrounding the ballpark just north of downtown. CLICK TITLE TO CONTINUE
NVCC upgrades abound
WATERBURY — A $44 million project to create a new health sciences lecture hall at Naugatuck Valley Community College is on target to open six months early and on budget, according to a leading NVCC official. "We now know it will be moved up to December of 2016," said James Troup, provost and senior dean of administration for NVCC. "We will pick up a whole semester."
That will come as welcome news for nursing and other medical students tucked into buildings around campus. The renovated Founders Hall will feature modernized space and equipment, along with a large community room available for student meetings, community events and large-scale lectures.
School officials say a relatively mild winter allowed for an early completion of exterior work, which, in turn, allowed work to proceed on the interior throughout the school year.
The campus is currently abuzz with other construction activity, including a $6.5 million general renovation of parking lots, grounds, exterior lighting and sidewalks. The state-sponsored effort will also reconfigure the awkward entrance on the east side of the campus along Chase Parkway.
Troup said the exterior improvements are probably the most ambitious attempted at the campus in at least 30 years. That work should wrap up sometime in August, he said.
"It's really finishing off the east half of the campus," Troup said. "It will be beautiful and very beneficial to our students."
At the same time, the city has pushed forward to complete the second section of a new concrete sidewalk running the length of the college frontage along Chase Parkway, from a bus stop by the west entrance to a bus stop located beyond the east entrance.
The city committed to splitting the cost of the project following requests from campus administration and students.
City public works staff built a little less than half of the now 1,400-foot-long sidewalk in fall 2015. The city hired Edo Construction to a $197,522 contract to complete the rest.
Edo completed its work in the first three weeks of June, Public Works Director David Simpson said. He estimates the final cost will fall below the contract price.
College and city officials are talking about possibly extending the sidewalk onto West Main Street, but no commitments have been made. Any further expansion could prove difficult and costly, involving steep slopes and the need to claim private property. CLICK TITLE TO CONTINUE