Perhaps the biggest energy question in Connecticut at the moment is what will happen to its massive nuclear generator – Dominion-owned Millstone Power Station.
What, if anything, state energy policy experts think should be done to help the plant, which has said it is struggling against low natural gas prices, is not answered in the Department of Energy and Environmental Protection's Comprehensive Energy Strategy (CES), a draft of which the agency unveiled Wednesday.
Gov. Dannel Malloy issued an executive order this week instructing DEEP to assess the economic viability of Millstone's reactors – a task that may involve a reluctant Dominion opening its books, perhaps behind closed doors, to regulators.
DEEP Commissioner Rob Klee said Wednesday that the Millstone evaluation will be one of his agency's biggest projects over the coming months, as the report is due Feb. 1, in time for the 2018 legislative session.
"We assembled a team to get started yesterday," said Klee, who called on Millstone and other energy sector players to work cooperatively with DEEP during the process.
Millstone lobbied hard for legislative action in the recently concluded session, but ultimately could not get a bill through the House that would have instructed utilities to purchase a sizable amount of nuclear power directly through a bidding process. The company has said it still hopes for legislative action in a special session, though DEEP's analysis won't be ready by then.
Dominion faces opposition from fossil fuel generators and others who argued the bill would lead to higher utility bills in a state that already has the highest energy prices in the country.
RPS growth
While the nuclear question remains on the table, the new CES plan, which DEEP will finalize after a public comment period, weighs in on many other areas of consequence in the energy sector.
One of the main goals of the CES is to help Connecticut meet its lofty emissions-reduction pledges, which call for an 80 percent reduction below 2001 emissions levels by 2050.
A major change in the CES, should the legislature agree to pass it into law, would be to increase the so-called renewable portfolio standard (RPS), which requires utilities and electricity suppliers to purchase a steadily increasing amount of electricity from various renewable sources. Those source can range from solar, wind and fuel cells to landfill methane, geothermal and waste incineration.
Ratepayers pay a premium for the right to use cleaner energy in the place of fossil fuel generation. DEEP estimates that the annual net cost of the RPS program will approach $400 million in the years ahead. CLICK TITLE TO CONTINUE
Public Hearing On New Town Hall Plans Scheduled For August
The town council took the next step toward a new town hall by setting a public hearing date for early August on the proposed $28.8 million project.
The public hearing is scheduled for 6:30 p.m. Aug. 8 and will allow residents to comment on the project before the council votes to send the plans to referendum.
"We are on the move. It's been a heck of a ride and I think both sides of the table have worked together to make this happen," Mayor Roy Zartarian said.
At a meeting last month, the town council heard preliminary plans for the new building design.
According to the plan, board of education offices will be on the third floor with government and human services offices on the second floor. Town council chambers, community television and the Transition Academy will occupy the first floor.
Architect Tom Arcari said plans for the community center space include two full-sized basketball courts, locker rooms, a kitchen, a multipurpose room and craft rooms. The plan also includes more storage space and a discrete entrance for human services."We anticipate the new building would be a 100-year building. We think it'll meet all the programmatic needs for a long time," Arcari said.
If approved by voters at a November referendum, the new building would be in the upper town hall parking lot. During construction no town offices would be moved, saving the town $2 million, and the old building would be demolished upon completion of the new facility. The project was originally billed for $29.5 million, but the price tag decreased to $28.8 million thanks to an extra bonding item that was mistakenly included in the total. The use of some capital improvement funds earmarked for the renovation project also brought down the cost. CLICK TITLE TO CONTINUE
Reluctant states raise gas taxes to repair roads
WASHINGTON Motorists don't like to pay more at the pump, and lawmakers worry that if they raise taxes on gasoline, they'll be voted out of office. But states rely on those taxes to build and maintain roads and bridges. With revenue lagging, those structures have been falling into disrepair in many places.
Despite the tough politics, 26 states have raised taxes on motor fuels in the past four years. The eight states that raised taxes this year include Tennessee and South Carolina, deep red states dominated by fiscal conservatives.
"We've seen more bipartisan agreement on raising gas taxes than almost any other tax out there," said Jared Walczak, senior policy analyst at the Tax Foundation, a right-leaning think tank in Washington, D.C.
Lawmakers say the sorry condition of their state's roads and bridges compelled them to act. "The deterioration of the infrastructure, particularly the highways, in South Carolina was the impetus," House Majority Leader Gary Simrill, a Republican, said of the law he shepherded through the Legislature. More than half the roads in South Carolina are in poor condition, according to the state Transportation Department.Gas tax deals are often crafted to reassure voters that their money will be spent wisely. South Carolina and Oregon's latest laws changed some of the rules governing their transportation commissions. California referred a constitutional amendment to the ballot that would guarantee new revenue raised by certain taxes on fuel and vehicle license fees will be spent on transportation.
And in South Carolina, Tennessee and New Jersey which raised gas taxes last year getting conservative lawmakers to vote for raising the gas tax required simultaneously cutting other taxes that fund general operations.
The gas tax increases typically involve a few more cents a gallon over several years. That's enough to raise some of the funding needed to take on each state's backlog of maintenance and expansion projects, but not enough to eliminate them entirely. South Carolina's law is projected to raise about $180 million in its first year, with annual revenue increasing to over $700 million by 2024, for instance, while the Transportation Department says it would need $11 billion to repair every substandard road in the state.
The federal government helps states pay for some highway projects and other transportation costs. But the federal gas tax hasn't been raised in over 20 years. And while President Donald Trump has talked about investing $1 trillion in infrastructure, states are unlikely to get an influx of new cash anytime soon. Trump's proposed budget would cut funding for the U.S. Department of Transportation including to some programs that make grants to states and an infrastructure bill is currently low on Congress' list of priorities.
States are also grappling with the fact that today's cars and trucks can drive for longer distances on less fuel, and a small but growing number of vehicles don't run on gasoline at all. The eight states that raised the gas tax this year also raised some other vehicle fees and imposed others, including new $100-$150 registration fees for electric vehicles.
Spending on highways and transit has fallen over the past 15 years across all levels of government, according to The Pew Charitable Trusts (Pew also funds Stateline). State funding fell by 15 percent between 2002 and 2012 as more fuel-efficient cars hit the road and gas taxes in many states failed to keep pace with inflation. Meanwhile, transportation construction costs rose.
The result: a more than $800 billion backlog of highway and bridge projects across the country, according to the American Society for Civil Engineers. One in 5 miles of highway is in poor condition, according to the professional association's latest report. CLICK TITLE TO CONTINUE
Branford River boat launch to reopen Saturday after delays, cost overruns
BRANFORD >> The Branford River State Boat Launch will reopen for use Saturday after being closed for nearly a year.
The new launch area now includes a two-lane ramp with concrete pavers, a regraded parking lot, a paved turning area and an ADA-accessible floating dock system for the safe launching and retrieval of boats.The launch had been closed for ongoing renovations, but upgrades were only supposed to take four months.The initial renovations were completed relatively on the planned schedule, after the ramp was closed last July, Eric Ott, director of the engineering and support services division at the state Department of Energy and Environmental Protection, said. But in fall, during the final stages of work, inspectors noticed the base of the launch had moved due to settling in the soil underneath the launch where it was anchored.
According to a report completed by Triton Environmental Inc., the interlocking blocks at the base of the ramp separated from the concrete ramp panels by approximately two feet. This would be a safety risk for boaters as their trailers likely would get stuck at low tide, unable to get back out, Ott said.Even though the soil tests prior to the renovations showed the soil would not be ideal for the project, Ott said, the engineers and designers decided to proceed with the initial project anyway. They had not expected the soils to be quite as bad, he said. Ott said it is now believed that the weak soils contributed to the movement and separation at the base of the ramp. CLICK TITLE TO CONTINUE
There is action near the station as development ramps up
Nearly two decades ago, when he was a Meriden city councilman, Mike Rohde went to a program at Yale on transit-oriented development, or TOD, the notion of building homes and businesses around transit stops.
There he heard officials from shoreline towns talk about the importance of housing near their railroad stations, something that “was not on the radar screen” at home because nearly everyone in the central Connecticut corridor commuted by car, he recalled in a recent interview.
He also learned that Meriden would be an ideal site for TOD.
Rohde would go on to become mayor of the Silver City from 2008 to 2013, and help usher in one of the most ambitious TOD projects in the state. And Meriden is not alone.
Dozens of communities — Windsor, Windsor Locks, Wallingford, Branford, Stamford, Norwalk, New Britain, Westport and others — have TOD studies or projects underway.
Officials hope the trend toward TOD will lessen traffic congestion, reduce pollution and create dense and lively town centers that can attract bright young workers, the ones the General Electrics and Aetnas say they want.
“Transit-oriented development is key to our state’s economic future,” said Garrett Eucalitto, under-secretary for transportation, conservation and development at the state’s Office of Policy and Management.
But this being Connecticut, where land use decisions are made locally, in each of the state’s 169 cities and towns, progress on TOD is moving unevenly. Some towns embrace it; some don’t.
Streetcar suburbs
The idea of settlement around transportation nodes is hardly new; much of civilization grew around ports and inland trade routes. In this country, the first wave of suburbanization was along streetcar lines out of older cities. Hartford at peak had 150 miles of trolley lines to its “streetcar suburbs.”
The coming of the automobile radically changed this semi-orderly growth pattern, especially in the years after World War II. With jobs, cars and VA mortgages, families — well, mostly white families — could live anywhere, and millions did, leaving cities and moving to new housing tracts in the suburbs. Most lived happily ever after.
But by the 1990s or thereabouts came a belated realization of a downside to the age of suburban sprawl. Acre after acre of subdivisions and strip malls promoted driving and thus fuel consumption and pollution; diminished open lands; demanded more infrastructure; increased the cost of services; isolated the poor and elderly; and limited housing variety. CLICK TITLE TO CONTINUE