STAMFORD - If you think the city hasn’t kept up with road paving, you’re right.
And if you think it’s finally happening, right again.
Mayor David Martin explains it this way: before he took office in 2013, the city was spending about $3 million a year to fix the streets, but the need was for twice that amount.
In the first year of his term, Martin said he increased the amount to $5 million. In the second year, the city had to devote tens of millions of dollars to construction of a new school on Strawberry Hill Avenue and a new police headquarters on Bedford Street, so Martin said he reduced the road-repair budget to $2 million.
In his third year, he raised it slightly to $2.5 million. “This year, we put $3.5 million in the budget, and we got an appropriation for another $2.5 million, for a total of $6 million,” said the mayor, who will run for a second term in the Nov. 7 election.
So this is the first year in a long time that the city will spend what it should on repairing and repaving roads.Crews hit the streets with the start of the fiscal year on July 1, and the money probably will run out by Dec. 1, Martin said.
Road work comes with the thorny question of which ones to do, and in what order. Martin said he found that to be a problem.
“I was unhappy with our strategy for road paving. Basically, there was no strategy,” he said. “It was a list of whoever complained the loudest. The roads that got paved needed it, but it was not based on surface condition and traffic volume.”
Summer Street, for example, was “in terrible condition but wasn’t getting paved,” the mayor said. “We weren’t getting complaints about Summer Street. We were getting complaints about the little side streets where people live, and those would get paved.”
His solution was to hire a company to develop a paving plan. In 2015, the city signed a $144,000 contract with Infrastructure Management Services, which began work last year.
The company sent out trucks trailering weighted equipment that measured how much the road surface moved as the heavy load passed over it. They used lasers to measure bumpiness, and made note of pavement cracks. CLICK TITLE TO CONTINUE
New Southington senior center seen on track for March opening
SOUTHINGTON - Construction of the town’s new senior center is on schedule, with completion expected by March, says Town Councilor Paul Champagne, amember of the Calendar House Building Committee.
“I was unhappy with our strategy for road paving. Basically, there was no strategy,” he said. “It was a list of whoever complained the loudest. The roads that got paved needed it, but it was not based on surface condition and traffic volume.”
Summer Street, for example, was “in terrible condition but wasn’t getting paved,” the mayor said. “We weren’t getting complaints about Summer Street. We were getting complaints about the little side streets where people live, and those would get paved.”
His solution was to hire a company to develop a paving plan. In 2015, the city signed a $144,000 contract with Infrastructure Management Services, which began work last year.
The company sent out trucks trailering weighted equipment that measured how much the road surface moved as the heavy load passed over it. They used lasers to measure bumpiness, and made note of pavement cracks. CLICK TITLE TO CONTINUE
New Southington senior center seen on track for March opening
SOUTHINGTON - Construction of the town’s new senior center is on schedule, with completion expected by March, says Town Councilor Paul Champagne, amember of the Calendar House Building Committee.
The project is on budget, said Champagne of the new $9.4 million building that will replace the current senior center.
“It is looking like it will open before March 20,” he said. “We are now starting the roofing and the mechanicals inside and the sprinkler system is almost complete. The partition work is done.”
Champagne said the next phase of the project is going to be installing the plumbing and electrical systems, then the sheetrock.
Within a month of the new building’s completion, demolition of the current senior center will begin.
“I would think by April we will have ripped it down and we’ll have more parking space,” he said.
Overall, Champagne said, the construction is going “very well” and the committee is pleased with the work of the KBE Building Corp., the contractor.
“Right now we still have not cut anything out of the original plan,” said Champagne, who noted that senior center users had given the committee a list of features they would like to see in their new building.
“Unless we run into any major problems it doesn’t look like we’re going to have to do any value engineering,” Champagne said.
Champagne said efforts were taken to blend the color scheme of the builing with the rest of the neighborhood so it would not stick out. CLICK TITLE TO CONTINUE
Driver shortage forces haulers to lift pay, perks to woo workers
Ansonia trucking-company operator John Pruchnicki uses nearly every tool in his kit to recruit and retain some of Connecticut's 57,000 or so commercially licensed truck drivers to his payroll.
Many of the semis in Pruchnicki's Coastal Carriers of Connecticut fleet are equipped with the same safety features and ergonomics found in today's cars — automatic transmissions, power steering, stability and adaptive cruise controls, and anti-lock brakes. His drivers also collect good pay, benefits, even performance incentives, as well as the opportunity to finish their workday and sleep in their own beds — something coveted among haulers forced to drive nights and weekends.
Yet, despite relatively good pay and working conditions, finding and keeping truck drivers is back to being as difficult as it has ever been, Pruchnicki and other truck-industry observers say. Tightened state and federal compliance obligations on trucking companies and drivers, plus increased competition in a revived economy for talent and consumers' mounting appetites for speedy delivery of goods ordered online, have exacerbated the trend. Trucker demographics, too, are a factor.
"The truck-driver shortage is real,'' said Joe Sculley, president of the Motor Transport Association of Connecticut (MTAC). "Trucking companies just cannot find candidates.''
Ask any trucking-company operator or driver-training school, and they'll tell you that, even with 3.5 million licensed truckers on U.S. roads, drivers always are in short supply. But the intensity of the shortage oscillates, particularly in tune with the economy, said Robert Costello, economist with the American Trucking Associations (ATA), to which MTAC belongs.
Currently the shortages appear to be the worst ever, experts say.
"We're short about 50,000 drivers today,'' Costello said, mostly for long-haul, interstate routes that keep them on the road for days, weeks at a time. CLICK TITLE TO CONTINUE
OSHA's Silica Rule Compliance Deadline Looms — Is Your Company Ready?
Reminder: OSHA will begin enforcement on its crystalline silica standard Saturday, Sept. 23.
The agency said it plans to offer compliance assistance in the first 30 days to employers who are making a “good faith effort” to comply with the new rule, with a particular emphasis on helping employers use the new Table 1 way of measuring exposure levels. OSHA said that if, during an inspection, it finds that an employer is not attempting to comply with the rule, the agency's inspection will then include both:
a collection of exposure air monitoring, and
the possibility of a citation, which will be reviewed by OSHA's national office if it is from this inspection period.
For your convenience, Construction Equipment Guide has compiled a list of the silica standard's requirements, including an overview of Table 1 here.
“It is looking like it will open before March 20,” he said. “We are now starting the roofing and the mechanicals inside and the sprinkler system is almost complete. The partition work is done.”
Champagne said the next phase of the project is going to be installing the plumbing and electrical systems, then the sheetrock.
Within a month of the new building’s completion, demolition of the current senior center will begin.
“I would think by April we will have ripped it down and we’ll have more parking space,” he said.
Overall, Champagne said, the construction is going “very well” and the committee is pleased with the work of the KBE Building Corp., the contractor.
“Right now we still have not cut anything out of the original plan,” said Champagne, who noted that senior center users had given the committee a list of features they would like to see in their new building.
“Unless we run into any major problems it doesn’t look like we’re going to have to do any value engineering,” Champagne said.
Champagne said efforts were taken to blend the color scheme of the builing with the rest of the neighborhood so it would not stick out. CLICK TITLE TO CONTINUE
Driver shortage forces haulers to lift pay, perks to woo workers
Ansonia trucking-company operator John Pruchnicki uses nearly every tool in his kit to recruit and retain some of Connecticut's 57,000 or so commercially licensed truck drivers to his payroll.
Many of the semis in Pruchnicki's Coastal Carriers of Connecticut fleet are equipped with the same safety features and ergonomics found in today's cars — automatic transmissions, power steering, stability and adaptive cruise controls, and anti-lock brakes. His drivers also collect good pay, benefits, even performance incentives, as well as the opportunity to finish their workday and sleep in their own beds — something coveted among haulers forced to drive nights and weekends.
Yet, despite relatively good pay and working conditions, finding and keeping truck drivers is back to being as difficult as it has ever been, Pruchnicki and other truck-industry observers say. Tightened state and federal compliance obligations on trucking companies and drivers, plus increased competition in a revived economy for talent and consumers' mounting appetites for speedy delivery of goods ordered online, have exacerbated the trend. Trucker demographics, too, are a factor.
"The truck-driver shortage is real,'' said Joe Sculley, president of the Motor Transport Association of Connecticut (MTAC). "Trucking companies just cannot find candidates.''
Ask any trucking-company operator or driver-training school, and they'll tell you that, even with 3.5 million licensed truckers on U.S. roads, drivers always are in short supply. But the intensity of the shortage oscillates, particularly in tune with the economy, said Robert Costello, economist with the American Trucking Associations (ATA), to which MTAC belongs.
Currently the shortages appear to be the worst ever, experts say.
"We're short about 50,000 drivers today,'' Costello said, mostly for long-haul, interstate routes that keep them on the road for days, weeks at a time. CLICK TITLE TO CONTINUE
OSHA's Silica Rule Compliance Deadline Looms — Is Your Company Ready?
Reminder: OSHA will begin enforcement on its crystalline silica standard Saturday, Sept. 23.
The agency said it plans to offer compliance assistance in the first 30 days to employers who are making a “good faith effort” to comply with the new rule, with a particular emphasis on helping employers use the new Table 1 way of measuring exposure levels. OSHA said that if, during an inspection, it finds that an employer is not attempting to comply with the rule, the agency's inspection will then include both: