East Hampton residents will vote on new town hall/police station in November
EAST HAMPTON >> The effort to construct a new town hall/police station, the subject of discussion, debate and delay for three decades, will go to a vote in November.
The Town Council voted 5-1 Tuesday to send an $18.98 million proposal for construction of a unified town facilities building to a town meeting Oct. 30, and from there to a vote in the Nov. 7 municipal election ballot.
Councilor Ted Hintz Jr. cast the lone opposing vote during an abbreviated special meeting held in the middle school library/media center. Councilor Mark Philhower, who had previously opposed the plan, did not attend the meeting Tuesday.The proposal calls for construction of an approximately 33,000-square-foot building that would house the Town Hall, police department and Board of Education on two floors. It would also contain other town offices — such as the recreation department — that now occupy rental space elsewhere in town. The building would be built on a 5.4-acre parcel of land in the Edgewater Hills mixed-use development which is owned by Edgewater Hills developers, Stephen and Lisa Motto. In exchange for the parcel of land, the Mottos are being paid 4 percent of the total cost to serve as the owner’s project manager for the project. Town Manager Michael Maniscalco estimated that will amount to some $756,000.
“It’s taken a long time to get here,” Maniscalco said after the meeting adjourned. “This is the furthest we’ve ever gotten” in the effort to find a replacement town hall, Maniscalco said. “We’ve never gotten this far.“This project is 35 years in the making,” he added. “To get this far is pretty remarkable,” Maniscalco said, all the more so because the process only began in March, when the council established a building committee. The town bought the current town hall from CL&P in 1976, when the town had a population of 8,100 people and a staff of 31. Today, East Hampton is home to 12,950 and employs a staff of 68 full-time workers. In 1983 — the year Maniscalco was born — the town began discussing how to replace the building.Speaking during an informational meeting last week, Maniscalco said, “Clearly, size is a challenge. “What about water?” he asked. “Water is something we take for granted in a first-world country. But if you work in Town Hall, you can’t drink the water,” because the well that serves Town Hall and police headquarters is contaminated. The present structure is also prone to flooding, Maniscalco said, most notoriously last year when a sewage drainage backed up in headquarters. More recently, there was seepage and condensation in the town clerk’s vault which imperiled some of the town most important and valuable documents. CLICK TITLE TO CONTINUE
Stevenson Dam Celebrates 100 years
MONROE — It was 100 years ago this fall that excavation began on the Stevenson Dam, still one of the largest dams in Connecticut and one of the most complicated civil engineering projects ever attempted in the state.
It’s a project that’s still talked about today, with its share of urban legends, frustrated motorists, wildlife and grand views, particularly after a day of heavy rain.
“It was actually a project of what was then the New York, New Haven and Hartford Railroad, said John Babina Jr., a member of the Monroe Historical Society. “In the early 20th century, the railroad was looking for way to power its new electric locomotives.”
Back then the nation was mostly powered by coal. In late 1916 the country was plunged into what was called a coal famine, and there were worries that not only would there be no coal for industry, but no coal for home heating.
“At that time, people were scrambling for another source of power, and the Housatonic River was seen as being part of the solution,” Babina said.
As the project in the Housatonic River was just getting under way, a battle was brewing between Oxford and Monroe over which side would get the powerhouse, because getting the powerhouse would mean snaring a big taxpayer. At first, Oxford seemed to have the upper hand.
“But after they took a look at the bedrock, there was no choice but to put the powerhouse on the Monroe side,” Babina said. The powerhouse is still Monroe’s biggest single-site taxpayer, according to First Selectman Steve Vavrek. Power was created to build it. Today, CL&P is the biggest electricity supplier in the state. It no longer owns the dam and its powerhouse; now it’s owned by FirstLight.
The bridge, grudgingly supported atop the spillway by 24 concrete piers, is owned by the state DOT, carrying Rt. 34 between Monroe and Oxford.
More than 800 men aided by dozens of mules worked on the project. Many lived there, creating a tiny temporary city, complete with a small hospital, a chapel, a 300-seat mess hall, carpenter shops and a machine shop. The men worked “night and day” according to a speech given by Gov. Marcus H. Holcomb in the fall of 1919 at a press conference staged at the construction site.
Officials point out that the dam is designed for power generation, not flood control. It can’t hold back floodwaters; the water that enters Lake Zoar — the 1.45 square-mile lake created by the dam — soon finds its way through or over the Stevenson Dam.
They also say that — contrary to popular belief — Lake Zoar does not have a lot of water. The dam is kept in good shape, but even if it were to somehow catastrophically fail, there would be only minor flooding experienced downstream.
The dam is anchored in gneiss, which is very hard bedrock.
So strong is the rock that the gravity-type dam wasn't physically anchored to the bedrock until 1987 when 80 "post tensioned" anchor cables were installed to give the dam improved resiliency in the event of a major earthquake. Hundreds of concrete dams in the U.S. were similarly stabilized beginning in the late 1970s; this work is ongoing.
Another commonly held belief is that there’s a body of a construction worker encased the dam, a poor soul who fell into the wet concrete.
“No record of that,” Babina said. “That legend began with a report of a man who signed in but never signed out. He probably just took off.”
There have been plans to replace the dam’s bridge with a proper stand-alone bridge about 250 feet upstream from the dam, but this idea, surprisingly, was met with local opposition.
The roadway has to be shut down frequently for repairs, sometimes for days at a time, and the sharp corners at both ends have seen countless crashes over the years. There’s no space for pedestrians, and two tractor-trailers traveling in opposite directions barely have room for each other.
It’s among a small number of dams in the United States that still carry major highways on their backs. Officials throughout the years have said the two make for odd bedfellows because dams and bridges present their own engineering challenges.
The Hoover Dam, spanning the Colorado River between Nevada and Arizona, closed its highway for good in October 2005, when the new Colorado River Bridge, carrying Route 93, opened.
Lake Zoar gets its name from the corner of Newtown and Monroe that once called itself Zoar, after the Biblical city Zoara near the Dead Sea. CLICK TITLE TO CONTINUE