Gregory Seay
A team led by Stamford landlord-developer RMS Cos., owner-operator of The Goodwin Hotel in downtown Hartford, has emerged as sole bidder to redevelop the city's Downtown North quadrant into a mix of residential and commercial spaces, the city says.
The city announced that RMS submitted by Thursday's revised application deadline its detailed proposal for transforming DoNo's mostly commuter parking acreage adjacent to Dunkin' Donuts Park.
That only one development team responded to the city's request for development proposals belies the apparent interest shown when individuals representing some two dozen potential bidders appeared at a bidder's conference the city held in mid-December in the ballpark's Aetna Community Center.
As recently as early February, the city cited heavy interest in redeveloping its approximately 20 acres bounded by I-84 and Main and Windsor streets for resetting the original Feb. 15 bid deadline to March 1.
"A number of developers had expressed interest throughout the process, and we certainly had hoped for more responses,'' Hartford Mayor Luke Bronin said in a statement disclosing RMS's bid team.
"That said, we look forward to reviewing the proposal that was submitted and working with the developer to determine whether it's a viable and appropriate project," Bronin said.
The city reissued a request for proposals late last fall after it fired its previous choice as DoNo developer, Centerplan Inc., due to Centerplan's troubled involvement in constructing the downtown home of the minor-league Yard Goats.
RMS has been an active developer, landlord and property manager in Connecticut. Its property portfolio lists online nearly two dozen properties, mostly hotels and apartments primarily in Fairfield County.
Aside from acquiring, renovating and reopening last year 124 luxury guest rooms at The Goodwin, RMS also built and opened last Sept. 1 West Hartford's 114-room luxury hotel, The Delamar.
In Stamford, RMS built UConn's housing for up to 300 students at 900 Washington Blvd.
A City Hall spokesman said Thursday that specific details about RMS's DoNo will not be publicly available until later in the review-approval process.
RMS did not immediately respond Thursday to a request for comment.
According to the city, in addition to being the DoNo owner-developer, RMS's construction unit would serve as general contractor. The architect/planners are Kenneth Boroson Architects of New Haven and Torti Gallas + Partners, of Silver Spring, Md.
The Freeman Cos. of Hartford would be the project's civil engineer-surveyor.
Despite Early Interest, Only One Developer Steps Forward To Build In Hartford's Downtown North Neighborhood
One developer has handed in a proposal to construct a new neighborhood north of downtown, five months after city leaders fired the original builders from the project.
Stamford-based RMS Companies submitted a $200 million plan for housing and retail on the four parcels that circle the city’s new minor league ballpark. The window to submit bids closed at 2 p.m. Thursday.
Also included in RMS’ development group are architects Torti Gallas + Partners and Kenneth Boroson Architects; civil engineer Freeman Cos.; and contractor RMS Construction.
RMS owner and founder Randy Salvatore was a partner in the yearlong, multimillion dollar renovation of Hartford’s storied Goodwin Hotel, which reopened last spring. He is also the developer of a mixed-use project in New Haven’s Hill neighborhood that features apartments, retail and research space.
Salvatore wouldn’t go into specifics Thursday about his pitch to Hartford officials, but said he was looking to build on the success he achieved with the Goodwin rehabilitation.
“It’s really a great site and I’m excited by what I see happening in Hartford,” he said.
Salvatore called his plan “economically feasible.” While he may pursue a loan from the Capital Region Development Authority, he said the majority of the project would be privately financed.
Hartford leaders have said for months that the downtown north region generated significant attention. Last fall, Mayor Luke Bronin noted that the city had received several calls from interested developers, and officials in February pushed back the deadline to submit bids by two weeks, citing substantial interest from outside firms
At a pre-bid conference in December, more than a dozen companies turned up to hear about the project.
But only one group returned the city’s request for proposals.“A number of developers had expressed interest throughout the process, and we certainly had hoped for more responses,” Bronin said Thursday. “That said, we look forward to reviewing the proposal that was submitted and working with the developer to determine whether it’s a viable and appropriate project.”
Complicating matters, Centerplan Construction Co. and DoNo Hartford LLC, the fired developers of the original downtown north project, have placed liens on the properties surrounding the ballpark. The firms are suing the city for wrongful termination, and have claimed that Hartford officials don’t have ownership of the land.
The city dismissed the developers after they missed two key deadlines to complete the baseball stadium.
A lawyer for Centerplan declined to comment Thursday. Through a spokesman, Howard Rifkin, Hartford’s corporation counsel, said he is reviewing whether the city can proceed with development on the properties.
City leaders in October said they had terminated a Master Developer Agreement with Centerplan, freeing them up to seek new plans for the four parcels near Trumbull and Main streets. CLICK TITLE TO CONTINUE
A proposal that could empower state’s metros
Last year Hartford Mayor Luke Bronin visited several suburban towns to explain the structural problems — too small a property tax base to pay for demanding services without a prohibitive tax rate — that were forcing Hartford to think about bankruptcy.
Though the frank discussions may have gained Bronin legislative support, no area town offered to partner with Hartford to ease its burden. At least one suburban mayor blamed Hartford for its problems, and others fretted about paying Hartford’s share of the regional water and sewer bill if the capital city filed for bankruptcy.
Though bankruptcy was avoided, the situation demonstrated that the flame of regional cooperation doesn’t burn brightly in town-oriented Connecticut. Some towns, often suburbs, don’t trust other towns, often cities, and thus are reluctant to work together.
Thursday the Commission on Fiscal Stability and Economic Growth recommended that the General Assembly offer an incentive to help bridge that divide. The commission proposed giving the state’s nine regional councils of governments, or COGs, the option “to levy an additional sales tax of up to 0.5 percent … to be used solely for regional economic development and shared service arrangements.”
The commission also recommended that COGs, or consortiums of COGs, as well as municipalities, be “authorized to impose supplemental time-limited sales or property taxes by special referenda to fund discrete capital projects,” as is allowed in Wyoming, California and some other states.
Choice
By granting taxing power to the COGs, the commission avoids the more radical option of consolidating small towns into larger ones, and instead urges what might be called an overlay approach, empowering a regional organization that already exists to do more of what it has been doing. Many of the state’s nine COGs have been doing yeoman work to increase regional sharing of services, but have been hamstrung by recent budget cuts. New money would help.
The proposal comes at a difficult budgetary time — next year’s legislature will face a biennial deficit of more than $4 billion — but what might help the regional taxing proposals is that they are optional — regions can choose to levy the taxes or not. Many regions across the country have taxed themselves for transit or economic development projects.
Balance
Connecticut is a state of 169 small towns and medium-sized cities, and, as the Fiscal Commission observed, is likely to stay that way. People moved to towns for good schools, good services, tolerable taxes, safe streets, the character of the place. They don’t want to see any of these assets diminished.But there is a downside to the ancient 169-town framework.
Fragmented local government isn’t unique to Connecticut, it occurs elsewhere, most noticeably in the Northeast. Brookings did a study of Pennsylvania, a state as fragmented as Connecticut, in 2006. Its findings include:
Fragmentation can undercut economic competitiveness. Towns and state agencies working in isolation can lead to bureaucratic overlap and mixed signals, as well as duplicated services and haphazard spending.
It can increase the costs of government, because competing jurisdictions sometimes duplicate infrastructure, staffing and services that could be provided more efficiently.
It can encourage costly sprawl, by inhibiting coordinated planning to manage growth and enco raging competition among jurisdictions for desirable developments.
It limits government capacity to deliver services. Some small towns with few major commercial enterprises don’t have the tax bases to provide basic services, an affliction not unknown to some small towns in eastern Connecticut.
So the trick is to find balance; to find projects that can improve a region without doing harm. What might those be? For one, there is more hay to be made by sharing services.
Service Sharing
There is a good amount of regional service sharing going on in the state, and it has saved money.
For example, John Filchak, executive director of the Northeastern Connecticut Council of Governments, said the 12 towns participate in his regional property revaluation program save an average of 50 percent on what they would pay individually; the 18 towns in his animal control program save 10 to 60 percent.
The Capitol Region Council of Governments’ purchasing compact has saved millions of dollars for nearly 120 towns.
More opportunities exist. A 2013 study by the New England Public Policy Center, part of the Boston Fed, suggested that Connecticut could save millions of dollars by merging or consolidating emergency call centers, local health districts and local pension administration.
The authors opined that most savings from regionalization will come in technology-based services and those that require specialized skills, not from labor-intensive services.
Here is such an example. About 75-80 percent of school districts in the state use a student software platform called PowerSchool, said Doug Casey, executive director of the state’s Commission on Education Technology. The towns all procure the service independently.
Were there a state master contract to which all could subscribe, it would almost assuredly save towns money.
Trust
To start building trust among town officials, former Simsbury First Selectman Mary M. Glassman suggested the state initiate some regional projects in metro areas and encourage (or require) area towns to participate.
These could be, say, regional police lockups, perhaps staffed by state corrections officers as prisons are closed. This would free local police officers to work where they CLICK TITLE TO CONTINUE