Danbury residents can help oversee massive Interstate 84 expansion project
By Zach Murdock
DANBURY — State engineers are looking for local help to develop a $715 million plan to rebuild Interstate 84 between Exit 3 and Exit 8 in Danbury over the next decade.
Engineers from the state Department of Transportation have hosted workshops with dozens of towns, businesses, groups and councils across the area over the past year, but they’re missing one core group — neighborhoods.
Now the team is forming a project advisory committee of at least two dozen local officials and neighborhood leaders to help guide the design of the highway expansion and improvements with their local experience, officials announced Tuesday at a luncheon for members of the Greater Danbury Chamber of Commerce.
“We don’t live in Danbury,” said Dave Sousa, a senior planner and consultant working with DOT on the project. “We have the data, but you all have the experiences. So it’s really important that we talk in these settings and get the feedback ... (The committee) is a really interesting way to engage people through representatives of people who live here.”
The committee will be formed this fall and will meet on a regular basis with engineers and consultants working on the project to provide feedback and help keep the entire project on track as it moves through a series of design phases through essentially the mid-2020s, DOT Project Manager Andy Fesenmeyer said. The massive expansion plan was first announced in early 2015 as part of Gov. Dannel Malloy’s ambitious 30-year, $100-billion plan to upgrade and modernize transportation infrastructure across the state. Malloy announced the plan at the time overlooking the interstate in Danbury and on Monday announced the I-84 construction project in Waterbury would be opening this month, a year ahead of schedule.
So far the Danbury project team has collected data and will spend at least the next two years working on potential proposals for the stretch of highway and securing necessary federal environmental permits — possibly setting actual construction all the way back to about 2030, according to the latest timeline. “Our timeline is still mid to late-20s and the reason we put it like that is we don’t even know what we’re building right now, so it’s hard to guess when we might build that,” Fesenmeyer said. “So the timeline is fairly long because, to work through the public, it’s an intensive alternative analysis to make sure we get the right project.”
This 6.5-mile stretch of the highway was originally designed in the late 1950s to handle about 15,000 cars per day — a far cry from the 80,000 to 110,000 vehicles that drive it daily now.
Atop the project’s priority list will be reconfiguring the interchanges where I-84 and Route 7 meet, which require lane changes and left exits that cause congestion and dangerous situations, DOT officials said.
But the final expansion might not mean simply adding an extra lane in each direction, Fesenmeyer said. As much as 40 percent of traffic on the highway between Exit 3 and Exit 8 is local traffic simply avoiding the city’s zig-zagging street network and stoplights, he said. It could be possible to add a local-traffic-only lane along the highway to ease congestion for through-traffic on the main interstate lanes without overburdening the existing city street setup, he suggested.
That will be for the advisory committee of neighbors to help decide and balance, though, which underscores the necessity for involvement early and often in the lengthy design process, state and local officials agreed. “I think the community engagement process is going to be really paramount to the whole thing,” City Councilman Vinny DiGilio said. “The city of Danbury and its residents went through a lot on Route 6. We were kind of held hostage to things happening there out of our control for a long, long time and there’s going to be a lot of those type of things during this process.
“That 30 to 40 percent (of local traffic) is here 100 percent of the time,” he continued. “The improvements and the end result are going to be excellent. The means, the work to get there, is going to be where the real special sauce happens.” DOT officials will be at this week’s Downtown Chow-Down during lunch on Thursday at Kennedy Park and plan to host more public community meetings in the fall.
Danbury leaders begrudgingly advance $102 million water treatment plan referendum
By Zach Murdock
DANBURY — Voters will be asked to approve a $102 million referendum in November for federal- and state-mandated upgrades to the region’s aging wastewater treatment plant in Danbury.
The City Council begrudgingly agreed Monday night to put the bond question before voters despite members’ skepticism that the costly upgrades will have any significant impact on the outflow into local waterways.
But council members say state and federal environmental rules have forced their hands to advance the plan despite its jaw-dropping price.
Now the city finds itself up against a series of deadlines to implement the proposed upgrades or face steep penalties from state environmental authorities, ranging from daily fines to outright losing its state permit for the plant.
“It’s not something we’re happy about doing, but it is what it is and it has to be done,” Council President Joe Cavo said after the meeting. “This is one of those infrastructure things we have to deal with and it’s a quality of life issue — you have to keep flushing your toilet and washing your dishes. But it’s for the voters to decide, so we have to put it to them.”
Still unclear, though, is how much the project might ultimately cost some city residents and business owners, Public Works Director Antonio Iadarola said. Although every city voter will be eligible to cast a ballot on the referendum question, only homeowners and businesses connected to city sewer will bear the cost through their monthly sewer bill.
Any ultimate rate increase necessary to fund the project cannot even be estimated until bids go out next spring and the state decides how much grant funding it will receive, both of which will happen well after voters would be asked to approve the borrowing, Iadarola conceded.
“It’s almost impossible to figure that out at this stage,” he told the council. “We’re trying to get our hands around that.”The wastewater treatment plant off Newtown Road was last upgraded in 1993 and now serves Danbury, Bethel, Brookfield, Newtown and Ridgefield.The referendum follows the city’s lengthy battles with state environmental officials and three environmental groups over treatment standards at the plant and some cases when it had to discharge untreated water into nearby brooks.
The city settled the lawsuit brought by environmental groups last year for a $100,000 fine and a series of updates to its regulations and the treatment plant itself. But it has now been a decade since the state Department of Energy and Environmental Protection ordered the city increase its water treatment to remove 98 percent of phosphorous from the water leaving the plant.The aging plant currently removes about 90 percent of phosphorous from the water — which can cause environmental or health problems in large amounts — but the planned upgrades will push the plant to the mandated 98 percent mark, Public Utilities Superintendent David Day said.Mayor Mark Boughton agreed the city has “no choice” but to pay for the upgrades or face steep penalties, from daily fines to losing their state water treatment permit entirely.
“I don’t have a problem with (the upgrades), it’s the phosphorous removal that just gets absurd,” Boughton said. “I don’t think this is going to have any impact downstream, but we’re not going to win the argument. We’ve been fighting with the EPA and DEEP and just haven’t broken through.”
The 21-member council must authorize the referendum with a supermajority vote at its meeting in September to formally advance the question to ballots this fall.
If the council doesn’t, it risks losing state funding for the upgrades and a consent order to complete the upgrades anyway, city corporation counsel Les Pinter said. If voters vote down the borrowing, the city likely would face the same dilemma, he added.
Voters approved a $10 million bond referendum two years ago to begin the process of designing the upgrades and designs are about 70 percent complete as of this summer.
If approved by voters, the city would bid the project next spring and could begin construction later next year to complete the improvements by mid-2022.
20 towns to split $62M for affordable housing development
Joe Cooper
The state will award over $61.5 million in funding to build, restore or expand 978 affordable housing units in 20 towns, officials announced Monday.
Gov. Dannel P. Malloy said the grants and loans will support multi-family housing units in high opportunity areas, which are identified by access to municipal services, local education systems and low crime levels.
The housing funding raises the availability of low-cost homes in Greater Hartford and in towns including Farmington, Manchester, Glastonbury, South Windsor, Enfield, Stamford, Greenwich, New Haven and Norwich, state officials said.
Since 2011, the state Department of Housing (DOH) and Connecticut Housing Finance Authority (CHFA) have built, rehabilitated or pledged funding for about 24,332 housing units, with over 20,000 of those remaining as affordable to low and moderate-income options for homebuyers.
The $1.4 billion investments were matched by over 2.4 billion from other financial sources including the private sector.
Projects to receive funds include:
Farmington: New Horizons Village: DOH will award a $3.5 million grant to New Horizons Inc. for renovationing a 68-unit community providing assistance to over 100 low-income adults with physical disabilities.
Hartford: Ward Affleck: DOH is funding almost $1.3 million to the 14-unit affordable housing property for interior and exterior improvements.
Hartford: Cityscape VII: DOH will provide a grant up to about $1 million to Pope Park Zion LLC for the seventh phase of its Cityscape Homes project in Hartford's Frog Hollow neighborhood.
Hartford: Bristol Apartments: DOH is funding up to $813,780 for exterior and interior improvements at the 15-unit affordable housing property.
East Hartford: Veterans Terrace: DOH will send $5.2 million to the Veteran's Terrace Communities LLC to begin the first phase of reconstruction and rehabilitation at the 45-unit moderate rental property.
Glastonbury: Herbert T. Clark Congregate: DOH has awarded a $3 million grant to the Glastonbury Housing Authority for its 45-unit congregate property. The grant will be used for exterior and interior upgrades. The property owner and utility companies will also provide funds.
Manchester: Spencer Village and Spencer Village: DOH will award a $2 million grant to the Manchester Housing Authority for its 80-unit elderly property. The funds are meant for exterior and interior improvements. The building owner, CHFA, and the utility company will also provide funding.
South Windsor: Wapping Mews: DOH will provide up to $2 million to the South Windsor Housing Authority for its 30-unit elderly property. The funds will cover interior and exterior improvements and upgrades to the community and laundry rooms to meet Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) requirements.
Manchester Panel: Renovate, Enlarge 3 Elementary Schools; Convert Another To Preschool
Jesse Leavenworth
A committee charged with drafting the second half of a school modernization plan made preliminary recommendations Tuesday to renovate and enlarge three elementary schools and convert another to a preschool.The panel, made up of town and school leaders and citizens, has considered three main options to bring the remaining elementary schools up to 21st century standards and balance racial and socioeconomic enrollment in each school.
Voters approved an $84 million bond issue in 2014 for the first phase of the school modernization project. That work is to be completed next year. The panel that drafted that plan, the School Modernization and Reinvestment Team Revisited, has been revived as SMARTR2 to plan the second phase and bring a proposal to voters.
Meeting in Lincoln Center Tuesday, the committee dismissed the option of “like-new” renovations to all four elementary schools: Bowers, Buckley, Martin and Keeney. A major problem is the expense: about $33.1 million after a state reimbursement. Also, that estimate is in today’s dollars, and construction costs are expected to climb before the projects begin.
Committee members also rejected renovating and enlarging two schools to accommodate about 580 students each and closing two others. Because the state reimburses more for larger projects, that is the least expensive option, at $19.8 to $22 million, but it would leave little room to accommodate increased enrollment in the future, members said.
Renovating three of the four schools — Bowers, Buckley and either Keeney or Martin — and making the other into a preschool makes the most sense, in part because it provides flexibility for future growth, panel members said. The net cost to taxpayers for renovating the three schools so that each could accommodate 400 students would be about $28.3 million.
The panel was leaning toward converting Martin to a preschool. Chairwoman Cheri Eckbreth said that made the most sense since Martin already meets some of the code requirements for a preschool, including bathrooms attached to each classroom. Randall Luther, representing the project architect, TSKP Studio architects, said the estimated cost of converting Martin into a preschool is about $14.5 million, before state reimbursement.
The SMARTR2 panel’s recommendations now go to a joint meeting of the board of education and board of directors, scheduled for Aug. 28. After that, public hearings would be held in September and it could go to voters for a referendum in April on issuing bonds. If voters approve, construction on the first school would not begin until the summer of 2020, General Manager Scott Shanley said.
So far, Bennet Academy has been joined with the Cheney Building for a new fifth- and sixth-grade school. The project also includes "like-new" renovations and additions to Waddell and Verplanck schools, so that each will serve up to 530 students. Robertson and Washington schools are to be closed eventually.