Mary E. O’Leary
NEW HAVEN — Development of more housing in the city continues unabated, with two market rate plans submitted for downtown as well as a modernized, low-income complex in the Dwight neighborhood and more apartments for the Hill.
There was high praise from the City Plan Commission for all four plans, but one has stalled until at least next month over an easement problem that the parties were told to work out between themselves.
The total number of apartments between the four plans is 290 units, with all but the Hill project approved Wednesday night The two downtown projects will fill in spaces in the center of the commercial district that is expected to have a positive impact on attracting additional retail and improving the aesthetics of Chapel, State and Center streets.
The largest is a seven-floor, 120-unit apartment complex with a roof deck at 842 and 848 Chapel St. owned by Mid Block Development LLC, partners of which are Paul Denz and Chris Vigilante.
It will feature a mix of studio, one- and two-bedroom units that Denz said will be less expensive than other units downtown by being slightly smaller and with fewer amenities.The whole complex is 120,000 square feet with a two level garage; one level in the basement and the other on the first floor. The entrance and exit from the garage is off Center Street; it accommodates 55 vehicles and has 45 bike spaces.
It will feature 66 studio apartments, up to 450 square feet; 41 one-bedroom units, five of them with dens, bringing them up to around 750 square feet; 13 2-bedrooms at approximately 1,200 square feet in size.
Denz said the main amenity is downtown New Haven itself with its many restaurants, gyms and coffee shops.
He expects to have everything in order by the spring with construction starting then and continuing for a year. The architect is Kenneth Boroson.
To complete the project, a small piece of land, owned by the city is being sold to the developers. Staging for the construction will be on an adjacent lot at the corner of Chapel and Orange streets, also owned by Denz, who plans to eventually put 40 apartments on that site.
He was particularly upbeat about an upgrade in commercial tenants for the block of Chapel to Church street with a vacancy in a few days when Foot Locker’s lease is up. He said he believes that Dollar Tree store will also be leaving in another year and his proposed apartment building will feature a retail space.
“We are going to have great retail all the way down the street from Dollar Tree to the corner. When I said I thought this project was transformative, I really believe that with brand new buildings, and we can reface the Foot Locker building, and we are going to come back to the corner property shortly ... But with all of that, with new retail, we believe that we could probably activate that whole block,” Denz said.
Around the corner at 294-302 State St., 60 residential units will be erected using modular construction on what is now a parking lot near the corner of Chapel Street.
This project by Joseph Cohen of Downtown East LLC will feature not only studios, one- and two-bedroom units, but ten 3-bedroom apartments and ten 4-bedroom units, which is a first for downtown.
Both the State Street and Chapel Street plans are touted as transit-oriented developments given how close they are the the State Street Station as well Union Station.
The low-income project will raze the current deteriorated Antillean Estates at 206 Day St., a cooperative that went bankrupt, and replace it with 31 new units that will be available to the same tenants when it is finished, if they desire.
“There is a lot of enthusiasm and I think the community is very excited about the project,” attorney James Segaloff said.
The four-story building will have five one-bedroom apartments; 11 two-bedrooms; 14 three-bedrooms; and one four-bedroom apartment. Carabetta Construction, which runs Bella Vista senior housing in the city, will purchase the property if it is successful in winning state housing support for low-income units. Their first application was turned down.
Last month the project was granted zoning relief, receiving a special exception to permit a Planned Development Unit in an RM-2 District. There will be 35 parking spaces and more open space than previously at the site.
Architect Henry Schadler said they broke up the facade with different materials “so it doesn’t look like an army barracks.”
There will be brick and plank siding and each unit will have its own washer and dryer. The design was approved by the New Haven Historic District Commission. Construction is expected to take 18 months.The last project is conversion of an Armstrong Rubber Co. property at 69-75 Daggett St. into 80 apartments near Yale New Haven Hospital and Yale Medical School, and is being pitched as housing for medical students and staff.
It had a revised parking plan from an earlier iteration approved by the commission in 2017. There will now be 46 spaces in the basement and a courtyard where there was parking.
THe project was seen as a good reuse of a deteriorating property in the Hill. It will feature studios, one-, two- and some 3-bedroom units.
“We feel this is the best version for use of the site. It will be a great asset for the neighborhood,” attorney Miguel Almodovar told the commissioners. The architect is Sam Gardner. He explained to them his plan to raise the roof at certain points to reach the right height for occupancy.
The plans have been recommended for approval, which includes a special permit needed for residences in a light industrial zone, and for the new site plan.
The process came to a halt however, when attorney Elliot Kaiman, representing Yale New Haven Medical Center, objected to the proposal, claiming an easement issue had never been settled. The center owns two abutting properties on the corner.
Almodovar, who represented the developer, Sidre LLC, said the plans had been revised to make the easement question for egress moot. Annoyed City Plan staff and commission members said they could not move forward until those questions were resolved.
Isaac Koren, the director of operations for the project, commented after the meeting.
“It is just a stunt, quite frankly. Yale, unfortunately exerting Yale muscle. There is absolutely nothing nefarious about this and this just wasn’t the forum to get into it,” Koren said.
He said they had not come to any agreement with Yale. “There was absolutely nothing finalized and we thought rather than continue negotiation with Yale, we went and we did our plans in order to eliminate the issue of the easement altogether. That’s it,” Koren said.
As for his company, Koren said he was in “joint venture,” Koren said. “We are partners for now,” he said, with an earlier developer.
Dan Haar: Lamont transition group calls for tolling authority, broad tolls
A passel of progressive ideas came out of Gov.-elect Ned Lamont’s working group on transportation Wednesday morning and along with them, the group called for a “tolling authority” in Lamont’s first six months in office — with highway tolls on all cars and trucks.
That adds pressure on Lamont, who has repeatedly said he wants to see tolling on long-haul trucks only, and said that again Wednesday.
Everyone in the group agreed on the need for tolls except one: New Britain Mayor Erin Stewart, who cast the sole vote against broad tolling, sources said. Stewart was not at the meeting at Bradley International Airport where the group presented its ideas.
The group didn’t offer any specifics. It called for a possible increase in the gasoline tax, without numbers. The tax is about 50 cents a gallon including a 25 cent levy plus a wholesale charge.
“We have to fix our roads,” said James Travers, bureau chief for transportation, traffic and parking for the city of Stamford, a member of the transition group for transportation. “Our investment in roadways is beyond anything that can be sustained with existing revenues.”
“We have been lucky that we haven’t has a Mianus River Bridge collapse,” Travers said, referring to the Interstate 95 bridge collapse that killed three in 1983.Later in the day, Lamont said a tolling authority “sounds like another piece of bureaucracy, I don’t think we need that right now. I think they can do that at DOT.”
He also said he opposes increasing gasoline taxes. He stopped short of vowing to veto a broad tolling bill, but added, “That’s their recommendation, the legislature will have some thoughts on this but my thought is what I told people for six months. Let’s start with tractor-trailer trucks, I think I can get that passed.”
That would raise about $250 million a year when up and running, under Lamont’s plan — enough, he said, to get underway with bringing highways up to standards.
The tolls issue, along with gas taxes, will almost certainly wash over a broad and important discussion about ways to improve Connecticut’s public transit and transportation systems. Some of it, members of the working committee said, could save money in the long run and make the need for added revenues less severe.
Critics of tolls responded quickly, starting with Sen. Len Fasano, R-North Haven, the Senate Republican leader. He issued a statement that covered many of the proposals by the 15 Lamont transition committees presenting their ideas this week.
“I’m trying very hard to give Gov.-elect Lamont the benefit of the doubt and not rush to judgment,” Fasano said in the written release. “However, the policy proposals that have emerged from many of his transition team meetings, including today’s proposal to toll all cars and increase the gas tax, are extremely concerning. These ideas look like Dan Malloy 2.0 and then some. They include massive tax increases, massive increases in spending and massive new promises - at a time when our state cannot even uphold the promises we have already made to residents.”“Oh, he’s a good man, he’s just joking around,” Lamont quipped later.
The unfortunate result is that amid all this brinkmanship about tolls and taxes — obviously important — Connecticut will lose ground in its slow move toward creating rational transportation systems that help the economy.
For example, the committee called for speeding up the hiring process at the state Department of Transportation, where some 500 jobs are funded but not filled. That saves money in the short term but some experts believe the state would spend less on big transportation projects, and get them done faster, if it brought more design and engineering work back in-house to the DOT.
In a draft report that’s not yet public, the transportation group also named several innovations aimed at a greener system. That includes a strategic plan for transit-oriented development — the idea of coordinating zoning and other efforts around less energy-intensive ways of moving people around.
To that end, the committee called for a new “transportation systems working group” to help bubble up good ideas and to coordinate efforts across state agencies. For example, the Department of Energy and Environmental Protection may work on land remediation at a place that could work for development that advances train transit along the Metro-North route — but there’s no formal way for those projects to align.
That working group would also have a “business advisory subcommittee,” which could, in addition to offering ideas, help come up with private money.
And the group called for a quasi-public “Transit Corridor Development Authority” to help development along transit lines.
The group is dominated by municipal and transportation and union officials including co-chairmanKevin Dillon, head of the Connecticut Airport Authority. He spoke about expanding the reach of the Connecticut Aviation Authority, perhaps to include oversight of Tweed-New Haven Airport, the better to coordinate if Tweed were to expand commercial service.
But tolls and taxes will emerge as the hot-button issue and all the ideas about Connecticut finally joining the 21st century are destined to be lost in that din — unless they can happen at little or no cost. In philosophy, the group advances a central concept articulated by Rep. Tony Guerrera, D-Rocky Hill, who’s exiting the House after losing a bid for the state Senate.
“For every dollar that you spend on transportation infrastructure, the return to the economy is double that,” said Guerrera, a leading proponent of tolls.
As Melissa Kaplan-Macey, co-chair of the group and a vice president and Connecticut director at the tri-state Regional Plan Association, put it, “All these great ideas, how are we going to pay for it?”
New gas pipelines: An expensive risk our ratepayers and environment can’t afford
hen gas pipeline explosions and fires killed one person, injured 25, and caused 0ver $800 million in property damage this September in Massachusetts, Connecticut state legislators called for an independent investigation to determine the extent of leak-prone gas pipelines and to ensure we have appropriate inspection procedures to prevent a similar disaster from happening here. These concerns are real and we must have answers.
We also need to ask ourselves if we need more gas pipelines at all, and if so, who should pay for them?
Most Connecticut ratepayers would be surprised to learn that a Connecticut law, enacted in 2015, allows electric utilities like Eversource to construct expanded gas pipelines, and pass the costs to ratepayers — along with a healthy profit margin. When the tax was passed in 2015, only a handful of legislators raised concerns and voted against the legislation.
Connecticut residents currently pay the highest electric rates among all 48 continental states, according to a report released recently by the U.S. Energy Information Administration. The number one reason for these high rates is our region’s over-reliance on natural gas, according to the report.
As if that’s not bad enough, Eversource has been pushing to build more gas pipelines, including the Access Northeast Pipeline. This gigantic pipe, running through our state, would cost approximately $6.6 billion, with about $2 billion coming from Connecticut ratepayers through future increases in our bills. Despite the recent tragedy in Massachusetts, Eversource refuses to give up on expanded pipelines in Connecticut and surrounding states. And three interstate gas pipeline expansions have already been completed in our state!
The evidence against the need for new fossil fuel pipelines is clear, according to many major studies. One report, released by Sierra Club Connecticut and CT Fund for the Environment, conducted by Synapse Energy Economics, shows conclusively that new natural gas pipelines are not needed in our state.
With demand for energy expected to be flat between now and 2030, the The Synapse study found that New England’s use of natural gas will actually decrease by 41 percent from 2015 levels by 2030. That much gas is going to be forced out of the region due to the legal requirements for more renewable energy and less greenhouse gases. The study said, “even existing gas pipelines may operate under capacity.”
This may be why Eversource and others won’t invest their own money in building new pipelines. They want consumers to pay through a surcharge on their bills – a pipeline tax– which has to be paid whether the pipelines are needed or not. The scheme was rejected by Massachusetts’ highest court and New Hampshire public utilities regulators. In its unanimous ruling, the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court said the pipeline tax would “re-expose ratepayers to the types of financial risks from which the Legislature sought to protect them.”
But here in Connecticut, the pipeline tax is alive and well. During the last legislative session, renewable energy activists, legislators and leading environmental groups joined together to overturn the tax, but were unsuccessful. Similar legislation is likely to be introduced when the legislature convenes a new session in January.
Instead of bowing to the pound-foolish and environmentally risky expediency of fossil fuels, it is time to push for more renewable energy to drive down our current dependence on natural gas. Connecticut was recently rated fifth in the country for energy efficiency and ninth for its installed solar power. We are heading in the right direction and we can do even better.
Connecticut consumers do not need higher energy bills. And our communities cannot afford the risk of more dangerous pipelines under and around our homes, schools and recreational areas.
State Rep. Gregg Haddad, D-Mansfield, and Martha Klein, Chair of Sierra Club Connecticut. Haddad was one of 11 members of the House of Representatives to oppose the Pipeline Tax (Public Act 15-107) becoming law in 2015.
Big changes contemplated for $46.2 million school construction plan in Waterbury
MICHAEL PUFFER
WATERBURY – City officials are strongly considering big changes to a $46.2 million renovation and expansion of Wendell Cross Elementary School, which was to begin in 2019.
In 2016, city officials approved a plan to renovate much of the existing school and add about 40,000 square feet of new space. It would turn a school designed for about 350 students through grade five into a building capable of housing 550 students from prekindergarten through eighth grade.
School Superintendent Verna D. Ruffin – who joined the district this year – isn’t sold on that plan, however.
And now officials are contemplating building an entirely new structure, and perhaps adding three classrooms per grade, rather than the original plan of two per grade.
During a forum for parents Tuesday at the school, Ruffin said some students currently have to go to other city schools, as Wendell Cross classrooms fill up.
“We don’t want to build a school and spend $46 million if it’s not adequate for the neighborhood,” Mayor Neil M. O’Leary said.
O’Leary said the city is contemplating using the closed St. Joseph Catholic School in the city’s Brooklyn neighborhood, or possibly the buildings that had housed the now closed St. Mary Catholic School (next to Saint Mary’s Hospital).
The St. Joseph School building had previously housed public school students before the shuttered Duggan Elementary School was renovated and reopened. O’Leary said the city is seeking estimates to get St. Joseph back into shape, and there may be state money available.
Two architectural firms vying for the Wendell Cross project have advised entirely new construction would better serve the district, O’Leary said. If there’s no expansion in scope, an entirely modern school could cost very near the $46.2 million already approved, said the mayor.
Officials have asked the design firms to present three scenarios: the project as originally envisioned; a new school for 550 students with two classes per grade; and a new school with three classrooms per grade, O’Leary said.
Big questions remain. City officials want estimates of cost and construction time. They also want to know whether the state would honor its prior pledge of 78.6 percent reimbursement if the project changes dramatically. And they question whether the city would have to get back in line with other municipalities seeking state grants for school construction projects.
The city has until October to begin work under the original approval by the state’s General Assembly. O’Leary promised that will happen.
“If we have to pay an extra 10 percent, I think we are all in agreement this school is needed,” O’Leary said. “And whichever version we’ve decided upon, we are going to go forward.”