Katrina Koerting
BROOKFIELD — The town has hired O&G Industries to be the construction managers for its upcoming elementary school project.
Torrington-based O&G were chosen from seven companies who responded to the town’s requests for proposals. The Municipal Building Committee narrowed that list to four before ultimately recommending O&G, incorporating feedback from the architect and owner’s project manager.
First Selectman Steve Dunn said O&G was the most qualified bidder and has done a number of projects. The bid came in at $3.8 million, he said. “O&G is a pretty good-sized firm based in Connecticut,” Dunn said.
The town is looking at building a new school that would combine pre-kindergarten through fifth grade while closing two elementary schools that are lacking in energy efficiency and handicap accessibility.
The town has already hired Tecton Architects to be the architect and Arcadis to be the owner’s project manager, which will oversee the project. The new school is expected to cost $78.1 million and measure nearly 139,000 square feet.
O&G Industries most recently completed an agriscience project at Shepaug Valley School in Washington. The company has also overseen school construction projects in Colchester, East Lyme, Groton, Hartford, Ledyard, New London, Plainville, Willimantic and Woodbury.
Bristol Hospital temporarily relocating Emergency Center entrance
JUSTIN MUSZYNSKI
BRISTOL - The entrance to the Bristol Hospital Emergency Center will be relocated for the better part of the next six months during a construction project.
The changes will take effect Sunday, as the hospital continues the second phase of a $15 million renovation project to the EC.
The first phase of the project was completed last year, when the hospital unveiled its new 10-bed Emergency Center Behavioral Health Unit. The 2,700-square-foot unit is designed to meet the mental health and substance abuse needs of the community in light of the nation’s opioid epidemic.
For the next five to six months, the entrance to the emergency center will be located at the Cancer Care Center door - which sits closer to the building’s main entrance.
“The signage will completely explain it,” said Christopher Boyle, hospital spokesman.
The entrance will have a check-in area with security and clinical staff. Patients will then be taken in an elevator to the Emergency Center waiting room.
Patients who visit the Cancer Care Center during the construction should now use the main entrance to the building. Valet parking is available, in addition to a parking lot across the street from the main entrance, said Paul Diaz, security supervisor.
“It’s complimentary,” Diaz said.
During the construction, which will include an expansion of the emergency center, Newell Road will be closed.
“We’re doubling the size of the (emergency center),” said Thomas Roche, director of facilities and construction.
“We own Newell Road now,” Roche said. “It used to be a city street.”
When it reopens, Newell will no longer be a one-way road.
The entrance to the medical office building on campus will still be off of Goodwin Street during construction, but it will be shifted over a bit, hospital officials said. This, too, will have signage to guide visitors.
The second phase of construction is expected to be completed in the summer. The entire project, which will be carried out in four phases, is slated to be completed by 2021 in alignment with the hospital’s 100 year anniversary.
Much expensive nonsense pushes transportation aside
Chris Powell
Now that highway tolls seem to have been dismissed for this year's session of the General Assembly, the Yankee Institute for Public Policy has provided good suggestions for finding transportation infrastructure money elsewhere.
Yankee's suggestions show that Governor Lamont and Democratic legislative leaders really don't believe what they say -- that transportation infrastructure is urgent. For if they did believe it, they wouldn't be planning to spend the money Yankee proposes to move to transportation:
-- The state's economic development grants to businesses -- corporate welfare -- and the filmmaking tax credit program cost state government about $257 million each year while accomplishing little. Indeed, a recent study by North Carolina State University reached the same conclusion on a national level.
-- State government should reduce its subsidies for passenger railroad service and raise fares by $1, generating $44 million per year that could be used to leverage federal funds for improving rail lines. Most commuters on the Metro-North line in prosperous Fairfield County could afford the extra $2 per round trip. (Greenwich's Democratic state senator, Alexandra Kasser, complained that the governor's toll proposal didn't go far enough, maybe because comprehensive tolling would have people who live outside Fairfield County and drive to work subsidizing Kasser's rail-commuting constituents.)
-- State government should eliminate "project labor agreements" and "prevailing wage" requirements for government construction projects. These policies are payoffs to construction unions and increase costs by 10 to 20 percent. They serve the unions, not the public.
That the governor and the Democratic majority in the General Assembly won't redirect this spending to transportation shows they consider it more important. Indeed, the state budget is full of things less important to the public than transportation but more important to politically active special interests.
If everyone pursuing public funds followed the Yankee Institute's example, essentially becoming an auditor of state and municipal government, budget debates might be far more illuminating and demand far more conscientiousness from the governor and legislators, who seldom judge anything in state government for results.
For example, Connecticut Voices for Children could be more useful by analyzing the top 5,000 state and municipal employee salaries, starting with the $300,000 salary planned for the executive director of the state's new educational slush fund, the "Partnership for Connecticut." Advocates for the mentally handicapped could report on why state financial aid to municipal education goes up even as student enrollment and performance go down. Community colleges, stewing about their consolidation, could analyze the deficits of the University of Connecticut's health center and athletic department.
Lots of money could be saved in state government if people were ever motivated enough to save it.
Why public subsidies are critical to new downtown Hartford housing construction
Joe Cooper
ome taxpayers scoff when a wealthy real estate developer secures a public subsidy to fund new housing construction in downtown Hartford.
But that support is necessary if the city wants to see more apartments sprout in and around the central business district, according to a new study by East Hartford real estate advisory firm Goman+York Property Advisors LLC.
In fact, taxpayer dollars are crucial in supporting new apartments because high construction costs and operating expenses make it difficult, if not impossible, for developers to achieve a 12% to 18% return on investment (essentially the minimum ROI most would accept to do a project) based on the market rents that can be charged downtown, the study said.
The Goman+York study — which was commissioned by the Capital Region Development Authority (CRDA), a quasi-public financier of most downtown Hartford projects — provides two hypothetical examples of a typical housing project to demonstrate why a subsidy is needed.
In the first example, the project has development costs of $250 per square foot, monthly market rents of $2.35 per square foot (that equates to a 650-square-foot apartment having monthly rents of about $1,527), and annual operating expenses of $9.87 per square foot.
The net rent ($9.87 in annual operating costs subtracted from $28.20 in annual rents) is $18.33 per square foot.
That project’s return on investment, without subsidies, is 7.3% ($18.33/$250), far below what it would take to entice a developer, the study says.
Using that same hypothetical example and providing a $100-per-square-foot public subsidy, which equates to 40% of the overall development costs, bumps up the return on investment to 12.22%.
If you’re thinking that’s a significant public subsidy it is, but CRDA, which largely offers low-interest loans, isn’t providing all of it.
For example, the $24-million Spectra Boutique Apartments at 5 Constitution Plaza, which debuted in 2015 with 190 studio, one- and two-bedroom units in the former Sonesta Hotel, received $9.6 million in state and federal historic tax credits, a combined $6 million in loans from DECD and CRDA, and a favorable tax assessment for blighted properties, the study said.
Spectra Boutique, developed by New York’s Girona Ventures and Wonder Works Development and Construction Corp., is currently 94% occupied and charges monthly rents ranging from about $1,100 to $1,900, the study says.
The study didn’t reveal the developer’s estimated ROI.
[Read more: 400-plus Hartford apartments coming online in 2020]
R. Michael Goman, principal of Goman+York, said public financing will be needed to encourage adaptive re-use of non-residential buildings in Hartford for at least the next five years, or as long as Connecticut’s population continues to decline or flatline.
Goman said an increase in population would drive greater demand for housing and increase rents, which would lessen the need for public subsidies on new housing construction.
“Until we see that change, I think you need the government to step in and incentivize new housing product,” he said. “CRDA is a vehicle in which we do that, and you can see that on the street.”
The ROI issue, Goman says, is common in most small cities, especially in the Northeast, where construction-cost growth has outpaced rents at aging residential buildings for decades.
“Virtually any project that we have looked at, particularly in downtown areas, … in order to make the numbers work, the community needs to participate,” Goman said. “This isn’t something specific just to Hartford.”
The first phase of the project was completed last year, when the hospital unveiled its new 10-bed Emergency Center Behavioral Health Unit. The 2,700-square-foot unit is designed to meet the mental health and substance abuse needs of the community in light of the nation’s opioid epidemic.
For the next five to six months, the entrance to the emergency center will be located at the Cancer Care Center door - which sits closer to the building’s main entrance.
“The signage will completely explain it,” said Christopher Boyle, hospital spokesman.
The entrance will have a check-in area with security and clinical staff. Patients will then be taken in an elevator to the Emergency Center waiting room.
Patients who visit the Cancer Care Center during the construction should now use the main entrance to the building. Valet parking is available, in addition to a parking lot across the street from the main entrance, said Paul Diaz, security supervisor.
“It’s complimentary,” Diaz said.
During the construction, which will include an expansion of the emergency center, Newell Road will be closed.
“We’re doubling the size of the (emergency center),” said Thomas Roche, director of facilities and construction.
“We own Newell Road now,” Roche said. “It used to be a city street.”
When it reopens, Newell will no longer be a one-way road.
The entrance to the medical office building on campus will still be off of Goodwin Street during construction, but it will be shifted over a bit, hospital officials said. This, too, will have signage to guide visitors.
The second phase of construction is expected to be completed in the summer. The entire project, which will be carried out in four phases, is slated to be completed by 2021 in alignment with the hospital’s 100 year anniversary.
Much expensive nonsense pushes transportation aside
Chris Powell
Now that highway tolls seem to have been dismissed for this year's session of the General Assembly, the Yankee Institute for Public Policy has provided good suggestions for finding transportation infrastructure money elsewhere.
Yankee's suggestions show that Governor Lamont and Democratic legislative leaders really don't believe what they say -- that transportation infrastructure is urgent. For if they did believe it, they wouldn't be planning to spend the money Yankee proposes to move to transportation:
-- The state's economic development grants to businesses -- corporate welfare -- and the filmmaking tax credit program cost state government about $257 million each year while accomplishing little. Indeed, a recent study by North Carolina State University reached the same conclusion on a national level.
-- State government should reduce its subsidies for passenger railroad service and raise fares by $1, generating $44 million per year that could be used to leverage federal funds for improving rail lines. Most commuters on the Metro-North line in prosperous Fairfield County could afford the extra $2 per round trip. (Greenwich's Democratic state senator, Alexandra Kasser, complained that the governor's toll proposal didn't go far enough, maybe because comprehensive tolling would have people who live outside Fairfield County and drive to work subsidizing Kasser's rail-commuting constituents.)
-- State government should eliminate "project labor agreements" and "prevailing wage" requirements for government construction projects. These policies are payoffs to construction unions and increase costs by 10 to 20 percent. They serve the unions, not the public.
That the governor and the Democratic majority in the General Assembly won't redirect this spending to transportation shows they consider it more important. Indeed, the state budget is full of things less important to the public than transportation but more important to politically active special interests.
If everyone pursuing public funds followed the Yankee Institute's example, essentially becoming an auditor of state and municipal government, budget debates might be far more illuminating and demand far more conscientiousness from the governor and legislators, who seldom judge anything in state government for results.
For example, Connecticut Voices for Children could be more useful by analyzing the top 5,000 state and municipal employee salaries, starting with the $300,000 salary planned for the executive director of the state's new educational slush fund, the "Partnership for Connecticut." Advocates for the mentally handicapped could report on why state financial aid to municipal education goes up even as student enrollment and performance go down. Community colleges, stewing about their consolidation, could analyze the deficits of the University of Connecticut's health center and athletic department.
Lots of money could be saved in state government if people were ever motivated enough to save it.
Why public subsidies are critical to new downtown Hartford housing construction
Joe Cooper
ome taxpayers scoff when a wealthy real estate developer secures a public subsidy to fund new housing construction in downtown Hartford.
But that support is necessary if the city wants to see more apartments sprout in and around the central business district, according to a new study by East Hartford real estate advisory firm Goman+York Property Advisors LLC.
In fact, taxpayer dollars are crucial in supporting new apartments because high construction costs and operating expenses make it difficult, if not impossible, for developers to achieve a 12% to 18% return on investment (essentially the minimum ROI most would accept to do a project) based on the market rents that can be charged downtown, the study said.
The Goman+York study — which was commissioned by the Capital Region Development Authority (CRDA), a quasi-public financier of most downtown Hartford projects — provides two hypothetical examples of a typical housing project to demonstrate why a subsidy is needed.
In the first example, the project has development costs of $250 per square foot, monthly market rents of $2.35 per square foot (that equates to a 650-square-foot apartment having monthly rents of about $1,527), and annual operating expenses of $9.87 per square foot.
The net rent ($9.87 in annual operating costs subtracted from $28.20 in annual rents) is $18.33 per square foot.
That project’s return on investment, without subsidies, is 7.3% ($18.33/$250), far below what it would take to entice a developer, the study says.
Using that same hypothetical example and providing a $100-per-square-foot public subsidy, which equates to 40% of the overall development costs, bumps up the return on investment to 12.22%.
If you’re thinking that’s a significant public subsidy it is, but CRDA, which largely offers low-interest loans, isn’t providing all of it.
Spectra Boutique, developed by New York’s Girona Ventures and Wonder Works Development and Construction Corp., is currently 94% occupied and charges monthly rents ranging from about $1,100 to $1,900, the study says.
The study didn’t reveal the developer’s estimated ROI.
[Read more: 400-plus Hartford apartments coming online in 2020]
R. Michael Goman, principal of Goman+York, said public financing will be needed to encourage adaptive re-use of non-residential buildings in Hartford for at least the next five years, or as long as Connecticut’s population continues to decline or flatline.
Goman said an increase in population would drive greater demand for housing and increase rents, which would lessen the need for public subsidies on new housing construction.
“Until we see that change, I think you need the government to step in and incentivize new housing product,” he said. “CRDA is a vehicle in which we do that, and you can see that on the street.”
The ROI issue, Goman says, is common in most small cities, especially in the Northeast, where construction-cost growth has outpaced rents at aging residential buildings for decades.
“Virtually any project that we have looked at, particularly in downtown areas, … in order to make the numbers work, the community needs to participate,” Goman said. “This isn’t something specific just to Hartford.”