June 21, 2021

CT Constriction Digest Monday June 21, 2021

It's CT road construction season. Here's what to watch out for.

Ed Stannard

From Hartford to Middletown to New Haven to Norwalk, state construction crews will be upgrading roadways and building bridges this summer.

While drivers may find slowdowns in some areas, much of the work will be performed at night, according to John Dunham, transportation construction commissioner for the state Department of Transportation.

Some major jobs, such as the new Charter Oak Bridge between Interstates 91 and 84 in Hartford, are already underway. Others won’t really get going until the fall.

But there’s essential information drivers should know as they travel Connecticut’s highways and state roads this summer.

“We have two projects that are basically starting up this summer,” Dunham said: One is a rehabilitation of the Merritt Parkway between Newtown Turnpike near the Westport-Norwalk line and Exit 40B in Norwalk. The other is reconstruction of Route 2 between Hartford and Glastonbury.

Merritt Parkway, Westport-Norwalk

Originally a larger project, which would have been the last of eight Route 15 improvement projects, the job was broken in two, Dunham said. That was done to include extending lanes at the New Canaan service plaza and to determine how much in repairs must be made to the Comstock Hill bridge. The first, costing $33.7 million, will resurface the three miles of the road in both directions.

The road improvement, to address “safety improvements and resurfacing” has begun with a 2.8-mile stretch from Maple Street to Pitkin Street in East Hartford, Dunham said. Intermittent lane closures have been occurring nightly on that stretch.

Interstate 691

The highway-reconstruction project was awarded to Manafort Brothers as a design-build project, in which the contract is awarded according to a scoring system, Dunham said, rather than as a strictly low-bid award. “They’re in the design phase right now. You might see some closed lanes,” he said. Major work won’t begin until late fall or early spring, however.

Dunham said design-build is controversial among some contractors who don’t have the ability to bid on large projects. “We’re looking to expand our design-build program and may have it include smaller design-build projects, and that would help the industry,” he said.

Arrigoni Bridge, Middletown-Portland

The ongoing construction on the bridge has reduced Routes 17/66 to one way in each direction, which should last until Sept. 21, according to the DOT project website. The $46.3 million project was awarded to Mohawk Northeast Inc. and is scheduled to be completed in February 2022. The bridge opened in 1938.

Ferry Street railroad bridge, New Haven

The steel truss bridge over the Amtrak tracks near State Street, will receive a new deck and repairs to the steel trusses above the roadway, Dunham said. “We have a detour agreement … with the city on it, and I believe it’s a four- to five-month detour,” Dunham said.

The bridge was first built in 1912, according to the Library of Congress. As for when work on the $7 million project will begin, “We don’t have a date from our contractor … but I think we’re looking at sometime this fall or late summer,” Dunham said.

Charter Oak Bridge, Hartford-East Hartford

“We just had a ribbon-cutting for the new left-hand Exit 29 a few weeks ago, so that project is progressing well,” Dunham said. “We opened up the ramp with one lane and it will eventually have two lanes, but we don’t have a date for the second lane.”

The old entrance ramp to the bridge had just one lane but couldn’t be widened on the right side of I-91, Dunham said. “It’s that connection to 84 that’s had significant backups for years,” he said. “Having a two-lane connection will help. There was really no other place for us to put the exit.”

The cost of the project has risen from $213 million to $240 million and the completion date extended from May 2022 to Oct. 18, 2022, according to the DOT web page.

Interstate 84 improvement, West Hartford

“We’re adding additional operational lanes, east- and westbound and there are also drainage improvement,” Dunham said. “If you drive, certainly during rush hour in the morning or the afternoon, it backs up there.”

The section between the Exit 43 on-ramp and the Farmington town line has been cited as dangerous, with 2012-14 crash data showing 159 crashes with 48 injuries and one fatality westbound, and 202 crashes with 90 injuries and one fatality eastbound, according to the project website.

“Essentially what they’re doing right now is they’re working in the median area,” Dunham said. Once that’s done, traffic will be shifted into the median so work can proceed on the outside lanes. The $54.6 million job was awarded to O&G Industries of Torrington.

The Mixmaster, Waterbury

The junction of Interstate 84 and Route 8 got its colorful name from the double-decking of both roads as they cross each other. While the roadways won’t be rerouted, “there has been a significant amount of work out there to repair those decks” on I-84 and the decks “on Route 8 northbound and southbound are getting replaced,” Dunham said.

One lane on I-84 westbound has been closed and will be reopened, “we’re hoping by the end of the summer or earlier if possible,” Dunham said.

There have been numerous nighttime road and exit closures as the project has progressed, making it imperative to drive slowly and cautiously through the area. Detours for the closed roadways are marked on the DOT website.

This week alone, lanes will be shifted left on I-84 eastbound from Exit 19 to Exit 21, according to the DOT website. There also is no more dedicated lane at Exit 31 on Route 8 south, forcing drivers entering I-84 eastbound to merge immediately with traffic on the interstate.

Rochambeau Bridge, Newtown-Southbury

The bridges carrying I-84 over Lake Zoar on the Housatonic River, known as the Rochambeau Bridge, scheduled to be completely replaced in December 2023, are being built one side at a time.

“They’ve got one half of the bridge completely demolished” and work is continuing on the piers, Dunham said.

In August and September, girders for the deck will be laid down and workers will begin building the new deck, he said.

The $52.9 million project was awarded to Middlesex Corp. on May 13, 2020, according to the DOT website.

“Bushnell South” plan could add more than 1,000 residential units to downtown Hartford over next decade. Parking lots around the Bushnell would be transformed into a new neighborhood. 

Kenneth Gosselin 

HARTFORD — A bleak swath of parking lots around The Bushnell Center for the Performing Arts in Hartford could be developed into a neighborhood of more than 1,000 residential units over the next decade, rivaling the construction of housing that is planned for another new neighborhood two miles away around Dunkin’ Donuts Park.

The scope of housing in the area -- now being called “Bushnell South,” a shortened version of the initial “Bushnell Park South” -- will be a significant component of a master plan that will be presented Wednesday to the public at The Bushnell. The new neighborhood is seen as a critical pedestrian connection between Bushnell Park and the hospital district, Park Street and Colt Park.

“It is a major development,” Suzanne M. Hopgood, chairwoman of the Capital Region Development Authority, said at the agency’s monthly board of directors meeting last Thursday. “The question that’s obvious is: We’ve seen a lot of plans go through the city and why do we think this is going to go ahead?”

The ground work is now in place, Hopgood said, in the roughly 20-acre stretch divided in half by Capitol Avenue between Main Street on the east and Trinity and Washington streets on the west, just south of Bushnell Park.

Hopgood pointed to four significant projects in the area. First, there was the $205 million renovation of the 1930s State Office Building, completed early last year, with a new, landscaped park on its east side. Then, there is the construction of two parking garages, one on Buckingham Street for state employees and the other on Capitol Avenue, the latter the start of a “district parking” strategy. And within last month, financing -- including $13.5 million in state taxpayer-backed loans -- for a $63 million conversion of the former state office building at 55 Elm St. into apartments fell into place.

Michael W. Freimuth, CRDA’s executive director, said Bushnell South could unfold in four or more phases over 5 to 7 years with the potential for up to 1,200 residential units. The number includes 161 units at 55 Elm on Pulaski Circle, which is at the northeastern corner of the Bushnell South area, Freimuth said.

North Crossing, the former Downtown North around the city’s minor league ballpark, could have up to 1,000 apartments in the next five or so years. The first phase of 270 apartments is now in construction.

How quickly the development unfolds -- and to what extent -- will depend on demand for housing in the city and the availability of public funding, seen as key to closing gaps left after private investment. Gov. Ned Lamont has infrequently called meetings of the State Bond Commission, which must approve borrowing funds to invest in projects like Bushnell South, part of his policy to cut down on state borrowing and debt.

Early signs seem to point to rental demand rebounding in downtown Hartford coming out of the pandemic. After a dip in occupancy, CRDA said its most recent monthly survey of nearly two dozen projects it has helped finance -- accounting for about 1,600 apartments -- all but two had occupancy of 90% or higher.

Developer interest also has been brisk for two historic buildings on Trinity Street being sold by the state that formerly housed state offices, including the Secretary of the State. The buildings, which stand side-by-side at 18-20 and 30 Trinity St. near the corner of Elm Street and just north of The Bushnell, are part of Bushnell South, in its northwest corner. The buildings also have been mentioned as candidates for housing.

“There has been interest from multiple development firms, and we have conducted several tours so far that were all well attended,” Lora Rae Anderson, a spokeswoman for the state Department of Administrative Services, said Friday. “We’d expect this one to be competitive.”

Proposals are due in three weeks.

Preliminary versions of the Bushnell South plan that will be presented Wednesday have been shared this spring with groups in the adjoining Frog Hollow and South Downtown, or “SoDo,” neighborhoods.

Those early versions, developed by consultant Goody Clancy of Boston, paint an optimistic outlook for downtown housing noting “demand is for predominantly multifamily residential development with ground-floor retail and commercial spaces in key locations.”

Goody Clancy also said “high quality” outdoor spaces would be vital and the area should form a connection to cultural attractions on Main Street.

The consultant’s report was commissioned last fall by a consortium of The Bushnell, CRDA and Spinnaker Real Estate Partners of South Norwalk. Spinnaker, now developing the corner of Park and Main streets in Hartford and soon to embark on 55 Elm, also has purchased three parking lots in Bushnell South.

Goody Clancy also analyzed how Spinnaker’s pieces would fit into the overall Bushnell South puzzle and if course corrections were needed because of the long-term changes that were expected from the pandemic.

In recent years, CRDA has gained control of some of the larger parking lots used by state office workers by overseeing a $16 million, state-financed parking garage on Capitol Avenue with 411 spaces. Some of those spaces would be used by state workers displaced from surface lots, with the garage also shared by future area residents and patrons of The Bushnell.

One critical parking lot encompassing about two acres at the corner of Capitol Avenue and Hudson Street is under option by Spinnaker but a sale has not yet closed. Spinnaker also has an agreement with The Bushnell on that lot to become part owner and have a say in future development should a sale take place.

The presentation at The Bushnell begins at 6 p.m. Wednesday in the Belding Theater. It also will be livestreamed on BushnellYouTube.


Groundbreaking held for $49.5 million middle school in New London

Greg Smith

New London — School and city officials on Friday held a ceremonial groundbreaking to mark the start of reconstruction of the city’s middle school, the second part of a nearly $160 million two-campus project now underway.

With some previous obstacles and delays out of the way, the first phase of the $49.5 million project at Bennie Dover Jackson Multi-Magnet Middle School is slated to begin on June 28. The project, which involves demolition, an addition and revamping of classroom and outdoor space, is slated to be completed in the fall of 2024.

The funding for the middle and high school projects was first approved in 2014 at referendum as a major component of the district’s transition into an all-magnet school district. The schools welcome students from towns across Connecticut, allowing the district to benefit from state magnet school funding.

At the time of the referendum, voters approved a total cost of $165 million for the two schools with $55 million allocated for the middle school. The state is reimbursing the city 80% of the costs for most components of the two projects.

Bennie Dover will eventually house middle school students in two of the district’s three magnet programs: STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math) and an International Baccalaureate program. The school is currently in the IB candidacy phase.

The third magnet pathway is Visual and Performing Arts. New London High School, in the middle of a $108 million construction project, will house STEM and IB programs for high school students and, because of the larger size, will accommodate both middle and high school students in the arts magnet program. The high school project is slated to be completed in 2023.

School officials say while the middle school will have distinct spaces for each of its two magnet school programs, it will continue to have arts programming as required by middle school curriculum. The renovations, for instance, will include new art spaces, band and digital arts areas.

The project, overseen by Colliers International, will include new heating, cooling and ventilation, a new addition to house science space and classrooms. There will also be an enlarged interior courtyard for outdoor programming. The current plans do not include reconstruction of the adjacent Central Office building, despite an initial push to use contingency funding for that project.

City Councilor John Satti, chairman of the School Maintenance and Building Committee, presided over Friday’s event outside Bennie Dover and handed out golden shovels to officials for photos. Satti gave a brief history of the middle school, which is the site of the former Chapman Technical High School.

An existing portion of Chapman Tech built in 1935 will be demolished as part of the project. Much of the middle school building was constructed in the 1950s, with a major renovation taking place in 1993. Bennie Dover Principal Chris Vamvakides lived in a home at the corner of Waller Street and Waller Court and watched the 1993 renovations.

“Now as principal of the middle school, I am incredibly humbled and proud to lead Bennie Dover through this exciting new chapter of its history,” Vamvakides said Friday. “We have a bright future ahead of us and I can’t wait until our students, staff and community get to enjoy this campus in just a few short years.”

“This is a long time coming and amazing opportunity and gift for the children and community,” Superintendent Cynthia Ritchie said. “This is one element of the chapter of change and new beginnings and levels of excellence which all of our students deserve. We’re transforming inside and out and we’re doing it together.”


Infrastructure Bill Talks Collide With Democrats’ Goal to Tax the Rich

Jonathan Weisman

WASHINGTON — In most years, the notion that Congress could pass a $1.2 trillion plan to fix the nation’s bridges, highways, tunnels and rail lines without raising taxes would be a politician’s dream, a vision of endless ribbon-cuttings with no angry cries of “tax and spend.”

But that pitch, by a group of senators negotiating a bipartisan infrastructure deal, is receiving a hostile reception from many Democrats who favor a package five times as large, to be paid for in part with at least $2.5 trillion in new taxes. It is not just a much larger economic package they want; they also see a rare opportunity to harness the political popularity of infrastructure spending to achieve their long-held policy goal of raising taxes on the rich.

For liberal Democrats in particular — including newcomers like Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York and more senior members like Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon — the tax side of the ledger is not a mere accounting exercise to pay for spending, but a critical policymaking tool unto itself.

“What we’re doing is generating revenue, but we are also making a major area of American government more fair, so people don’t feel they’ve been played while the rich person gets off scot-free,” said Mr. Wyden, the chairman of the tax-writing Finance Committee.

Centrist senators who have been toiling to find a bipartisan infrastructure compromise have steered clear of tax increases, after Republicans made it clear they were unwilling to touch the vast tax cut they muscled through Congress in 2017. But leading Democrats — following President Biden’s own budget prescriptions — appear determined to move forward on an array of fronts to reshape the tax code as part of any major infrastructure effort.

For weeks now, Mr. Wyden’s committee has been drafting detailed tax policy changes targeting three major areas: corporations, the energy industry and individual taxpayers.

On the corporate tax side, Democrats would raise the tax rate from the 21 percent set under President Donald J. Trump’s 2017 tax cut while reversing other policies in that law that they say created new incentives for American companies to build factories overseas. For instance, one provision they would reverse allows a company to shield from taxation annual overseas profits valued at 10 percent of the cost of a factory built abroad — the bigger the factory, the bigger the tax shelter.

Democrats also want to sharply curtail a 2017 measure that has let many affluent partnerships and limited liability companies qualify for a generous tax break for small businesses. (In its current form, they say, 50 percent of the benefits go to millionaires.) They aim to phase out the deduction for taxpayers making more than $400,000 while eliminating a provision that prevented many small-business owners from using the benefit.

And they would like to finally close the so-called carried-interest loophole that allows private equity titans to have the fees they charge their affluent clients taxed as capital gains, usually at 20 percent, instead of as income, which would be taxed annually at 37 percent.

On the energy side, Senate Democrats on the Finance Committee are moving to toss out 44 separate tax breaks that have been on the books for years, many of them aimed at oil and gas drilling and production, and replace them with tax breaks for clean electricity, clean transportation and energy efficiency.

Policy changes related to individual taxpayers remain the least developed part of Democrats’ proposal. They had hoped to find a way to tax wealth, by capturing a slice of the fantastic annual gains in value of stocks and other assets held by the superwealthy — gains that are never taxed because they are never sold. Mr. Biden wants to raise the top income tax bracket back to 39.6 percent from the 37 percent that Mr. Trump secured, and to begin taxing capital gains from the sale of stocks by taxpayers who earn more than $1 million a year at income tax rates. For the richest taxpayers, that would nearly double capital gains rates from the current 20 percent.

“Taxes need to be raised on corporations and need to be raised on that wealthiest of people who got a terrible, tremendous windfall from the Trump tax game,” said Representative Steve Cohen, Democrat of Tennessee.

A tentative plan floated by Senator Bernie Sanders, the Vermont independent who is the chairman of the Senate Budget Committee, envisions spending as much as $6 trillion over 10 years on an economic package that would tackle what Democrats call “human infrastructure,” not just roads and bridges, with about half of it paid for. It would include investments in child care, health care, anti-climate-change programs, universal prekindergarten and community college access. Mr. Wyden’s committee would be expected to raise $2.5 trillion, a huge sum that could require significantly reordering the tax code.

“We have learned recently that some of the wealthiest billionaires in this country don’t pay a nickel in a given year in federal taxes,” Mr. Sanders said. “You’ve got dozens of corporations that are going to make billions in profits and not pay a nickel in taxes.” He was referring to a ProPublica report published this month that used a trove of leaked Internal Revenue Service documents to show how America’s richest men — including household names like Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, Michael R. Bloomberg and Warren Buffett — pay almost no federal taxes, and in some years paid no taxes at all.

“It is obvious that if we’re going to address the needs of working families in this country, we need revenue,” Mr. Sanders added, “and one way that we get that revenue is by demanding that the wealthiest people, the largest corporations are paying their fair share.”

The emerging $1.2 trillion proposal — which still faces substantial obstacles — omits tax increases and focuses entirely on physical infrastructure, leaving out the expansions of the social safety net that Mr. Biden and congressional Democrats argue must be part of any infrastructure initiative.

Even as the White House has pushed hard for a bipartisan agreement, officials have also made it clear they support a reconciliation package to push through the rest of Mr. Biden’s economic agenda, including tax increases. Doing so would allow them to sidestep a Republican filibuster and advance it with 50 votes, but they can do so only if their entire caucus backs it.

Many liberals are concerned they might never reach that level of support if the bipartisan plan succeeds. They are convinced that once conservative Democrats such as Senators Joe Manchin III of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona get their roads and bridges, they will not support a reconciliation bill. Neither has committed to supporting such a package until they see the details.

“That is absolutely the concern,” said Ms. Ocasio-Cortez, who said she felt as if her wing of the party had already been hoodwinked.

“It was at the insistence of the more conservative Democrats that we had to include how we were going to pay for the infrastructure spending,” she said. “So this comes to the White House, the White House agrees, comes back and says, ‘OK, we’re going to tax the rich,’ and then the same conservative wing that demanded, ‘How are we going to pay for it?’ is now saying, ‘Wait, wait, wait — not like that.’”

Republicans are already gearing up to hit Democrats hard on any tax increases. Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Republican leader, said the Trump tax cut law of 2017 “was the major contributor to us having the best economy in 50 years, before the pandemic.”

But Democrats see a changed landscape. The ProPublica report added fodder. But even before the pandemic recession, corporate tax receipts had plunged 40 percent after the Trump tax cuts. Though the 2017 tax law ostensibly lowered the corporate income tax rate to 21 percent from 35 percent, the effective business rate has fallen to 8 percent, said Representative Lloyd Doggett of Texas, a senior Democrat on the Ways and Means Committee.

“There’s been a big change in voter attitudes on taxes,” Mr. Wyden said. “In the last 10 years, Republicans always want to talk about taxes, nail those Democrats on taxes, ‘tax-and-spend’ and all the rest. Now, the American people are sympathetic with our point, which is that everybody ought to pay their fair share.”

Democrats are divided about how far to go. Senator Elizabeth Warren, Democrat of Massachusetts, pressed Treasury Secretary Janet L. Yellen last week on Ms. Warren’s proposed wealth tax, which would impose a 2 percent surtax on the value of assets owned by people worth more than $50 million — and raise at least $3 trillion.

“This is about choices,” she told a reluctant Ms. Yellen. “We can fund universal child care, or we can hand Jeff Bezos enough tax savings to build a superyacht.”

Other Democrats, even liberals, are not so sure.

“The whole term of a wealth tax scares an awful lot of people who are hoping to achieve some wealth,” Mr. Doggett said. “We don’t want to discourage economic success. We just want to level the playing field.”

Senator Mark Warner, Democrat of Virginia, is stuck in the middle. As a pro-business Democrat, he was tapped by Mr. Wyden to hash out a corporate tax package with Senator Sherrod Brown of Ohio, a pro-labor Democrat. But he is also a member of the group negotiating the bipartisan infrastructure deal.

He said he was confident there would be unanimous support among Democrats to include the international tax framework in a reconciliation bill that followed a narrower infrastructure compromise, “because it’s just so darned complicated.”

But he also said he understood that the infrastructure agreement might not even get to a vote unless his Democratic colleagues were certain they also had the votes to pass all of the tax measures and all of the spending initiatives that would be left out of the bipartisan deal.

“A lot of my colleagues have made clear that they’re not going to be supportive of the infrastructure package, unless they at least have some visibility on what’s going to happen to reconciliation,” he said. “Now that’s a hard challenge to navigate.”