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.
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.”