State Pier wind energy project gains momentum in New London
John Moritz
NEW LONDON — The renovation of the State Pier into a
launching-pad for offshore
wind energy projects is well-underway, state officials said last week,
despite concerns from some lawmakers over the project's $235 million price tag
and efforts by local opponents to halt the development.
Work crews began the process of remediation in February at
the century-old pier, which is owned by the Connecticut Port Authority.
Existing buildings on the site have been demolished, according to authority
officials, while earth-moving equipment is in place to re-grade a portion of
the property known as “the hill.”
The later stages of the project, meanwhile, still face
permitting approvals from state and federal regulators even as the final round
of state bonds were approved on Friday.
The not-yet-permitted work includes one of the project’s
most significant undertakings: Filling in the central wharf and adding several
acres of space to handle massive heavy-lift equipment involved in the assembly
of wind turbines.
“Ultimately, what we are left with is a much more capable
facility that will be able to handle in addition to wind-turbine components, a
wide variety of general cargoes,” said John Henshaw, executive director of the
Port Authority.
Henshaw said the authority expects the project to be
completed “near the end” of 2022, at which point the 30-acre site will be
turned over to a joint-venture by Eversource Energy and Ørsted, which signed a
10-year lease to use the pier as a staging area for three wind projects off the
coast of Rhode Island and New York.
The three wind power projects are expected to employ more
than 100 people at the pier, according to Justin Mays, a spokesman for the
venture. One of the offshore sites, Revolution Wind, will supply 304 megawatts
of energy to Connecticut and 400 to Rhode Island — enough to power 350,000
homes.
Construction over the next year is expected to add another
400 temporary jobs, officials said.
“I thought long and hard about the scale of this project, I
think it’s transformative not just for New London and New London Harbor, I
really think it’s transformative for the state and the region,” Gov. Ned Lamont
told the state Bond Commission on Friday “It’s one of the most extraordinary
deep water ports in the country, that’s why wind is going to be built out of
there, what a difference that makes.”
Criticism of the project has focused on its soaring costs,
which have risen by nearly 50 percent since the Port Authority reached
a deal with the wind-energy developers last year at a total cost of $157
million.
Lamont conceded Friday that development of the project “did
take a little longer and it was more expensive than we wanted.” Still, the bond
commission, chaired by the governor, approved the final tranche of bonds for
the project worth $50 million, bringing the state’s total investment to $160.5
million. Eversource and Ørsted have committed another $75 million to the
project — for a total of $235 million.
The only opposing vote on the commission, state Rep. Holly
Cheeseman, R-East Lyme, questioned whether potential issues with older pilings
on the site, or the expected dredging, could push the eventual cost even
higher.
“I must admit, I’m very concerned with this project both in
terms of the cost that may be borne by the taxpayers and a lack of transparency
on the part of the Port Authority,” Cheeseman said.
Henshaw defended the cost of the project, saying earlier
estimates were made during the “conceptual” phase, and grew as the details were
hammered out. For example, he said, an installation berth had to be moved from
one side of the site to the other, to prevent interference with the Cross Sound
Ferry, adding “significant” costs to the project.
“At each of those steps, the price went higher, but it was
driven in part by some external factors,” Henshaw said.
Kosta Diamantis, the deputy secretary for the office of
policy and management, told the commission Friday that the latest cost
estimates on the project are “rock solid,” and construction could wrap up under
the current budget.
Opposition to the project has also arisen from the pier
itself, which was historically used to handle shipments of salt, copper, steel
and plywood.
The Port Authority’s application for an environmental permit
from the Department of Energy and Environmental Protection faces opposition by
a road salt business that was forced off the pier as a result of the
renovations, The
Day reported.
An attorney for the business, DRVN Enterprises, was unable
to comment last week.
DEEP spokesman Will Healey said Thursday that DRVN’s appeal
of a draft license for the project that was recommended for approval by a
hearing officer is being considered by the agency’s commissioner, Katie Dykes.
A hearing before Dykes was held on Wednesday.
“Should the commissioner find that the facts of the hearing
are correct, she will issue her final decision and the license would then be
signed,” Healey said in an email.
Henshaw said the lease by the Eversource-Ørsted venture
would not make the pier completely off-limits to other uses over the next
decade. During “lulls,” their construction of offshore turbines, portions of
the pier can be made available for other cargo, Henshaw said.
State Sen. Paul Formica, R-East Lyme, said the Port
Authority, which was created less than a decade ago, appeared to be
ill-equipped to handle the scope of the project.
“I’m a proponent of offshore wind,” said Formica, whose
district includes New London. “I think we have to move forward with the
project, I’m just concerned that the due diligence didn’t occur early enough,
with enough specifics, to determine what the numbers might be.”
The chair of the legislature’s Energy Committee, state Sen.
Norm Needleman, D-Essex, said the cost-overruns associated with the project
were “unfortunate,” but he remained focused on the long-term goal of building
up the state’s clean-energy electric grid.
“This is a good thing overall,” Needleman said. “The details
… that’s a little more murky.”
Robert Marchant
GREENWICH — Every year, 446 Greenwich residents are
diagnosed with cancer, according to Diane Kelly, president of Greenwich
Hospital.
And many of those local patients end up traveling to New
York City, New Haven or Boston to get the latest treatments available, Kelly
said.
To offer those patients a closer option, Greenwich Hospital
has proposed the construction of a three-story building next to the Greenwich
Hospital campus that would house a 54,865-square-foot cancer-care unit.
Many area residents would benefit from having a top-flight
cancer facility located within the community, where they could access high-end
treatments, and it would bolster overall medical care in town, Kelly said.
“If you would get half of those patients, you would be
making a significant difference to the lives of those people,” she said.
Overall, the hospital administration is emphasizing the value of getting
treatment at a top-flight cancer center in the town — and not traveling an hour
or more.
Cancer rates are going up around the region as the
population ages, and long-drives for cancer care can be a serious burden to
patients and their caregivers, said Kelly, who is also a nurse.
But the hospital’s proposal, which is currently pending in
the Planning and Zoning Commission, has hit a wall of opposition from its
neighbors. They are voicing a litany of complaints about disruptions they
already face from the hospital and saying they don’t want to put up with more
if the facility were built.
In an effort to mend fences with the neighbors, Kelly said
she and other hospital administrators want to hold regular meetings and address
the issues. They
held a “town hall-style” meeting with about 50 residents last
Thursday, where Kelly answered questions, took complaints and explained the
role of the proposed cancer care unit.
She said she wanted to hold regular meetings in the future.
“I look at this as beginning on an ongoing dialogue,” Kelly told the attendees.
She said she wanted to initiate a “neighborhood advisory council” to facilitate
communications with the residents who live near Greenwich Hospital, especially
those who have voiced concerns about the size of the proposed building.
Kelly also told neighbors why the cancer care unit was
proposed for Lake Avenue, near Greenwich Hospital. That proximity would allow
for better levels of care, she said, explaining that it’s not uncommon for
patients undergoing chemotherapy for the first time to require care in the
emergency room following shock to the body. The equipment for radiation
machines, and the lead-lined rooms that they are housed in, are not well-suited
to leased office complexes, Kelly said. The hospital’s blood bank is also
located in the main building on Perryridge Road.
The new Bendheim
Cancer Center, as the project is called, would be built at Lafayette Place
and Lake Street, and several medical offices there would be demolished to make
way for it.
But residents who live near the hospital expressed their
firm opposition.
Karen Fassuliotis, a central Greenwich resident, said during
the teleconferenced meeting, “You’re trying to put a round peg in a square hole
with this particular project. ... I don’t see it working in this neighborhood.”
Tonya Gojani, another local resident, said traffic is
already bad in the area around Greenwich Hospital. “Why has it gotten to this
point?” she said, asking why the hospital had not been working on the traffic
problems earlier.
The hospital president said, “I regret that. ... When you
know better, you do better.”
Chief Operating Officer Mark Kosak said the initial plans
for the new cancer-care unit have been scaled down due to community input,
cutting out one floor and reducing the square footage from 90,000 square feet.
The design had also been changed to make the structure “more welcoming, more
part of the neighborhood,” Kosak said.
The hospital has also changed its delivery schedule and
procedures to reduce traffic problems that have been raised recently. “We’re
hearing you, we’re listening,” Kosak told the residents. The hospital
administration said it was working on plans to improve traffic flow in the
area, and said the new facility would have its own free underground parking
garage.
The hospital administrators said Greenwich police have also
been cracking down on illegally parked vehicles in the area. Local residents
said they were happy to see a greater police presence in the area — but
wondered how much longer it would last.
The hospital administrators said they would look into the
possibility of adding more traffic enforcement and security in the area in the
future.
Lawrence Sterne, another neighbor, said traffic in the area
near the hospital is a “recipe for disaster.”
The hospital administrators were questioned about billing
rates, and whether the hospital could charge a higher rate for insurance
reimbursements than an annex built in another part of town.
Kelly said, “If you have the level of services, because of
the care that the patient needs, it is true you are reimbursed more than an
[office]....Hospital departments are re-reimbursed more than if this were a
standalone center, with no physicians and no radiation oncology.”
Still, many see the downside to putting a large medical
facility in their neighborhood.
Mary Jenkins, who lives near Greenwich Hospital, said,
“there is so much traffic now.” The possibility of even more traffic is a major
concern, she said.
Danbury traffic is 'an absolute nightmare,' leaders say. A recent study said otherwise.
Rob Ryser
DANBURY - City leaders who are overseeing the creation of a
master plan for the next 10 years settled in this week for a presentation from
experts about the latest transportation data in the Hat City.
Some city leaders could hardly believe what they were
hearing.
Traffic volume has been “trending downwards” since 2004, the
experts from FHI Studio said, and travel on Interstate 84 has been “stable.”
“I really think we need to take a much better look at what
(experts) did to get those figures,” said Fred Visconti, a city councilman and
member of the master plan task force, during a Tuesday meeting on Zoom.
“I have been here all my life and I have to say I haven’t seen any improvement
in the amount of traffic that we have in this city right now. It’s really
getting crazy.”
A fellow city leader agreed.
“(If) traffic on I-84 was somewhat stable in the last few
years, I am wondering where the increase in cars has come from,” said Richard
Jannelli a master plan task force member who serves on the city’s school board.
“It is really becoming a nightmare. An absolute nightmare.”
Francisco Gomes, the manager of a team from FHI hired by
Danbury to lead the task force through the two-year process of creating a new
land use map said the data was reliable as far as it went.
“I do think the numbers are accurate but not representative
of the entire city,” Gomes said towards the end of the 90-minute meeting. “What
you tell us is as important as the numbers and if there is anything we can do
with the (master) plan to describe your experience and identify the need to
better manage that traffic - that will be a big question.”
Growth and associated concerns about congestion and overcrowded
schools have been hot campaign topics as Danbury continues to be one
of the fastest-developing cities in Connecticut.
An expert explained during the master plan presentation that
traffic volume on 12 busy roads in Danbury could indeed be decreasing as state
transportation data shows, while at the same time drivers avoiding those busy
roads are putting more miles on side streets.
“Danbury is a big place, so traffic as a whole on all 250
miles of city roads is potentially stable, but where we are seeing issues might
be a very small percentage of 10 percent or less of those roads,” said Parker
Sorenson, senior transportation engineer at FHI. “If those state routes were
saturated in 2004 and no capacity improvements were conducted at that time we
wouldn’t expect much additional traffic on those routes, but it is not
reflective of some of the busier neighborhood streets you mentioned that are
being cut through.”
Danbury’s top planner came down in the middle of the debate.
“We look at the numbers and we are living something
different,” said Sharon Calitro, the city’s planning director. “This is
something we need to address,” she said.
One solution would be for the master plan to recommend a
city-wide traffic management study to look at side street traffic volume that
the state does not track, she said.
It is not the first time over the last nine months that the
master plan task force has questioned the data.
In April, data showing a high percentage of people renting
single-family homes in the city’s heavily residential neighborhoods south
and west of downtown surprised leaders.
The next step is for the task force to begin overdue public
outreach in the fall, assuming COVID infection rates remain low and
face-to-face focus groups can be scheduled. The task force plans to send out a
questionnaire before any public meetings are held.
The goal is to adopt a new master plan by late 2022.
Not all task force members were shocked this week to hear
Danbury’s traffic characterized as “stable.”
“I have been working in Danbury for 35 years, first on Main
Street and now on the west side, in a job that requires me to drive all around
city streets…and in terms of having a terrible or awful time navigating city
streets on a typical day - I haven’t seen it,” said Arnold Finaldi, the
chairman of Danbury’s Planning Commission and a task force member. “Maybe it’s
me or maybe I have tolerance, but I don’t see where it is that bad.”
$50M multi-warehouse project planned in Windsor
Greg Bordonaro
Scannell Properties, one of the most active developers of
warehouse buildings in Greater Hartford, is eyeing its latest new development
in familiar territory.
The Indiana-based company has gained local approval to build
two new warehouses in Windsor with a combined 487,200 square feet on 40.8
acres, at 1190 Kennedy and 451 Hayden Station roads.
The approximately $50-million project, known as the BDL
Logistics Center, is still waiting for state approval before it breaks ground,
potentially by Oct. 1, according to Daniel Madrigal, Scannell’s senior
development manager.
Both buildings are being developed on spec, which means no
tenants are currently lined up for the properties. Spec construction is rare in
Connecticut, but Scannell has used that strategy in the past, including a
facility it built in Cromwell a few years ago.
Madrigal said the project is being spurred by continued hot
demand in the warehouse and distribution space. Scannell typically targets
Fortune 500 companies as tenants, he added.
The land for the project is currently owned by O.J.
Thrall Inc., the centuries-old farming company. Madrigal said Scannell plans to
finalize a purchase of the land before it breaks ground later this year.
One building will be 268,000 square feet and the other about
219,000 square feet.
Scannell is not pursuing a tax break deal from the town,
Madrigal said.
Scannell is also the developer of the under-construction
823,000-square-foot distribution center that Amazon will occupy at 1201 Kennedy
Road and 1 Joseph Lane. That facility is scheduled to be completed by the end
of this year, Madrigal said.
Industrial properties have been the hottest segment of
Connecticut’s commercial real estate market in recent years, and many have been
built in north-central Connecticut, where large swaths of open land and easy
access to major highways have made it attractive for companies — particularly
e-commerce retailers — to set up distribution centers closer to their end
customers.
Scannell has been an active developer in Greater Hartford, particularly in
South Windsor, where, since 2017, it has developed about 1.5 million square
feet of distribution space that has led to more than $100 million in investment
and attracted top corporate tenants, including Home Depot.
After years of delay and anticipation, construction on the
mixed-use redevelopment near Dunkin’ Donuts Park in Hartford is showing signs
of progress.
Stamford-based developer RMS Cos. broke ground on the
project’s first phase last October, and has already completed construction of
the 330-space parking garage. RMS CEO and President Randy Salvatore said
construction on the $50-million project’s first phase, which will include 270
apartment units, should be completed in the first quarter of 2022.
Meantime, RMS is in early discussions about the
development’s next phase, which will include construction of 532 additional
apartments and a 541-car garage.
When the development is completed the plan is for the newly
named North Crossing project to have 1,000 total apartments.
The pandemic has dealt a setback to the city of Hartford,
but Salvatore recently told HBJ he’s still optimistic about the city’s future,
especially when it comes to demand for new rental units.
“I remain as bullish as ever about the long-term prospects
for Hartford and this development,” Salvatore said in May.
Bond Commission approves $1.1 billion, Lamont hints at more
Susan Haigh
Funding for renovations to state parks, highway and bridge
improvements, clean water projects and a memorial to the 26 lives lost at Sandy
Hook Elementary School were among the $1.1 billion in projects approved by the
Connecticut State Bond Commission on Friday.
It marked the first meeting of the new fiscal year, which
began July 1, and only the second during 2021. Democratic Gov. Ned Lamont, who
chairs the commission and has imposed a so-called “debt diet” for state
borrowing, suggested he's easing up on that stance.
“I’d say it’s a pretty robust agenda for what could be a
pretty robust year when it comes to bonding,” he said. “The reason being, I
think this is a unique time to be making investments in the state right now.”
Lamont noted how interest rates are at historic lows, the
state's bond rating has improved and Connecticut residents are still looking
for work as the state continues to emerge from the COVID-19 pandemic. While it
has improved, the state unemployment rate for June was 7.9%.
“This is a time to get people back to work, get people back
to work with good-paying jobs, a lot of good-paying construction jobs, which is
what we’re doing right now,” he said. “It’s all about jobs and opportunity.”
About $600 million of the borrowing approved Friday was
earmarked for general obligation bonds - money that will be spent on a wide
range of projects such as improvements to the State Pier in New London. The
site is being redeveloped into an offshore wind hub.
Funding was also approved for infrastructure improvements at
community health centers and mental health and substance abuse providers,
grants for new walking trails and pedestrian walkways, state information
technology upgrades, sound amplification in state courtrooms, asbestos removal
in state buildings, and affordable housing and energy efficiency projects.
The panel approved an additional $20 million to continue
helping homeowners in northeastern Connecticut replace their crumbling
foundations, and $300 million in local school building projects.
Tucked into a list of funding for local projects, such as
the construction of four playscapes in West Haven, was $2.5 million to defray
much of the $3.7 million that voters in Newtown approved in April to construct
a memorial to the victims of the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in 2012.
The project is nearing construction, with a groundbreaking ceremony planned
next month at the site down the street from where the shooting occurred that
killed 20 first-graders and six educators. Construction will be finished before
the 10th anniversary next year, officials said.
Meanwhile, slightly more than $500 million of the projects
approved on Friday are transportation-related, including state and local road,
highway and bridge repair work. There's also funding for rail improvements, and
bus and rail facilities.