Progress coming along on Steele Center project off Farmington Avenue in Berlin
BERLIN - Progress is coming along on the 80,000 sq. ft.
Steele Center project off Farmington Avenue, a mixed-use development that broke
ground in March.
“We are currently under construction with 9 Steele
Boulevard; the steel frame is up and wood framing is now going up,” Tony
Valenti, one of the principals of Newport Realty Group, told the Herald
Wednesday.
The first of four buildings the Southington developer has
planned for the site, 9 Steele will have 8,000 sq. ft. of commercial space on
the first floor and 16 one- to two-bedroom upscale apartments on floors two and
three, ranging from 600 to 950 sq. ft. Completion is expected by May 2022.
“We have an ongoing waiting list of folks who want those
apartments and we are looking to obtain a restaurant for the side facing
Farmington Avenue, where we are building an outdoor patio,” Valenti said.
Once the property’s north-facing parcel is remediated and
sealed, a four-story building will be constructed there with 60 one- and
two-bedroom apartments and parking below.
The remaining two buildings will consist of retail,
commercial and office space.
It was the adjacent Berlin Train Station that drew his
company to this particular site. Newport Realty has already completed other
smaller developments at 848 and 861 Farmington Avenue, now home to small
businesses and restaurants.
“The train station is one more very key amenity that’s going
to allow us to draw residential and commercial tenants to the Steele Center,”
Valenti said. “We hope we can also provide supply to that demand of our rail
system.”
Newport first submitted its proposal to the town in Sept.
2018 and signed a purchase agreement in May 2019. The developer paid $460,000
for the two parcels along Farmington Avenue, the former site of a warehouse
furniture store, and $1 for the Brownfield site on the property’s north end,
which was formerly an industrial use.
“This is a nice partnership between the Town of Berlin and
Newport Realty Group,” Berlin Economic Development Director Chris Edge said.
Although construction materials have faced shortages and
delays, the developer has kept to his timeline and the project remains on
track.
“We’ve obtained all our necessary approvals and we’re
completely financed,” Valenti said. We’re ordering construction products well
in advance and we’re working as hard and smartly as we can to avoid any
delays.”
Lamont ends controversial experiment with school construction financing oversight
KEITH M. PHANEUF
Gov. Ned Lamont returned oversight of the state’s massive
school construction financing program Friday to the Department of
Administrative Services, ending a controversial two-year experiment that had
placed the venture within his budget office.
The reversal came one day after deputy budget director Kosta
Diamantis of Farmington — who directed the school construction unit — abruptly
retired in the face of an investigation for unspecified misconduct.
“Given the departure of the former director of the office of
school construction we felt it made the most sense" to bring the team back
to Department of Administrative Services, said Josh Geballe, Lamont’s chief
operating officer.
The program, which sends hundreds of millions of dollars
annually to municipalities to help build new and renovate existing schools, had
long been located within DAS. And with Diamantis’ departure, Geballe said, the
department is best positioned to manage the program.
Max Reiss, Lamont’s director of communications, declined to
discuss specific allegations against Diamantis with the CT Mirror on Thursday
night, writing only in a brief statement that: “The Governor’s Office removed
Mr. Diamantis because of a personnel matter that is still under review.”
Diamantis denied any wrongdoing and said Lamont’s top aides
have been disrespectful to his former boss, Office of Policy and Management
Secretary Melissa McCaw, who is Black.
McCaw, who is Lamont’s budget director, surprised legislators
in November 2019 when she announced Diamantis, a former state representative
who’d led the school construction program for years within DAS, would be
joining the budget staff — and bringing the construction unit into OPM with
him.
Top lawmakers from both parties balked at the Lamont
administration’s decision to make this move unilaterally, since the legislature
had placed the school construction unit within DAS by statute decades earlier.
And Republican leaders questioned whether the Democratic
governor had slipped up in a political sense, as well.
Because of OPM’s immense authority — it executes much of a
governor’s agenda as the state’s chief fiscal, planning and labor relations
agency — it generally is viewed by legislators as more partisan than other departments
and agencies within the Executive Branch.
The school construction program historically is seen as
immune from partisan politics. Communities receive construction grants that
reimburse between 20% and 80% of project costs based solely on wealth, population
and other empirical data.
The Lamont administration insisted at the time that the move
was about increasing efficiency and said there was no intention to change the
operations — or the nonpartisan nature — of the school construction oversight
process.
And while leaders of the legislature’s Democratic majority
said in late 2019 that they wanted, at a minimum, to revisit the program
transfer and clarify the matter in statute, nothing was enacted in 2020 or
2021.
Leaders of the legislature’s Republican minority repeated
Friday the objections raised two years ago, and said the latest controversy is
indicative of the majority’s laissez-faire attitude when it comes to the
governor.
The Democratic majority repeatedly has extended Lamont’s
expanded emergency authority throughout the coronavirus pandemic, much to the
GOP’s frustration. And Senate Minority Leader Kevin Kelly said Friday that the
Democrats’ unwillingness to stop the school construction shift immediately
after it happened was — along with the emergency power issue — part of a larger
problem.
“There is a culture of acquiescence,” Kelly said, “where the
majority has been very comfortable letting the governor handle everything and
that’s what’s landed us at this point. ... Where are the checks and
balances? Where are the protocols?”
House Minority Leader Vincent J. Candelora of North Branford
said Lamont’s unilateral shift of the construction program “reeks of politics”
when it happened. And before the administration announced its reversal Friday,
Candelora already had called for the General Assembly to formally reassign the
program via statute to DAS.
“That was unprecedented, that was highly political,”
Candelora added. “Certainly my worst fears came to fruition.”
Democratic legislative leaders didn’t comment on Diamantis’
departure, but did recommend Friday that it was time for the legislature to get
more involved.
“The General Assembly should clarify where that agency is
statutorily,” said House Majority Leader Jason Rojas, D-East Hartford.
But both Rojas and Senate President Pro Tem Martin M.
Looney, D-New Haven, said that while Lamont needs to work with the legislature
to realign agencies, moving the construction program from one department to
another — even to the budget office — was neither unprecedented nor inherently
wrong.
The school construction unit sent about $330 million to
local school districts in the fiscal year before its transfer to OPM, and
Looney noted the budget office understandably has a close relationship with any
program handling such large amounts of money. “They are all part of the same
administration,” he added.
With Diamantis’ departure, DAS Deputy Commissioner Noel
Petra will oversee the school construction program until a permanent
replacement is selected, Geballe said.