CT lawmakers set to pass reforms to troubled school construction program
Andrew Brown, CTMirror.org
State lawmakers are poised to enact a number of reforms to
Connecticut’s school construction office as a federal investigation continues
into the multibillion-dollar grant program.
Legislators in the House folded several changes to the
program into the state’s annual budget bill, which they passed early Tuesday
morning. The Senate is expected to take up the legislation Tuesday night.
The reforms tighten the bidding procedures for school
construction contracts and set stricter deadlines for completing audits of
school building projects.
The state Office of School Construction Grants and Review
has been in the spotlight since February, when state officials revealed that a
federal grand jury subpoenaed records related to the school grant program.
That subpoena — and similar summons that were sent
to at least five municipalities — suggest that federal prosecutors are
focused on investigating the work of former Office of Policy and Management
deputy secretary Konstantinos Diamantis, who ran the school construction office
for more than six years.
Diamantis, who previously served as a state Democratic
lawmaker, was removed from both his state jobs last October.
Since then, Gov. Ned Lamont’s administration has been reviewing
the school construction office in an attempt to foster confidence in the grant
program and the financial assistance it provides to municipalities.
The legislation that lawmakers are poised to pass this week
came out of that review. Leadership at the state Department of Administrative
Services, where the school construction office is housed, asked lawmakers to
take up several reform measures at the beginning of this year’s legislative
session.
One of the biggest changes requested by the state agency involves
so-called construction management companies, which often oversee the budgets,
schedules and bidding processes for school construction projects in the state.
In 2019, Diamantis
convinced state lawmakers to pass a bill that would enable those
construction firms to manage a construction project and simultaneously build
part of the schools they were overseeing. The bill referred to that as “self
performance.”
That law has remained on the books despite several industry
groups complaining that the setup threatened to upend the normal bidding
procedures for school construction projects by giving construction management
firms an unfair advantage.
Noel Petra, the interim director for the school construction
office, told lawmakers earlier this year that the language that was introduced
in 2019 could allow a construction manager to perform work on a project without
seeking bids from other companies.
“They actually wouldn’t be required to bid it,” Petra said.
Those concerns should be alleviated by the legislation
currently wending its way through the General Assembly.
The bill bans construction management firms from performing
any of the physical construction work on future school projects. Instead, all
of that work will need to be put out to bid to subcontractors.
“Prohibiting self-performance helps ensure consistency
between state and municipal projects, promotes competitive bidding along with
opportunity and competition in the trades industry and creates a more level
playing field between construction managers and subcontractors,” said Lora Rae
Anderson, a spokeswoman for DAS.
“We are grateful for the collaboration of our legislators,
municipalities, and industry leaders in this process and are hopeful this provision,
along with others will help further strengthen the integrity of the school
construction grants program,” she added.
The other legislative fix that lawmakers are pursuing
involves the financial audits that are performed once a school construction project
is complete.
Recent reports have shown that the state is extremely slow
in completing those audits, which determine whether municipalities properly
used the grant funding they received.
The Connecticut
Mirror obtained several recent audits showing the school construction
office reviewed projects that were completed more than a decade ago.
To fix that problem, lawmakers plan to implement new
deadlines for each construction project. Under the new rules, the state will
have five years to complete the audit once students are in the building.
New Britain officials seeking public input on planned completion of multi-use Beeline Trail
NEW BRITAIN – City officials are seeking public input on the
planned completion of a multi-use trail that will allow people to bike and walk
into nearby towns and far beyond.
An informational meeting on Phase II of the Beeline Trail is
set to take place Tuesday, May 10 at 6 p.m. in Room 201 of City Hall, located
at 27 W. Main St.
“The Beeline Trail will provide a beautiful option for
enjoying our city through the great outdoors,” Mayor Erin Stewart said. “We
encourage residents to get involved in the design process so this trail will
have the maximum positive impact on our community that it can have.”
City officials are expected to present plans for the
proposed design at the meeting and residents will be encouraged to provide
feedback.
The CTfastrak Multi-Use Trail currently extends five miles
between busway stations at Newington Junction and Downtown New Britain. The
trail rejoins the CTfastrak roadway at the East Street Station.
Once complete, the Beeline Trail will connect the CTfastrak
Multi-Use Trail with the Farmington Canal Heritage Trail in Plainville. Phase
II of the project specifically addresses a 2,400 ft. connection between West
Main Street and Corbin Avenue.
The section begins along W. Main, south of the Rt. 72
overpass, continues west to Black Rock Avenue, passing Sherwood Road and
Hamilton Street, ending on the east side of Corbin Avenue. Access to this part
of the trail will be located on Hamilton Street.
The preliminary design for Phase II has been completed and
is estimated to cost $700,000. Construction will be funded with a $600,000
grant from the Connecticut Department of Transportation’s Community
Connectivity Grant Program and the City will cover the remaining $100,000.
Once pedestrians and cyclists are able to reach the
Farmington Canal Trail in Plainville, it will open up their access to the
entire East Coast Greenway, which runs 3,000 miles from Maine to Florida.
Connecticut’s section is about 200 miles, running along the coast from
Greenwich to New Haven, then north all the way to Simsbury, before turning east
towards Hartford and continuing to Sterling before crossing the border into
R.I.
The Beeline Trail project was referenced in New Britain’s 2021
Plan of Conservation and Development. One of the city’s plans for the future is
enhancing bicycle and pedestrian infrastructure.
With trash plant closing, CT rethinks waste policy
If there is such a thing as a momentous year in trash
collection, 2022 could be one. It might have to be.
“We are at a crossroads in Connecticut now,” said Department
of Energy and Environmental Protection Commissioner Katie Dykes, whose agency
oversees solid waste management.
First, the trash-to-energy plant in Hartford’s South Meadows
will close. By late summer, and for the first time in four decades, trucks
won’t be delivering trash to the hulking pile of brick, smokestack and steel
that evokes the Industrial Revolution.
“The chain will be across the road by Sept. 1,” said
Thomas D. Kirk, president and CEO of the Materials Innovation
and Recycling Authority, or MIRA, which superintends the facility. It means
that hundreds of thousands of tons of Connecticut waste will be shipped to
landfills in other states.
No one is happy with this result, seeing it as
irresponsible, expensive and stressful to the environment.
However, 20 miles down I-91, a solution may be in the works.
Hundreds of Meriden residents are separating their food scraps from other trash
so the organic waste can be turned into biogas and fertilizer. It’s a
state-funded, four-month pilot program that, if successful, could be replicated
in other communities, significantly reducing the stream of waste.
Finally, a bill before the General Assembly, which was passed
by the Senate last week, would create a task force to “study and make
recommendations for short-term and long-term solutions to the trash problem.”
The key would be the long-term solution. Several MIRA board
members, including chairman Don Stein, have called for a stronger state role in
solid waste management.
There are models to choose from, and “all should be on the
table,” said Laura Francis, first selectman of Durham and co-chair of the
Connecticut Coalition for Sustainable Materials Management, a partnership of DEEP and some
90 towns exploring ways to solve what Dykes, Stein and others have called a
crisis in solid waste.
Francis said she is encouraged that the often-ignored issue
is finally getting the attention of legislators, town officials and some
others.
The trash plant
The question surrounding the aging MIRA trash-to-energy
plant in Hartford was not if it would close, but when.
It was a coal-burning power plant converted to a
trash-to-energy facility in the 1980s. This was a time when almost every
municipality had a town dump that was likely releasing greenhouse gases into
the atmosphere, polluting groundwater and playing host to an army of
vermin.
Turning trash into electricity was seen as a vast
improvement, and six trash-to-energy plants were built (four will remain after
South Meadows closes; all are more than 30 years old).
The South Meadows plant originally served 70 towns, a number
that dwindled to about 50 by 2012. By that point, it was becoming clear that
the plant was in dire need of renovation and upgrade. It broke down several
times, and efforts to rebuild it fell through. MIRA went to the state in 2020
with a request for $330 million to refurbish the plant. When the state turned
down the request, MIRA’s board voted in late 2020 to close the plant by June 30
of this year.
But MIRA still had 48 towns under contract, so they had to
make arrangements to have their garbage hauled to landfills in upstate New
York, Pennsylvania or Ohio. An initial idea was to turn the South Meadows plant
into a transfer station, where waste would be transferred from local collector
to interstate haulers. Another was to keep the plant in operation for another
year.
Neither concept was terribly popular with DEEP or Hartford
city officials, but it appears neither will come to pass. MIRA’s contracts with
towns allow the towns to opt out once a year, in the month of March. By early
April, 28 towns responsible for about 80 percent of the tonnage had opted out
and made their own arrangements with private haulers.
Thus relieved of much of its burden, MIRA will not have to
turn the South Meadows into a transfer station, or keep the plant running past
the summer, and will also be able to close one of its three existing regional
transfer stations, the Watertown facility.
A small amount of waste from the Essex transfer station will
be sent to the Covanta trash-to-energy plant in Preston. A company spokesman
said Covanta created room for about 40,000 tons a year by moving some existing
haulers to facilities in Massachusetts. Still, most of the Connecticut waste is
going to end up in out-of-state landfills.
Connecticut produces almost 2.4 million tons of trash a
year, of which about 1.4 million are managed by the in-state incinerators. That
means almost a million tons must be shipped to out of state landfills. Dykes
said the immediate goal is to reduce that number to the point where the state
is self-sufficient, managing its own waste, a goal of the state’s 2016 waste
management plan.
The Sustainable Materials Management coalition is trying to
reach self-sufficiency by significantly reducing the amount of material going
into the waste stream. To that end, the coalition has working groups studying
unit-based pricing (pay-as-you-throw), improved recycling, food scraps/organics
diversion and extended producer responsibility, a notion that producers of
materials should share the responsibility of disposing of them.
DEEP also made grant money available to towns to pursue
those goals. Meriden was the first grantee.
Co-collection
The Meriden pilot project is based on a European model
called “co-collection.” About 1,000 households — customers on a route of the
waste hauler HQ Dumpsters, a partner in the program — were provided with
color-coded bags. The idea is for residents to put their trash in the orange
bag and their food scraps in the green bag, and then put both bags in the same
collection cart, hence co-collection.
The bags are separated after collection, with the food
scraps going to a firm called Quantum Biopower in Southington, where they are
transformed by anaerobic digestion into biogas for energy and then composted
for use as nutrient-rich fertilizer. Anaerobic digestion breaks down organic
material in the absence of oxygen, creating biogas.
Three months into the program, it has achieved a
participation rate of about 50%, said Kristen Brown of the national consulting
firm WasteZero, which is monitoring the Meriden project.
The number, she said, is “super-encouraging,” because with
further consumer education and implementation of full unit-based pricing, known
as pay-as-you-throw, to all of its households, the city could get 70% of the
waste out of the system.
Given that the state’s current level of recycling only
removes 30-35% of waste, is it possible to double that?
Consider: 30-35% of the waste stream is made up of organics,
mostly food waste. If that is diverted to an anaerobic digester, there’s 65-70%
left. Pay-as-you-throw can remove 45-55% of what is left, according to
Brown’s data. So, 70% of the trash goes elsewhere. She said Brattleboro, Vt.,
and some other New England towns have reached the 70% goal.
Money saver
Pay-as-you-throw means customers pay for the trash they
discard, just as they pay for the water or electricity they use, but not for
the recycled or composted materials. The idea is to encourage less trash and
more recycling, reuse, donations or other means of lessening trash volume.
Pay-as-you-throw has been a hard sell in Connecticut; only a
handful of communities have formally adopted it. But it’s been quite popular in
the rest of New England, with some 550 communities on board, Brown said, part
of 6,000 across the country. Connecticut produces 740 pounds per capita of
municipal solid waste per year, about the national average. In Stonington,
which has the state’s most aggressive pay-as-you-throw program, the number is
389 pounds.
Some New England cities with unit-based pricing programs are
doing better. Residents of Worcester, Mass., the region’s second largest city,
produce 324 pounds of trash per capita, and each citizen of Portland, Maine,
puts only 286 pounds of garbage into the waste stream.
Connecticut may soon see more unit-pricing programs. The
state made $5 million in grant money available this year for towns to create
food scrap collection or unit-pricing programs, and two dozen communities have
applied for funds.
The state had made progress over the past 30 years in
reducing its waste stream, with such measures as the bottle bill, single stream
recycling and recycling of paint, mattresses and electronics. The latter is an
example of “extended producer responsibility,” an effort to get manufacturers
to take some responsibility for the end life of their products. Officials are
trying to extend the concept to tires and gas cylinders.
There are several advantages to
reuse and recycling. Keeping food waste out of landfills limits greenhouse gas
production. Recycling allows a consumer to get full use of a product or
material and reduces the need, and attendant pollution, of extracting raw
materials for new products. And in Connecticut’s case, it can save money. It is
less expensive to ship a ton of organic waste from Meriden to Southington than
to Southern Ohio.
Dykes said her goal is to find alternatives such as
anaerobic digestion and “scale them up” so they are available to all state
residents. She said the state can play a role, perhaps by guaranteeing to
buy electricity from digestion plants, as an incentive to build more of them.
She said she receives regular inquiries from developers who want to bring
innovative solutions to the state (some have). She said she recently met with a firm that
hopes to introduce electric-powered trash collection trucks.
Task force
What happens after that likely will be determined by the task
force, assuming the bill authorizing its creation wins House approval before
the session ends Wednesday night.
For one thing, it must determine the fate of MIRA, the
agency that’s been running the trash-to-energy plant. MIRA still has work to
do. The agency has to decommission the plant, which includes removing the
environmental hazards. This could take “many months if not a year,” Kirk said.
MIRA is also responsible for four jet turbines on the site, backup sources of
energy for peak periods of demand, through May 2023.
Its future after that is up in the air.
“You wouldn’t think you’d need a quasi-public agency to run
two transfer stations,” said Tom Swarr, a MIRA board member and retired United
Technologies engineer who lives in Hartford.
“I’d be surprised to see MIRA still here in its present form
in five years,” said State Sen. Norm Needleman, Senate chair of the Energy and
Technology Committee and also first selectman of Essex. MIRA was a public
option — towns could join MIRA instead of making their own arrangements. As a
nonprofit, it had a stabilizing effect on costs and was a successful example of
regional service sharing, MIRA chairman Stein has said.
One question the task force must face is whether there
should be a public option going forward, Needleman said.
If so, should MIRA be that option? As Brown observed, the
agency does have “innovation” in its title. Though it has been tied to the
trash-to-energy model for a long time, it could at least theoretically pivot to
newer technologies or programs.
Another question concerns residue. Even deploying every
available tool to reduce waste, there will still be some left over. Should it
be burned? Environmentalists oppose trash
burning, believing it adds to air pollution and pulmonary illness. Advocates
such as Quirk believe modern technology can clean emissions to a point where
they don’t pose a health risk (there is a very modern trash-to-energy plant in
Copenhagen, Denmark, with a 1,500-foot artificial ski slope on it).
Dykes agreed that emission scrubbing is moving in the right
direction but said the location of the Hartford plant near the highways —
transportation is a major source of pollution and greenhouse gases — has
created a cumulative health risk for nearby residents.
Needleman said he’d be OK with a modern burn plant, as long
as it burned “as little as possible.”
The major challenge facing the task force will be the
long-term structure. DEEP has a strong regulatory and advisory role but doesn’t
run the program. MIRA chairman Stein, who also is the first selectman of
Barkhamsted, believes the state has to step up.
In testimony on March 8 supporting the task force bill,
Stein and MIRA co-chair Jim Hayden, former first selectman of East Granby, said
solutions based on “a voluntary participation of towns are necessarily
impractical, ineffective and inefficient. A statewide approach encompassing
each of the 169 towns is required.”
Without “regulation or financial incentive to compel
participation and/or public financial subsidy, optimum technologies for
managing the entirety of our State’s waste will not be implemented,” they
said. Economic considerations will drive towns to the least expensive
option, which currently is to transport to “rural mega landfills” in distant
states.
The veteran officials put in a plug for “public ownership,
operation and control of disposal capacity,” which they said has a “myriad of
practical, legal and economic benefits and can provide competitive balance and
efficiencies.”
If the state were to take a larger role, what form might it
take?
One possibility would be a statewide authority to manage
solid waste, as Delaware has. Delaware uses large “modern” landfills, one in
each of the state’s three counties, which are lined and capture greenhouse
gases. The state has no trash-to-energy plants, does not ship any waste out of
state nor allow any to be shipped in, and has achieved a recycling rate of 44%,
said spokesman Mike Parkowski.
Another model might be a public utility, such as that used
by the city of San Francisco, where an employee-owned company called Recology
runs one of the most aggressive recycling programs in the country, achieving a
rate of more than 50%. This is aided by a state law that requires businesses
and residents to separate organics for composting.
Responsible residents
Trash disposal is not something many people think about —
“It’s something they expect government to do,” said former MIRA board member
John Adams last year. But residents have a role. They can reuse containers, not
use plastic bags, or not buy products with excessive plastic wrap, said
Francis.
Jim Therrien works at the Old Saybrook transfer station, and
he’s been carrying on a quiet crusade for proper recycling. Therrien regularly
posts recycling tips on a community Facebook page and has done a local access
television show on the subject. He sees people trying to recycle the wrong
things, such as plastic bags or shredded paper, and is trying to get them not
to.
He has solutions for two of the more difficult recycling
challenges, peanut butter jars and pizza boxes.
A peanut butter jar still coated with the product is
contaminated and should not be recycled. But clean it with a spatula and put it
in the dishwasher, and it is good to go. If the bottom of a pizza box is
contaminated with grease, tear it off and put it in the trash, and recycle the
rest of the box.
Asked in a recent interview what the strangest thing someone
tried to recycle, he said: “A bowling ball.”
“Duckpin or ten pin?”
“Ten pin — the big one.”