New CT Amazon building: 1,000 workers, 5-story building the size of two malls
With a crew of more than 200 construction workers, Amazon is
turning most of a
157-acre property on the Naugatuck-Waterbury line into what will be one of its
biggest distribution centers in the state.
City and state leaders gathered at the sprawling, muddy
construction site Tuesday to celebrate what they expect will be one of the
region’s biggest employers when it opens sometime in 2027 or 2028.
“This marks the start of new opportunities and a much more
vibrant regional economy,” Waterbury Mayor Paul
Pernerewski Jr. told an audience of business leaders, community
officials and Amazon senior managers. “It’s going to be a true game-changer for
our region. It’s going to bring 1,000 really good-paying jobs to the area, it’s
going to strengthen our local families and businesses.”
The five-story behemoth will use automation to sort and ship
as many as 800,000 packages a day, and will take up more square footage than
the West Farms Mall and Danbury Fair Mall combined. Even so, Amazon projects
that it will need 1,000 employees and said fulfillment and transportation
workers will average $23 an hour.
To officials in the Naugatuck Valley, where brass mills and
others powered a thriving middle-class economy through the mid-20th century,
Amazon is one of the few big-scale job new sources amid the decades-long
trickle of factory shutdowns.
“I’ve worked on construction projects my whole life, I’ve
never seen anything like this − it’s unbelievable,” Naugatuck Mayor
Pete Hess said over the engine noise of a small fleet of cranes and
earth movers. “The steel we’re erecting today is going to hold up much more
than a building. It’s going to hold up jobs, dreams and a shared prosperity
that will bind Naugatuck and Waterbury forever.”
As enormous as the new center will be, it is still sized
about 600,000 square feet smaller than its premier Connecticut facility, BDL4
in Windsor just beyond Bradley International Airport. The Waterbury center will
be largely hidden from public view at the back of an industrial park, while
BDL4 dominates the skyline for Bradley flyers who recall the property as
sprawling shade tobacco fields.
The new center will perform essentially the same work as
BDL4, but with a higher concentration of robotics to sort and move products
along miles of conveyors stretching across acres of shelving and bins. The
company anticipates contractors will complete the building shell by early 2027,
but say the opening will come later because Amazon will need to install all of
the moving parts inside.
The project didn’t get done without controversy: Some
homeowners have complained about rock blasting as Bluewater Property Group and
its subcontractors clear the land and erect enormous retaining walls around the
building’s foundation. A few residents have complained about tax incentives for
the retail giant and the relatively low price it paid for the municipally owned
property.
But overall leaders in both communities have endorsed the
project, anticipating tens of millions of dollars in new tax revenue along with
a much-needed employment boost.
“Amazon I believe is the second-biggest employer in the
state of Connecticut. This (project) is 3.2 million square feet, 60 football
fields, 300 construction jobs,” Gov. Ned Lamont said, noting the company has
other mega-centers in Wallingford and North Haven along with large operations
in more than a dozen other towns.
Port Authority finalizes agreement with contractor for State Pier project
Greg Smith
The Connecticut Port Authority has settled a dispute over
costs with the construction manager overseeing the reconstruction of State Pier
and signed an agreement that finalizes
an $11.3 million settlement, Port Authority Executive Director Michael
O’Connor announced Tuesday.
The negotiated final cost is more than the $7.3 million
expected payment to Kiewit Corp. to complete the project but will not come at
any additional cost to the state. The port authority will cover the additional
costs with its own funds, O'Connor said.
The port authority's board of directors previously
authorized O'Connor to negotiate the settlement and end debate about the $24
million Kiewit said it needed to complete the $311 million project. Kiewit had
claimed increased costs as the result of added work at State Pier. The port
authority has said there were outstanding issues with the work: one related to
soil quality and another with an improperly situated toe wall where vessels
dock.
Connecticut Port Authority Board Chairman Paul Whitescarver
said Tuesday that outstanding issues were worked out.
"The bottom line is it's a fully functional pier
operating as it was designed," Whitescarver said.
In a statement, the port authority touted the agreement as a
successful completion of "one of the East Coast’s most advanced heavy-lift
port facilities."
State Pier is being leased and used as a launching spot for
wind turbine parts in the construction of offshore wind farms. The State Pier
reconstruction project, managed by the port authority, has been under scrutiny
for years because of costs that have spiked since the early estimates of $93
million. The state has contributed $211 million to the cost of renovations
while Danish offshore wind giant Ørsted, which is leasing State Pier, picked up
the remainder of the cost of the renovations, the port authority said.
“State Pier stands today as a modern, heavy-lift port
facility built to advance Connecticut’s maritime future,” O’Connor said in a
statement. “We remain focused on ensuring operational excellence and long-term
reliability. Our partnership with Kiewit has been essential in delivering this
asset.”
Kiewit Infrastructure Co. Area Manager Pete Maglicic said in
a statement that Kiewit was "proud to have partnered with the Connecticut
Port Authority, local labor unions, subcontractors and suppliers on this
transformative project.”
“The scope of work of taking an underutilized asset,
stabilizing and reinforcing the pier’s structure and modernizing its
cargo-handling capacity has resulted in a world class facility positioned to
deliver long-term value for Connecticut and the region,” Maglicic said.
State Pier at the moment is serving as a staging area for
Ørsted's 65-turbine Revolution Wind project off the coast of Rhode Island.
O'Connor said there are 12 remaining turbines to assemble for that project.
Ørsted has already started staging components for its next project, the
84-turbine Sunrise Wind in New York. That project is scheduled to be completed
sometime in 2027.
A copy of the agreement is available here.
Jury in CT school construction corruption case deliberates on bribery, extortion, conspiracy charges
BRIDGEPORT — The 12-member jury in the trial of Konstantinos
"Kosta" Diamantis,the
state's former head of school construction accused of extortion, bribery and
lying to federal agents, began its first full day of closed-door deliberations
on Tuesday in a room adjacent to Judge Stefan Underhill's fourth-floor
courtroom.
Defense attorney Norman Pattis and
Assistant U.S. Attorneys David
Novick and Jonathan Francis are waiting for the verdicts in the
complicated case. Prosecutors offered evidence of alleged contract steering,
while the defense made the counter-argument that Diamantis was a disrupter
whose goal was to save the state money and complete hundreds of millions of
dollars worth of construction projects on time.
Diamantis said that the tens of thousands of dollars from
two firms were for introductions among contractors as well as for legal advice
and career counseling outside his public service duties. Novick and
Francis said the three co-conspirators, who have already pleaded guilty, were
threatened by Diamantis with the fear, in a series of electronic messages, of
having their subcontracts taken away if they didn't pay up.
Underhill, after giving the jury an hourlong review of the
charges and procedures on Monday, then supervised a random drawing in which the
14-member jury pool was reduced to the 12 who will decide on the charges. If
something unforeseen occurs, an alternate or two will be called to serve on the
jury.
The jury's deliberations began around 9 a.m. Tuesday, with
Underhill promising free lunch to keep the jury on-task. By the end of the day,
the jury had not reached a verdict. The jurors were dismissed just before 4
p.m. Tuesday for the day.
If convicted on the 21 federal charges, Diamantis could be
facing 20 years in prison.
During closing arguments on Monday, the lawyers, in hourlong
recitations, had starkly different views of the case. "The defendant was a
corrupt public official," Novick said. "He helped the contractors who
gave him these bribes. He also used his official position to get bribes and
instill fear."
Pattis said the government made allegations that were never
proven by the evidence nor by the testimony. That included a requirement under
the bribery law that interstate commerce was affected beyond the fact that one
of the alleged co-conspirators, a former masonry executive whose company paid
Diamantis tens of thousands of dollars, lives in Rhode Island and the firm did
work in neighboring states.
"You are not to do the government's work for it,"
Pattis said. "What testimony was there about creating fear?" He said
a female owner of a construction management firm, Antonietta
Roy, had been encouraged by Diamantis to strike out on her own. "She
was a woman-owned business in a male-dominated culture and he told her to go
for it." Earlier in the trial, Roy said she felt compelled to hire
Diamantis's daughter.
“A quid pro quo must be clear and unambiguous,” Pattis
said, portraying Diamantis as a disrupter of a connected fraternity of
nearly all-male construction contractors. Pattis also said that one of the
co-conspirators who has already pleaded guilty, John Duffy, kept his boss in
the dark about his own share of alleged payments to Diamantis.
In his closing arguments, Pattis did not address the nearly
dozen charges of lying to federal investigators. He told the jury that he
avoided the issues, which Diamantis denied on the witness stand, to keep the
prosecutors from bringing the issues up again in their final remarks, after he
finished.
Diamantis, speaking to reporters outside the courthouse at
about 4:20 p.m. Monday, said he had been under orders from Gov. Ned Lamont to
save money and bring in hundreds of millions of dollars in annual school
projects on schedule.
On the sidewalk in front of the courthouse, Diamantis
said that school construction was second only to the state Department of
Transportation in annual expenditures. In about 2019, the newly elected Lamont wanted
to put the state on a “debt diet,” he said.