“The intention is to have the entrance back up here,” said Thomas Roche, director of facilities and construction, wearing a hard hat and standing at the end of Newell Road - which is now owned by the hospital.
The hospital in March relocated the Emergency Center entrance, which formerly sat at the end of Newell, to the Cancer Care Center door - which sits closer to the building’s main entrance in the front of the campus. By July or August, the entrance should be back on Newell Road, which will no longer be a one-way road and will now circle in a U-shape off of and back onto Goodwin Street.
Construction broke ground in February and has for the most part remained on schedule. Roche said some supplies have been hard to come by because the coronavirus pandemic has shut down some factories.
“It slowed us down a little bit,” he said, adding that the project is still on pace to meet its deadline.
The renovations to the existing Emergency Center and a 12,500-square-foot addition are part of a four-phase, $15 million project. By late summer, the steel of the addition, which will sit off of Newell Road, should begin being put into place.
Roche said the plan is to have staff move into the addition once it’s complete, while the existing Emergency Center space undergoes renovations.
“They’re the ones who will be putting up with the inconvenience,” Roche said of the doctors and nurses of the Emergency Center. He added that, working in the emergency room can inherently be tumultuous, so the staff is “used to chaos.”
The first phase of the project was completed last year, when the hospital unveiled its new 10-bed Emergency Center Behavioral Health Unit. The 2,700-square-foot unit is designed to meet the mental health and substance abuse needs of the community in light of the nation’s opioid epidemic.
The entire project, which is currently in phase two, is slated to be completed by 2021 in alignment with the hospital’s 100 year anniversary.

Hartford inks lease deal for $21.5M Albany Ave., Woodland St. development
Joe Cooper
artford's city council has agreed to lease city property to a local developer proposing to build a $21.5-million mixed-use development in a key corner of the Upper Albany neighborhood.
The city council on Tuesday approved a 50-year deal for 7 Summits Realty LLC to lease the vacant city-owned land at the corner of Albany Avenue and Woodland Street for the development of 50 apartment units and office and retail space.
7 Summits CEO Rohan Freeman in an interview said the deal gives his group control of the 2-acre property, and leverage to finalize more than $10 million worth of “soft commitments” from several potential public and private funders.
Freeman said potential funders include the quasi-public Capital Region Development Authority (CRDA); the city of Hartford; Trinity Health of New England; and the Local Initiatives Support Corp. (LISC), among others.
7 Summits, the lone bidder to redevelop the property, formerly home to a gas station, still needs the planning and zoning commission to approve its site plan before it moves closer to breaking ground on the four-story, 80,000-square-foot development it hopes to complete in 2021.
The timing of possible city approvals, Freeman said, will determine whether the eight-month construction project begins this fall or next spring.
According to plans, which Freeman presented to CRDA’s board earlier this year, the top two floors of the so-called Albany and Woodland Place would include a mix of 50 studio and one-bedroom apartments, and the second floor is likely to house one office tenant in about 20,000 square feet.
The majority of the street-level space would be used for retail, office or restaurant space. Freeman said he is vetting a handful of potential banking, restaurant and healthcare tenants, but declined to disclose any suitors. Tenants would have access to 122 parking spaces behind the building and another 30 spaces across the street.
The Albany Avenue and Woodland Street area is currently home to performing arts institutions The Hartt School, The Artists Collective, and a branch of the public library.
He said residents have expressed interest in bringing a much-needed financial institution or  small business restaurant to the property.
“I think this is something that is long due to happen in this community,” he said. “We hope this project becomes a catalyst to spur other large-scale private development in the upper Albany and North End community as a whole.”

Windsor grants key approvals for proposed Amazon distribution facility
Joe Cooper
An Indiana developer proposing to build Amazon’s second warehouse/distribution center in Windsor has received all local land use approvals for the $50-million project.
Windsor’s planning and zoning commission on Tuesday approved a special use application and site plan for Scannell Properties to build a 823,000-square-foot distribution hub on former tobacco farmland at 1201 Kennedy Road and 1 Joseph Lane.
The approvals are contingent on a handful of conditions, including that a continuous crosswalk to the distribution facility be installed at River Street and Kennedy Road, and that additional sound barriers are implemented, among other caveats.
Last week, HBJ was first to report that e-commerce giant Amazon, which operates a massive fulfillment center on Old Iron Ore Road, is planning to open a second Windsor location where it expects to add 1,000 new jobs. Amazon, which did not respond to a request for comment Wednesday, has not confirmed or denied it intends to occupy the building.
“We will have a pre-construction meeting with the developer and their construction team before site work begins to ensure a smooth process,” said Town Planner Eric Barz, adding that Scannell has “significant site work to perform” before it begins construction.
Meantime, Amazon is seeking a multi-year tax abatement for the development, where it plans to invest at least $200 million to build out the facility on land owned by the Thrall family farm (O.J. Thrall Inc.). Windsor’s economic development commission has recommended that the town council approve the seven-year, 100% tax abatement that would save the company an estimated $4 million to $5 million annually upon completion of the project.
The town council is expected to discuss the proposed abatement at an upcoming meeting, town officials say.
According to plans, the five-story e-commerce storage and distribution facility would feature 63 loading docks, 1,800 car parking spaces, 16 motorcycle spaces and 206 trailer parking stalls.
Town records show Amazon is hoping to begin construction on the facility in the third quarter of 2020 before it starts occupying the new space in the third quarter of 2021.
If approved, Amazon would work closely with the town to employ "as many people from the community as possible once the proposed facility is operational,” according to the proposed abatement.

MIRA: Trash-To-Energy Plant No Longer Viable Without State Help
Christine Stuart
HARTFORD, CT – The Materials Innovation and Recycling Authority’s board of directors voted Thursday to begin shutting down the last publicly owned trash-to-energy plant in Connecticut.
The facility in Hartford’s South Meadows neighborhood accepts trash from 51 member towns and many private haulers, but the equipment is outdated and the municipalities can’t afford to pay for improvements alone.
Towns that contract with the Materials Innovation and Recycling Authority (MIRA) for trash removal and recycling are currently paying about $83 per ton, and that is projected to go up to about $91 in the next fiscal year.
Over the past two years, MIRA officials have been trying to combine state bonding, a new power-purchase agreement for the energy generated by the plant, and renewable energy credits to keep the cost of disposal to about $95 per ton after the plant is renovated.
But without those three additional revenue sources, towns will have to pay $145 per ton for their waste disposal – a 42% increase over the current rate. That was unacceptable to municipalities.
“I’m disappointed that if we’re going to have a quasi-public presence in the state, in this line of business, it needs support and it needs some state support,” said Manchester Town Manager Scott Shanley, who also served on the MIRA board.
East Granby First Selectman and MIRA board member Jim Hayden said he thinks it’s a “tragedy” that the state is no longer going to be “self-sufficient” in trash.
Pat Widlitz, a MIRA board member and former lawmaker, said she did not get on the board to help begin “shipping our waste out of state and just toss out 40 years of our success in managing our own waste.”
Widlitz said “MIRA is a public-private partnership and we’re missing the public right now.”
Most board members were disappointed in the state’s decision not to help provide financing to continue operations.
“Every environmentalist should be shocked and appalled that we are going to revert to landfilling,” MIRA Vice Chairman Richard Barlow said. “And not only landfilling, but landfilling in other states.”
MIRA has been working on a plan to modernize its operations for more than two years with a European developer chosen by the state Department of Energy and Environmental Protection. The board voted Thursday to allow that contract to expire since it was unable to get any of its members to agree to a proposal that would cost them $145 per ton for the next 30 years.
“MIRA has concluded that the Project is not viable,” it wrote in the resolution approved by the board Thursday.
“It is unfortunate that MIRA was not able to come to terms with an innovative partner to update and revitalize the Hartford Resource Recovery Facility,” Dykes said in a statement. “MIRA has the responsibility to provide reliable service to more than 50 Connecticut municipalities for several years to come, and we look forward to hearing from MIRA its plans to continue to provide reliable service in a manner that is consistent with the state’s waste hierarchy.”
Thomas Kirk, executive director of the agency, said the contract ending means that they will have to start trucking trash to Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia, and New York by 2023. That’s because without state support it’s no longer viable to operate the plant.
“Hauling waste out of state is a big giant step backward,” Kirk said.
He said they tried to warn state lawmakers that they would close the plant if they didn’t get either $330 million in general obligation bonds or a power-purchase agreement like the one created for the Millstone Power Station a few years ago.
Kirk said there are no viable, less costly solutions because the technology is not there yet.
“Forty years ago Connecticut made the right decision to stop burying our garbage,” Kirk said. “Now we’re going to bury it in another state.”
Kirk said he hopes that over the next couple of months they can come up with a financial alternative, but the prospect of keeping the trash-to-energy plant open is not looking good.

New toll hike, $24B construction plan approved by Turnpike board despite calls to delay
Larry Higgs