State DOT ready to pick company to expand the Naugatuck River Greenway in Waterbury

Michael Puffer

WATERBURY – Nine construction companies are vying to build the first 2.2-mile leg of the Naugatuck River Greenway in Waterbury.

Bids submitted by the April 26 deadline range from $4.5 million to $6 million. These proposals are being vetted by the firm hired by the city to design the trail.

The firm picked for the job will be reviewed by the state Department of Transportation and then a contract will go before the city’s Board of Aldermen for approval.

“The bids have been submitted and if all is in order, an award will take place over the next few weeks, give or take,” Connecticut Department of Transportation spokesman Kevin Nursick said. “Construction would then begin this construction season.”

The construction season essentially runs spring through early winter, before harsh winter weather makes construction difficult or untenable.

The first leg of the trail will begin along Platts Mills Road at the Naugatuck line and then run up to South Main Street and down to Eagle Street.

Officials plan to eventually complete 7.5 miles of trail running along the river through the city. This will connect to a 44-mile regional trail skirting the river. Waterbury’s Board of Aldermen have approved bonding $9.5 million to build the first 2.2 miles of trail, along with an associated 7-acre park at the intersection of Platts Mills Road and South Main Street.

Planning began more than a decade ago and target construction dates have repeated been pushed back. The city first applied for federal funding in 2007. There have been a few delays, including the discovery of Native American artifacts by the future site of the new park, which required additional archeological study.

A prior round of construction bids was scrapped after contractors discovered they couldn’t secure the black locust wood for fencing called for in the plans, according to city Project Manager Salvatore Porzio.

Plans have been changed to allow for red cedar, a different type of wood.

Once a contractor is picked and given a green light, they’ll have one year to “substantially complete” the project and must be entirely done within 410 days.

The project city has secured $7.6 million from a federal grant to defray costs, along with $500,000 from a state environmental program. The federal grant requires local taxpayer invest at least $1.5 million.

Torrington school building committee considering retaining current gym

Lance Reynolds

TORRINGTON – Architects for the $159.6 million Torrington Middle/High School building project say they prefer renovating the gymnasium at the current Torrington High School over constructing a new one as part of the grade 7-12 school.

Modernizing and keeping the current THS gymnasium would save the city nearly $1 million, said Amy Samuelson, associate principal at SLAM Collaborative, a Glastonbury-based architectural firm.

Constructing a new gymnasium would cause school district officials to look elsewhere for a year to hold high school physical education classes, Samuelson said during a building committee meeting last week. In a renovate-as-new project, though, those classes would be held in the middle school gymnasium, which would be built first, she said.

Last month, the project’s building committee chose to base the new school’s footprint in a portion of the current parking lot at THS. That means the school will be closer to Route 8 and the pond at Elise Besse Park.

Board of Education Chairwoman Fiona Cappabianca said she didn’t fully understand how to differentiate the pros and cons of adding a new high school gymnasium or renovating the existing one.

“I’m just wondering as a committee, if this building is going to last 60 or 70 years, should we be looking at the differences between renovating the gym or putting in a field house?” she asked. “I don’t understand enough to know if it’s worth going down the path of a [new gym].”

In 2017, the state declined a request by state Rep. Michelle L. Cook, D-Torrington, to renovate the school’s gymnasium and fitness center due to their hazardous conditions.

“Moreover, an inspection has revealed that there is asbestos under the gym floor; consequently, the high cost and time-consuming process of replacing it stymies any such plans,” a 2019 study from the New England Association of Schools and Colleges stated.

Mario Longobucco, building committee co-chairman, told committee members he believes a renovation would be beneficial since it would allow high schoolers to stay on campus for physical education classes during construction, while helping save money.

“That’s been the big driver for moving away from a field house, which I love the idea of,” Longobucco said.

Once the schematic design phase is complete, it will be too late to change back to constructing a new gymnasium, Samuelson said.

“There’s a lot of investigation that we need to do,” she said. “We’ve done a lot of work placing the building on the site gridwise so that it would make a big difference if we were to change midway through that course.”

Construction of the building is scheduled to commence in spring 2022 and finish before the start of the 2024-25 school year. The city is slated to receive an $85 million reimbursement from the state, lowering its share to $74.6 million.

‘New York City money’ drives influx of residents to North Stamford, Downtown during pandemic

Veronica Del Valle

STAMFORD — New residents from far and wide landed in Connecticut’s lap during pandemic-related exoduses, according to a new study. And among all of the state’s 169 municipalities, pockets of Stamford fared particularly well.

A Hearst Connecticut Media analysis of change-of-address notifications filed with the U.S. Postal Service found that Connecticut beat out regional competitors like Westchester and Long Island in terms of 2020 move-ins. The pandemic especially flipped the migration switch in two pockets of Stamford: the ZIP codes 06901 and 06903, according to real estate services firm CBRE.

The number of people moving from other, more populous places to the Stamford metro area exploded in 2020. Over 17,000 people moved to the Stamford-Bridgeport-Norwalk Metro from New York City and its surrounding communities in 2020. The year before, only 10,079 people made the same move, meaning the migration grew by 72 percent in one year, according to the Hearst analysis.

By population, the ZIP code for Stamford’s downtown, 06901, saw some of the most precipitous growth in Connecticut, according to the USPS data. For every 1,000 residents, 65 more people moved downtown in 2020 than in 2019. Over the pandemic year, in particular, the increase in that neighborhood beat out the boom in some of the city’s more suburban communities. And that only counts people who permanently changed their mailing address accordingly.

However, Stamford’s 06903 ZIP code — which spans all of North Stamford — fared better overall in the region’s population game. Even when accounting for residents who moved away, North Stamford gained at least 413 new residents by CBRE’s estimate.

“I’ve seen more baby carriages in the last six months than I have in the last six years,” said city Rep. Bob Lion, who represents part of North Stamford. He said he sees young families everywhere in his neighborhood. Of course, the trend has picked up over the last year, but Lion thinks it goes back years.

The 06902 ZIP code, a vast and socioeconomically diverse swath of Stamford south of Interstate 95 up to Westover, led the entire state in newcomers during 2019 and 2020. Between the two years, 13,452 residents moved there. But that influx of people alone only means so much. In that same time frame, 15,006 residents moved out of the 06902. Unlike Downtown and North Stamford, the pandemic’s net migration from that zipcode was relatively flat.

New families, many with young children, are replacing longtime residents who are looking to downsize or cash in on the hottest housing market since 2006. Lion thinks that the churn of families moving in and out of North Stamford is different than in years past.

During its corporate heydey in the 1980s, when the city had the largest concentration of headquarters in the country, “it used to be because people were transferring in and out,” Lion said. By his estimates, the corporate professionals who settled here 40 years ago are now turning over, thinking of downsizing or flocking to warm-weather states like birds in the wintertime.

Combined with the pandemic-related influx, real estate agents say Stamford is experiencing a perfect storm.

“There’s a severe lack of inventory right now in Stamford,” local real estate agent Chris Carozza said. In April 2021, only 91 homes were listed for sale in the entire 06903 ZIP code, according to data from Realtor.com. Exactly a year prior, 215 homes were listed for sale in the same community. Fewer homes drive up the price of real estate and heighten the stakes in competitive markets. Between February 2020 and February 2021, the median listing price in North Stamford jumped 30 percent.

Carozza said sees cash offers happening in places like North Stamford more and more because of the “New York City money” flooding the market, along with waived mortgage and inspection contingencies.

There’s a downside, however, especially for more vulnerable house hunters.

“If you have to sell your house to buy your next house ... you’re competing with people who don’t have anything to sell, and they have cash. It’s very difficult to compete with those people. That’s really frustrating for a lot of Connecticut buyers right now,” Carozza said.

In Fairfield County, the limited housing stock and competitive market have meant more people are moving farther away than before. CBRE data shows that a whopping majority of movers — more than 49,000 people — stayed within the county. But during the pandemic, the number of people moving between 100 and 500 miles from Fairfield County jumped by 19 percent.

That same zeal translated into enthusiasm about Stamford’s rental market, which has changed the most because of the pandemic. In 2019, Downtown lost 433 residents. One year later, move-ins to the same neighborhood jumped by 620 people.

Just before the pandemic stuck, Urby — a brand of apartment buildings with a penchant for aesthetically minded flourishes — opened its Stamford location right on the corner of Greyrock Place. And like many of its Downtown compatriots, the influx of residents to the neighborhood has been welcome news.

“We’re definitely considering people who are saying ‘I don’t necessarily need to be tethered to a certain area of New York City. I can have the flexibility of being a little bit further away,’” Urby Marketing Director Tara Leavitt said.

Leavitt thinks the Urby is strategically positioned for even more growth as people emerge from their socially distanced cocoons. The building is significantly closer to the Stamford Transportation Center than some of the other luxury properties nearby, she said, and proximity to both the train and the central business district helps give its tenants the best of both worlds.

While the pandemic has brought hundreds of people to Stamford, it’s the city’s job to convince them and their tax money to stay. A sure-fire way to to do that, according to Lion, is by investing in Stamford’s amenities.

The city representative said he hopes to see more money going towards parks, more Downtown programming like farmers’ markets and its outdoor dining initiative, and more large-scale events geared towards young people and families.

“It’s not going to be for me,” Lion said. “It’s going to be for those who buy my house.”

Biden wants to move energy offshore, but choppy seas are ahead

Joshua Partlow 

DORCHESTER, N.J. - In his three decades servicing oil platforms in the Gulf of Mexico, boat captain Keith Piper rode out all manner of storms and gales. Still, he had never faced the elements that tested him last winter at a wind farm off the coast of Rhode Island. Subzero temperatures. Snow. A nor'easter blowing 70 miles per hour. Coffee sloshing in the pot and his 500-ton liftboat - propped above the waves on four hydraulic legs - vibrating from the force of the wind.

Given the rock-hard bottom of the continental shelf, unlike the Gulf's forgiving sands, any mistake setting the boat legs down and the impact on board would feel like being slammed head first into concrete. "It shakes everything and breaks everything," he said.

These are the discoveries being made at the dawn of America's offshore wind industry. Up and down the East Coast, developers and government agencies are preparing for the massively complex and costly challenge of placing thousands of wind turbines taller than the Washington Monument miles out into the Atlantic. The Biden administration has set a goal that industry players call highly ambitious, if not unrealistic: to produce 30,000 megawatts of electricity from offshore wind farms by 2030, enough to power 10 million homes. Meeting this goal is one of the few available paths for President Joe Biden to reduce the country's reliance on fossil fuels and fight climate change.

The obstacles ahead are staggering. The United States is decades behind Europe and Asia in developing offshore wind. Only seven offshore turbines are running - the five in Rhode Island, plus two in Virginia - and together the projects produce just 42 megawatts of electricity. China alone installed more than 3,000 new megawatts of offshore wind energy last year, more than half the world's total.

Far larger efforts are on the horizon, though. Vineyard Wind, the first large-scale U.S. offshore wind farm, is expected to receive its final federal permit from the Interior Department within days. It calls for 62 turbines generating 800 megawatts just more than a dozen miles southeast of Martha's Vineyard, Mass. Fourteen other projects from North Carolina to Maine are in other stages of permitting that, under a disdainful President Donald Trump, became a seemingly endless process.

"The Achilles' heel of the industry has been the federal permitting process," said David Hardy, chief executive of Ørsted Offshore North America, the U.S. offshoot of the Danish energy giant that has been involved in both existing American projects and has applications pending for several more. "It was, to be blunt, stalled under the Trump administration."

Hardy is encouraged by Biden's interest. A recent call with offshore industry leaders included four Cabinet members as well as White House climate adviser Gina McCarthy, with administration officials vowing to provide federal loans and accelerate permitting, he said. The Bureau of Ocean Energy Management has committed to processing the 14 pending proposals by 2025.

"We're taking an all-of-government approach to ensure that we are successful in developing offshore wind," bureau director Amanda Lefton said in an interview.

The aggressive timetable will require a massive new industry, with steep investments in new ports, boats, factories, and upgrades to electrical grids. The first U.S.-built vessel capable of installing the offshore turbines is being completed in Texas at a cost of $500 million. Until more ships are ready, projects in this country must rely on boats from Europe, an exchange complicated by the continent's own demand for wind energy and maritime trade laws here.

There are other hurdles, too, particularly intense opposition from some coastal communities and commercial fishermen. Even when that's overcome, construction can only move forward during certain months because of bad weather and the threat to migratory patterns of the North Atlantic right whale, a critically endangered species.

It all makes offshore wind farms - multibillion-dollar infrastructure projects - a still-risky proposition, according to developers and others in the industry.

"Everybody's sticking their toe in the water right now," said Piper, the boat captain who's now based in Dorchester for that very reason. "But nobody wants to stick their whole foot in yet."

Bill White leaned into a brisk breeze as he crossed the vast and largely empty expanse of compacted gravel at the edge of Buzzards Bay. There is wind here but so far little else.

Yet two years from now, he envisions 500 workers - electricians and engineers, longshoremen and seafarers, all tiny specks next to turbine blades longer than a football field, nose cones called nacelles that are large enough to hold elevators and 3.5-million-pound steel columns known as monopiles, which get hammered deep into the seafloor.

It is White's job to make Vineyard Wind a reality, and this lot at the Marine Commerce Terminal in New Bedford, Mass., a historic whaling community, is where it will happen. The site is the first port in the country built specifically to withstand the turbine components' crushing weights. Other facilities are being developed in New York, Connecticut, Rhode Island and Maryland. In New Jersey, a $250 million factory will be completed in two years and begin building the monopiles that anchor wind turbines in place. Siemens Gamesa is considering a future factory in Virginia to make turbine blades.

"These will be some of the biggest construction projects our country has seen," said White, vice president of offshore wind for Avangrid Renewables, one of two companies leading Vineyard Wind. "This will be a massive mobilization."

He has long envisioned this future. A veteran of the State Department and the Clinton White House, he spent more than a decade trying to advance offshore wind energy with the state of Massachusetts and then the private sector. He lived through Cape Wind, a proposed project off the coast of Nantucket, Mass., that was defeated by lawsuits and well-funded opponents such as the Koch brothers. The first meetings to discuss the location of what would become Vineyard Wind were in 2009.

"It's been a hell of a long road," he said.

Thousands of wind turbines are already spinning across the country, but developers see greater potential offshore because of more powerful sustained winds, the proximity to large coastal cities thirsty for electricity and the space for vast activity.

White's company is a subsidiary of the Spanish energy company Iberdrola. Its partner is Copenhagen Infrastructure Partners out of Denmark. So far, European companies dominate these early efforts to bring offshore wind to the United States. Vineyard Wind's onshore substation will be built by a Swedish company, its cables by Italian and Belgian firms. General Electric will supply the turbines.

Developing the domestic supply chain and expertise to get U.S. wind farms up and running is one of the big obstacles ahead. When Dominion Energy in Virginia launched its two-turbine pilot 27 miles off the coast of Virginia Beach, the only boats capable of doing the installation work were in Europe. Because of the project's small scale, it took three rounds of bidding to secure the parts and vessels needed, Dominion senior vice president Mark Mitchell recalled.

A century-old law made the situation even tougher. The Jones Act says only U.S.-built-and-operated ships can move goods between U.S. ports. To install the Virginia turbines, supplies shipped from Europe were first staged in Canada before being ferried on repeated trips to the construction site. The repeated snags prompted Dominion to invest in the ship now being built in Brownsville, Texas. A jack-up vessel, it will be able to put down legs on the seafloor and then use hydraulic power to lift itself above the waves and create a secure working platform. It is expected to be ready in 2024 for Dominion's wind farm expansion.

Even after a wind farm goes online, much can go wrong. That was why Piper and his men headed out last October aboard the Ram XV, a vessel that resembles a giant floating platform with 175-foot vertical legs. Its wind-energy niche is drilling and cabling work, and it was dispatched to the Rhode Island wind farm to help bury transmission cables that had become exposed by shifting sands.

The liftboat left the dock in Dorchester, making its way down the Maurice River, into Delaware Bay and then up the New Jersey Coast before turning east. During the four-month assignment, several major storms hit, at times forcing the crew to shelter in the Block Island harbor, Piper recalled. Temperatures plummeted to minus-10 degrees at one point, freezing the boat's water-making machine. A sewage line had to be thawed with an acetylene torch.

"It was brutal," said David Morgan of Aries Marine, the oil services company that owns the boat. "Very, very difficult job. Right through the worst time of the year." 

Those who oppose wind farms find many reasons to do so. The sight of them can be enough to sour a waterfront homeowner's mood, although the projects in the pipeline are slated for many miles offshore and so turbines will appear tiny, if not invisible, from land.

Environmentalists, who support moving away from fossil fuels to combat climate change, are torn. They worry about risks to birds, fish and marine mammals, particularly the North Atlantic right whale.

Only about 360 of the whales remain, migrating every fall from New England to as far south as Florida. Noise from underwater construction and increased boat traffic is the most serious threat posed by the new crop of wind farms, according to Mark Baumgartner, a marine ecologist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute who uses buoys and underwater gliders to monitor right whale sounds.

"We already have a fairly industrialized ocean, with shipping traffic and fishing activities. Adding these large wind farms with many, many, many turbines is certainly concerning," he noted.

Wind farm developers have pledged to restrict construction for several months each year to avoid disturbing the whales. Vineyard Wind plans to use compressed air to form an underwater curtain of bubbles to try to dampen construction noise. Vessels involved will have spotters scanning for whales and orders to halt work if they appear.

The Biden administration's goals will face the determined resistance of commercial fishermen, whose trawl nets and lobster pots ply the same stretches of ocean as several of the areas designated for future wind farms. This is no small business. New Bedford, Mass., with its scallop industry, has been the most lucrative fishing port in the country for the past two decades, taking in more than $430 million in 2018.

Wind farm prep work has already generated conflicts. Large survey vessels, which have a sled that drags below them with cables and sonar, have repeatedly damaged nets and other equipment as they mapped the ocean floor, according to several commercial fishermen.

In August, a survey boat working for Ørsted was about nine miles southwest of the tip of Long Island, close to where 67-year-old Ace Auteri, had laid out rows of fish pots to catch sea bass. "I'm there and he's trawling, he's dragging his gear literally 50 feet off my line of gear," Auteri recounted recently. "I called him on the radio and I told him, 'Hey, look, you're way too close to my gear here. You're going to get into it.' "

Auteri returned a few days later and found his fish pots gone. Convinced the boat had torn through them, he complained to Ørsted's liaison to the fishing industry but felt he was getting a runaround. He decided not to file a formal claim, though he estimates he lost $10,000 in gear and lost income from the missing traps. "I could see I wasn't going to get paid for it."

An Ørsted spokesman said the company does not comment on such individual situations or claims.

But many commercial fishermen are worried about more than nets and pots. They fear they will lose fishing grounds because it will be dangerous to maneuver among the wind farms, particularly during poor weather and low visibility. When close to turbines, they report persistent problems with their radar navigation systems identifying false objects. They also worry that construction and underwater drilling - and then noises from normal turbine operations - could disturb fish and shellfish populations.

Vincent Carillo, of Montauk, N.Y., who owns a scallop boat called the Nemesis, said that for years he has heard government fisheries regulators talk about the ocean as a public resource.

"And now they just leased it all off to foreign companies," the 55-year-old Carillo said. "I don't understand how they can just lease the bottom out like that when for centuries we have been fishing on those grounds."

Wind farm developers have been negotiating extensively with fishermen, with Ørsted taking hundreds of meetings with them "to understand their concerns and try to adapt to work with their needs," Hardy said.

Vineyard Wind's developers have agreed to pay $37.7 million to commercial fishermen in Massachusetts and Rhode Island to compensate them for future losses. They also reduced the size of the project by 60 percent and agreed to place turbines one nautical mile apart.

"This is an unknown to them," White said of the fishermen. "And we've had them at the table, but there's still a lot of uncertainty."

He expects legal challenges from opponents if the federal permit is approved. Even so, he feels the wind's at his back these days, and the future he has long imagined may finally be on the horizon.

"I think it's coming," White said. "I think it's just about here."