Middletown Combines Two Projects Into One With Single Prime Contractor

Phase II work is under way on the Connecticut Department of Transportation (CTDOT) Arrigoni Bridge project. The $46 million undertaking in Middletown/Portland is the result of a 2010 safety report, which found deficiencies in the structure's two main arch spans. Construction is taking place simultaneously with the Saint John's Square/Main Street intersection operational improvement project in Middletown.

"Both project limits abut each other," said James Vincenzo, CTDOT transportation supervising engineer. "Due to the possibility of conflicting traffic patterns and the need for constant project coordination, it was decided to combine both projects into one contract, in order to have one prime contractor coordinating work on both projects. This reduced the probability of contractual and construction conflicts during construction."

The bridge's two center spans were replaced in 2012, as Phase I of the bridge rehabilitation; a Phase II effort was required to complete remaining rehab work, which included the replacement of the approach deck spans.

"The site required minimal clearing to start construction," said Vincenzo. "Prep work involved clearing and grubbing, setting up of staging areas and access roads and coordination with P&W railroad."

Replacement of the Arrigoni approach spans will be completed in three stages. Traffic is reduced from two lanes in each direction to one lane in each direction during all stages. Work zones will be protected with temporary precast concrete barrier curb. The contractor must complete the three stages within 540 days from the time traffic is first impacted.

Vincenzo noted that cold weather paving and concrete plans are necessary to meet the project specification requirements and aggressive project schedule. Heating may be required to provide a proper concrete curing environment.

Main materials include structural steel (steel plates, sidewalk struts/brackets, span poles, mast arms, etc.), galvanized deformed steel bars, various concrete classes, low permeability concrete, precast sidewalk panels, luminaires, protective fencing, elastomeric cold applied membrane, various pavements (HMA / PMA), traffic signals and equipment, bearings, precast concrete barrier curb, drainage structures and shear connectors.

Stage 1 demolition of the existing deck and parapets has been carried out. Stage 2 and 3 demo remains to be completed. Class S concrete substructure repairs also have been ongoing, which requires the sounding of substructure elements to determine areas of deterioration that require repair.

The earth excavation quantity was estimated at 3,077 cu. yds. There are additional items on the project that include excavation.

Excavation is required for roadway reconstruction, traffic foundation installation, sidewalk installation, curbing installation, drainage structure installation, temporary access road construction, etc. A majority of the project is bridge rehabilitation work, so earthwork tasks are limited.

Temporary precast concrete barrier curbs are anchored to the existing bridge deck in staged construction. Debris shields are installed prior to demolition, along with all safety appurtenances in accordance with OSHA regulations.

During construction, existing pedestrian rail and light standards are removed, followed by barrier curb, sidewalk and sidewalk struts and brackets. The bridge deck can then be sawcut, removed in sections and hauled off. After deck demolition, structural steel repairs are completed, along with deck forming, shear connector installation, rebar installation and low permeability concrete placement.

After proper curing time, cold applied elastomeric concrete membrane is installed followed by pavement courses. Deck replacement must be coordinated with the replacement of the barrier curb, sidewalk and railing installation.

The substructure must be sounded to determine areas of concrete deterioration. Deteriorated areas are removed to sound concrete, and class S concrete repairs are completed. There also are numerous substructure steel repairs being performed in deteriorated sections of substructure components.

Temporary precast concrete barrier curb allows for staged construction to occur in a safe manner. The TPCBC is anchored to the existing bridge deck and separates traffic from the work zone during deck reconstruction.

According to CTDOT, the bridge exemplifies the long-span bridge engineering of the first half of the 20th century. Because of the growing need to provide uninterrupted highway passage over large bodies of water, engineers were called upon to design large cantilevered trusses, suspension bridges and steel arches. Innovative erection methods, the availability of very large structural components and special metals all contributed to the development of long-span bridge technology.

Almost a third of the bridge used high-strength silicon steel, and the structure was almost entirely erected by building the arches outward from the center pier, letting them balance each other as they were extended over the water. Another interesting feature is the use of chains of huge eyebars under the roadway that tie together the ends of each arch. The tied-arch technique resisted the outward horizontal thrust of the arches and allowed the piers to be much smaller and more economical.

As for the St. John's Square and Main Street construction, it involves carrying out the geometric realignment of the intersection to improve safety and operational efficiency.

"The proposed work included the addition of two turn lanes on St. John's square westbound," said Vincenzo. "Widening occurred on the southbound side, in order to incorporate the two new lanes, as well as a proposed median island. In addition, geometric improvements were made to the intersection by way of median islands on Main Street that will serve to normalize the alignment."

Work on the project, which is funded with a combination of federal and state funds, began in February 2020. The anticipated completion date is early 2022. Construction is currently on schedule and within budget.

Mohawk Northeast Inc. serves as the prime contractor on the project. Equipment owned and used on site by Mohawk includes an Aspen A-62 snooper; Cat 330 and Cat M322D excavators; a Cat 938M loader; a Cat 305E mini-excavator; a Schwing S20 concrete pumper truck; Wirtgen W120 CFi and Wirtgen W35 DC millers; and a National Crane Series NBT 30H truck crane.

According to Mohawk Project Manager Tim O'Connell, the project is an ideal fit for his company.

"With over 50 years of bridge construction experience, Mohawk Northeast is ideally suited to complete the Arrigoni Bridge reconstruction project. Having completed numerous projects with similar features, such as a tight schedule, heavy traffic congestion and limited/restricted site conditions, Mohawk has proven itself to be a leader in the industry."

O'Connell added, "We have a strong working relationship with the DOT, and understand what it takes to complete a project of this nature. Many of our workers live in the area and/or travel across this bridge daily. When working on such an iconic bridge so close to home, there is a sense of pride taken in our workmanship. We have the equipment needed to complete the project, along with the experience to give Connecticut a bridge that will last for years to come." CEG

Some key Bridgeport downtown projects moving slowly

Brian Lockhart  BRIDGEPORT — When it comes to economic development, this city has gotten used to waiting to see if plans on paper become real, occupied buildings.

John Guedes, who operates the city-based Primrose Companies architecture and construction, said he has learned to take a believe-it-when-he-sees-it approach to Bridgeport’s economy: “Don’t worry about the ones (plans) that have been approved, worry about the ones that have been started.”

Guedes hoped to be able to open his new 92-unit downtown apartment complex by now. But after an initial groundbreaking at the corner of Congress and Main streets, the site has lain dormant.

He said in an interview this week he expected the foundation will finally be poured this fall, with an opening in late 2021 or in 2022. He blamed the delay on a combination of old construction debris that needed removal and some permitting complications.

“Building in Bridgeport is always a little more difficult,” said Guedes.

This week, staff from the economic development department briefed members of the City Council on the status of several projects, including a few downtown where officials have for years been working to renovate or replace vacant and dilapidated municipally-owned sites on and off Main Street.

The ultimate goal has been to build a larger mix of housing, retail and attractions to bring more life to an area which, particularly now because of the current COVID-19 pandemic, struggles to become and stay a lively and prosperous destination.

Of a trio of pending high-profile proposals Mayor Joe Ganim’s administration has touted over the past few years as key to downtown’s ongoing revival, Guede’s market-rate housing — which will also include 7,000 square feet of ground level retail — is closest to becoming reality.

Guedes did not participate in Tuesday’s council teleconference but economic development staff said at the time that they believed his permitting hold-ups had been concluded as of that very day.

Guedes told The Connecticut Post he expected to be able to “just work right through” the winter: “Unless we get a tremendous amount of snow that holds up everything. ... The quicker we can get the building up and begin occupancy, the better it is from an investment point.”

He noted that there will be even greater demand for the new apartments because the coronavirus health crisis has been driving migration out of New York City into less-densely populated Fairfield County, with Bridgeport offering some of the cheapest rents compared with the southwestern suburbs.

While Guedes’ development is still moving ahead, the news was mixed for two of the Ganim administration's other signature deals that had already been floundering pre-coronavirus.

More than three years after selecting New York-based Exact Capital to renovate the historic but shuttered Majestic and Poli Palace theaters along Main Street and open a hotel and residential towers, that massive undertaking remains stalled.

“It’s pretty much status quo,” William Coleman, deputy director of economic development, told council members Tuesday. “We had meetings with them (Exact) before the (COVID-19) crisis in which they demonstrated they were having progress, not conclusive, but progress. ... He seemed to be talking to the right people about the right sorts of things. He didn’t lock it down and secure the financing before the crisis hit.”

Still, Coleman emphasized, Exact spent money on asbestos removal within the theaters so has made a modest financial commitment.

Exact, which had originally talked of a November 2018 groundbreaking, but missed that December’s initial deadline to come up with $56 million, has repeatedly ignored The Post’s requests for comment, including for this story.

Coleman also advised the council Tuesday that another proposal — a state-of-the-art ice skating facility — was still in the works: “That (development deal) will be coming to you in the first quarter” of 2021.

He offered no further details.

Ganim’s office in September 2018 had announced Guedes’apartment complex simultaneously with the selection of the rinks’ developers, Park City Ice Palace, a new limited liability corporation that involved a professional skater from the Ukraine.

But the skating facility received push-back from some on the council and from the operators of the city-owned, privately managed Wonderland of Ice, who argued more rinks were not needed in Bridgeport and could hurt Wonderland’s business.

“On the skating rinks, I had hope that they would have been able to move forward on it,” Guedes said this week. “For us having another project across the street, moving at the same time, adds value.”

On Thursday Coleman, Economic Development Director Tom Gill and Ganim’s head of communications, Rowena White, through a teleconference, provided more information about the rinks and downtown in general to The Post.

“Those people have hung in,” Gill said of Park City Ice Palace. “We’re working with the same developers. It’s our intent to get a plan to the council early in the spring and see what the council wants to do.”

Park City’s representatives, who met with the City Council in March 2019 to address any concerns and convince critics of their project’s merits, could not be reached for comment.

Gill urged skeptics of downtown’s progress to consider the full picture and how it contrasts to two or three years ago, pointing to completion earlier this year of the long-delayed effort to convert the former Jayson and Newfield buildings into apartments and retail.

“The positive about that is how quickly those apartments are renting up,” Gill said.

And the brewery announced in July 2019 is still moving into those buildings, Coleman added, though under the public health and safety limitations required of the pandemic: “They're looking to open up this spring if not sooner in terms of wholesale. They expect to make the business model work on a delivery basis, even in these challenging times.”

Coleman, Gill and White also cited the several demolitions that occurred in July 2018 and in September and December 2019, resulting in other owners beautifying their now more exposed facades.

“So you can see a very clear and definitive look,” White said. “Before it was old buildings either falling apart or that had graffiti.”

And the vacant land is, temporarily, being spruced up for public use while the city courts other developers.

“While things at times seem like, ‘Oh, Guedes is delayed or this happened,’ when you analyze what’s been done in the two, two-and-a-half years down here, it’s phenomenal,” Gill said.

Jon Lender: Small businessman asks for 2½ more months on New London state pier to save his company and 11 workers’ jobs. So far, he’s been granted 1 month.

Jon Lender  When you’re outgunned, sometimes you make your last stand on high ground. The site of Steven Farrelly’s last stand is 60 feet high — a gigantic mountain of salt, 85,000 tons piled onto the State Pier in New London, scooped by cranes out of ships that floated it all the watery way from Egypt.

Analysts: Lamont, lawmakers face $4.3 billion gap in next two-year Connecticut budget

Keith M. Phaneuf   State officials are facing almost $4.3 billion in red ink in the next two-year budget, due largely to the coronavirus-induced recession, according to a new report Friday from nonpartisan analysts.

Those deficits, while daunting, are significantly less imposing than the massive shortfalls Connecticut faced after the last recession in 2011 — gaps that forced a record-setting tax hike of nearly $1.9 billion nine years ago.

The legislature’s Office of Fiscal Analysis also used its annual Fiscal Accountability Report on Friday to warn that Connecticut’s cash-starved transportation program is on pace to run deficits for four consecutive years and to reach insolvency by 2024.

“The pandemic recession will adversely impact the state budget for years to come,” the nonpartisan analysts wrote in their report, adding that debt service, required contributions to pensions and retiree health care, increased payments owed to hospitals and other fixed costs also are driving the deficit forecasts.

According to OFA, state finances for all programs — unless adjusted — would run nearly $2.1 billion in deficit in the fiscal year that begins next July and $2.2 billion in the hole in 2022-23.

But Gov. Ned Lamont, who must propose his next biennial budget to legislators in February, has nearly $3.1 billion in reserve. And while nonpartisan analysts estimate $854 million of that cushion will be gone by July — to close a deficit in the current budget — that still leaves Lamont more than $2.1 billion to mitigate the red ink to come.

Lamont’s budget agency, the Office of Policy and Management, which is required to submit its own Fiscal Accountability Report, issued very similar projections late Friday afternoon — both about the overall budget deficits and the transportation system’s woes.

In past years, when faced with major deficits, state officials have used reserves — if available — to temporarily replace shrinking tax receipts until the economy improves.

By comparison, Gov. Dannel P. Malloy inherited an empty rainy day fund — and about $1 billion in operating debt — when he took office in January 2011. And Malloy was faced with annual deficits 50% larger than those confronting Lamont — about $3.6 billion per year.

Lamont already has said he is optimistic the next two-year budget can be balanced without any major tax hikes, particularly if President-elect Joe Biden’s new administration and Congress send another round of federal relief to states early in 2021 as promised.

The governor has cautiously guarded the rainy day fund since the pandemic began, resisting appeals from some lawmakers to use more state resources to assist nonprofit social service agencies, nursing homes and municipalities.

Due largely to a surging stock market and expanded federal aid to the unemployed, Connecticut has seen its income and sales tax receipts surge — and its rainy day fund grow — since March, despite having more than 200,000 residents collecting weekly unemployment benefits for much of the summer and fall.

Despite the positive effects of the stock market and federal unemployment aid, the Lamont administration noted in its report, income and sales tax receipts for the current fiscal year, which began July 1, still are running below pre-pandemic levels.

Leaders of the Senate’s Republican minority cited the report Friday while chastising majority Democrats in the legislature for not proposing any spending cuts to mitigate the current deficit.

“It’s alarming that so far this year Democrats have called for more borrowing, abandoning the ‘debt diet,’ and not doing anything on the state budget until April,” Senate Republican Leader-elect Kevin Kelly of Stratford and Sen. Paul Formica of East Lyme, ranking member on the Appropriations Committee, wrote in a statement.

Kelly and Formica also noted Lamont’s proposal for closing the shortfall this fiscal year relies heavily on tapping the rainy day fund, rather than reducing spending. Democrats have countered that health care providers, schools and municipal governments would be harmed by any deep budget-cutting effort amid the coronavirus pandemic.

Transportation fund in trouble

Nonpartisan analysts also warned Friday in their report that the state budget’s Special Transportation Fund — already reeling from two consecutive years of legislators refusing to enact tolls — is set to run out of cash in 2024.

The STF primarily funds Department of Transportation operations, transit programs, and the debt on borrowing used for highway, bridge and rail upgrades.

That borrowing, in turn, leverages about $700 million per year in federal aid for infrastructure work in Connecticut.

But DOT officials say state bond funds and federal aid combined — which have totaled between $1.7 billion and $1.8 billion in recent years — fall $200 million to $300 million shy of the annual level needed to maintain good repair and make strategic improvements.

Lamont pressed lawmakers in 2019 to impose highway tolls on all vehicles, and in 2020 he asked just for fees on large trucks. The legislature, facing a lot of political pushback, acted on neither proposal.

Nonpartisan analysts say the transportation fund, which is supported with a combination of fuel tax revenues, a share of sales tax receipts and other fees, is expected to run a $46 million deficit this fiscal year and shortfalls ranging from $24 million to $65 million over the next three.

By 2024, absent a new source of revenue, those shortfalls will have wiped out the STF’s $122 million reserve and the program would be $21.5 million in debt, according to OFA.

Lamont has said he doesn’t plan to propose tolls when the 2021 legislative session opens in January but will press legislators for new options to preserve the transportation program.

CT’s unemployment trust fund goes broke; employers on hook for millions in federal borrowing

Greg Bordonaro  The state’s unemployment insurance trust fund has gone broke, forcing the state to borrow hundreds of millions of dollars from the federal government to pay jobless claims as the coronavirus pandemic continues to inflict harm on Connecticut’s economy, state officials have confirmed.

That money will eventually have to be repaid by employers, who will face higher unemployment insurance taxes and fees in the years ahead. 

The state’s unemployment insurance trust fund, which typically raises $800 million a year via employer taxes, ran out of money in August, forcing the state to borrow $402 million from the federal government to date, said Michael Lucente, the unemployment claims director of accounts within the state Department of Labor.

That loan has helped pay out jobless benefits in recent months, but there’s only enough money left ‒ $4.2 million ‒ to last the rest of this week. That will force the state to borrow even more from the federal government. 

Connecticut has asked the feds for an additional $150 million in November and $250 million in December, but will only access the money when the trust fund is fully depleted, Lucente said. 

It’s a similar scenario to the one that played out during the Great Recession, when the state borrowed nearly a billion dollars from the federal government to pay jobless benefits. It took seven years to repay that funding.

But the coronavirus pandemic has created even more dislocation from the workforce. 

Since March 13, the state labor department has received 1.1 million state, federal and extended unemployment benefits applications; currently about 188,000 residents are filing for unemployment benefits weekly, DOL said.

That’s led to a huge drain on the unemployment insurance fund, which came into the recession with about a $700 million balance. Since March, the state has disbursed $5.5 billion in state, federal and extended unemployment benefits. 

The federal government has paid for a majority of those claims, but Connecticut has spent nearly $2 billion, DOL said. 

The federally borrowed money will be interest-free through the end of the year. But as of New Year’s Day, any outstanding balance will be subject to an interest rate of about 2.4%, largely because Connecticut failed to have a fully solvent unemployment trust fund in years past.

In fact, according to the federal government’s 2020 Trust Fund Solvency Report, Connecticut has not had a fully solvent unemployment trust fund since 1999, more than 20 years ago.

A ‘killer’ for businesses

The last time Connecticut borrowed money to pay unemployment claims was in 2009, during the Great Recession. The state – or rather Connecticut businesses —  did not pay off that $1.2 billion debt until 2016.

Unemployment trust funds are funded through state unemployment taxes paid by employers and remitted to the federal government, which has a separate trust fund account for each state.

State unemployment taxes are assessed on the first $15,000 of each employee’s salary. The rate is determined by a company’s hiring practices.

The higher a company’s turnover, the higher the company’s unemployment tax.

Earlier this year Lamont signed an executive order so that layoffs tied to the pandemic would not impact a company’s rate. 

In addition, a 6% federal payroll tax, known as the Federal Unemployment Tax Act (FUTA) tax, is levied  on businesses on the first $7,000 of covered workers’ earnings. Employers remit the tax but can claim credits against 5.4 percentage points of FUTA taxes paid in states like Connecticut, effectively shrinking the  FUTA tax rate to 0.6%, or a maximum of $42 per worker.

Lamont could also choose to reduce that credit, just as Connecticut’s government did after it borrowed trust fund money during the last recession.

The interest on that loan was repaid from a special assessment billed to employers, and interest on the new trust fund loan would be paid the same way.

A CT Mirror report was included in this story.