Middletown garage to add 600 more spaces to accommodate increased development downtown

Cassandra Day

MIDDLETOWN — If all goes well, city officials are hoping to break ground on a sorely needed, multilevel municipal parking garage downtown sometime this spring.

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The arcade behind Middletown Superior Court on Court Street was demolished in 2018 due to safety-related issues stemming from conditions of the nearly 50-year-old structure. The majority of the garage’s lower level was closed in December 2013.

City officials have been meeting with stakeholders on a weekly basis to discuss the matter, Mayor Ben Florsheim said. 

“The real hope is not just to construct a parking garage, it is to provide parking that is already needed downtown to meet the needs we’re already struggling with, which remains as challenging as ever,” he pointed out.

The delay in announcing the developer selected for the garage project mostly is due to staffing challenges in the office of Economic and Community Development, as well as behind-the-scenes activity, including negotiations, design plans and paperwork, he added.

“We are very engaged with the developer. We are very pleased with the way these conversations have been going for the past couple months,” Florsheim explained.

The plan is to “zero-in on the scope of work,” he added, which includes a memorandum of understanding put in place a couple of weeks ago.

“What we’re working on now is a more formal development agreement that will stipulate things like who is going to be managing the parking; how many spaces are being dedicated to the public” — a multistep process, the mayor noted.

The first phase will involve environmental assessments, such as having brownfields consultants conduct soil testing to determine how far underground garage levels could be built.

The hope is to create 600 more spaces, a number of which will be reserved for tenants of several new apartment projects, the mayor explained. 

The biggest development is the Village at Riverside proposed by Spectra Construction & Development Corp. It calls for 277 market-rate apartments and townhomes on a 228,000-square-foot lot behind the police station, bordered by deKoven and Dingwall drives, close to where the arcade would be built.

While a portion of the 600 spots won’t be available to the public, Florsheim noted, the “bulk of it will be."

“If we can get a few hundred spaces underneath, that will allow us to move forward with a site plan that puts parking first chronologically, so we can get that underway as quickly as possible to meet that existing, outstanding need,” he explained.

It would involve building parking above ground “as we work our way through the rest of the project, without having to compromise the vision for things like connection to the riverfront; potential new public space in that area by creating big surface lot-type parking,” the mayor noted.

Adequate spaces for new residents to leave their cars overnight downtown will become all the more important when other Main Street housing projects are completed over the next few years.

These call for nearly 350 housing units to be built on and around Main Street.

Ongoing construction includes 10 units in the top two stories of 418-22 Main St., where, on the ground floor, the original Amato’s Toy & Hobby was located in the 1970s, as well as Vinnie’s Jump & Jive dance hall.

At the former Schlein’s Furniture building at 584 Main St., 12 market-rate apartments are being proposed.

Another project underway to construct 48 flats is being proposed for 339 Main St., in the upper levels of the former Bob’s Surplus store.

In the future, City Hall may be relocated, an idea first raised by Florsheim in 2020. The structure is close to “the end of its useful life,” he said at the time.

“That is many years away at this point, but, if we were to do that, we would most likely look at a parking solution to go along with that,” he said Monday.

Now, some city employees leave their vehicles at the courthouse garage, while others use Melilli Plaza and the area surrounding City Hall.

Most of the Mellili lot traffic occurs in the evenings, when municipal workers have gone home for the day, Florsheim said, so that arrangement has worked out well: “We don’t have much of a bottleneck being caused by that issue.”

However, police store various vehicles near the former arcade lot in the back of the 222 Main St. station, which dips significantly into the amount of available parking, the mayor said.

“We are thinking about getting more creative or efficient with how we handle that side of things to free up those spaces for people to use,” he said.

Toward that end, the city is also looking at creating small surface lots, including at 7 and 31 Rapallo Ave. in the North End, as well as talking to property owners in that area to possibly free up some more spaces —at least for the short term, Florsheim said. 

Once the city’s master plan for redevelopment gets underway, there are plans for more public parking infrastructure projects along River Road and elsewhere. 

“This will also be something that can hopefully serve the riverfront project well, because it will be very close to a future pedestrian overpass (intended to move foot traffic over Route 9),” Florsheim explained.

Future parking demands are also being taken into consideration for the master plan, the mayor added. “This arcade project is going to be tightly integrated with whatever the future Department of Transportation plan with the city is on both the location and design of that plaza.

“We have to think about what this is going to look like in 2025, 6, 7; 2030. That’s how we’re trying to plan it,” Florsheim added.

Solving parking woes will also be beneficial to attracting people outside the area to frequent shops, restaurants, offices and myriad other places downtown. 

These plans will “go a long way toward making it much more easy and much more predictable if you’re coming into downtown Middletown. If you’re coming down on a typical weekend night or one of the big events that we are trying to do regularly, we want this to make your life a little bit easier,” Florsheim said.

Groundbreaking held for Great Wolf Lodge at Foxwoods

Brian Hallenbeck

Mashantucket ― By mid-2025, the Mashantucket Pequot-owned Foxwoods Resort Casino, the largest facility of its kind in North America, figures to add another size-based superlative to its collection.

Try “biggest next-door attraction.”

Joined by Gov. Ned Lamont, Mashantucket tribal leaders, Foxwoods officials and local dignitaries, Great Wolf Resorts executives officially broke ground Wednesday for the $300 million indoor water park resort that’s about to rise adjacent to Foxwoods on 13 acres of Mashantucket-owned land off Foxwoods Boulevard.

Might Great Wolf Lodge at Mashantucket siphon off some of Foxwoods’ patrons? Won’t the water park resort’s 549 hotel rooms ― the smallest of which will sleep six ― divert some guests from Foxwood’s nearly 2,000 rooms?

“We’ll complement each other,” Jason Guyot, Foxwoods’ president and chief executive officer, said. “Some of their guests are going to visit Foxwoods, and some of our guests are going to visit Great Wolf. I don’t see the inventory of rooms as a problem.”

“This is going to be something unique in the United States,” he said.

With Foxwoods having recently reconfigured 275,000 square feet of meeting space, the Foxwoods-Great Wolf complex promises to become a “home base” for many a corporate gathering, Guyot added.

Lamont thanked Chicago-based Great Wolf for showing “confidence in the state of Connecticut,” citing the 450 construction jobs tied to the project as well as the 500 permanent part- and full-time positions the water park resort will provide when it opens. The new jobs will range from senior management, engineering staff and IT professionals to lifeguards, guest service agents and housekeepers.

“And it’s going to be fun,” Lamont said, addressing a standing-room-only audience packed inside a heated tent erected on the construction site.

“Foxwoods and now Great Wolf ― this is becoming a destination,” the governor said. “This is where people want to be, not just overnight, not just for a show, but for a week and for a family.”

State Sen. Cathy Osten, D-Sprague, state Rep. Kevin Ryan, D-Montville, and Tony Sheridan, president and CEO of the Chamber of Commerce of Eastern Connecticut, were among the audience members.

John Murphy, Chicago-based Great Wolf’s CEO, said the water park developer’s resorts “offer a fun-filled getaway that is close, convenient and carefree, and with this new resort we will be able to provide our beloved signature experience to more families across the Northeast.”

Murphy summoned Mashantucket Chairman Rodney Butler to the podium and announced Great Wolf, in conjunction with its financial backers, Blackstone and Centerbridge Partners, was making a $25,000 donation to the Mashantucket Pequot Museum and Research Center in support of the museum’s efforts “to preserve the history and traditions of the Pequot people.”

Butler presented Murphy with a wampum necklace.

Great Wolf Lodge at Mashantucket will be Great Wolf’s 23rd North American resort and one of four under construction, the others being in Perryville, Md., near Baltimore; in Webster, Texas, outside Houston; and in Naples, Fla.

In addition, Great Wolf is expanding its resort in Scotrun, Pa., in the Pocono Mountains, adding 200 rooms to an existing hotel and expanding the water park by 40,000 square feet, according to Jason Lasecki, Great Wolf’s vice president of corporate communications.

When the resorts under construction are completed, 93% of the U.S. population will live within a five-hour drive of a Great Wolf resort, Lasecki said. Besides Mashantucket, the only one in New England is located in Fitchburg, Mass.

Butler recalled that his tribe first engaged with Great Wolf nearly two decades ago when the company was operating just four or five resorts. In 2007, the partners pursued plans to develop an indoor water park resort on tribe-owned, nonreservation land along Route 214 in Ledyard, securing town approval of a zone change for the project.

“Then 2008 happened,” Butler said, referring to the Great Recession.

The parties resumed talks in earnest in 2020 after Steve Jacobsen, Great Wolf’s vice president for domestic development, emailed Butler “on a cold, winter COVID day about a month into the pandemic.” Butler said.

Jacobsen said Great Wolf maintained its interest in Mashantucket because of the overall strength of the Northeast market, its proximity to population centers in Hartford, Providence and New York City and the presence of Foxwoods.

The main features of the resort will be a 91,000-square-foot indoor water park heated to 84 degrees, with a variety of body slides, tube slides, raft rides, activity pools and splash areas, and a 61,000-square-foot family entertainment center known as the Great Wolf Adventure Park, which will include MagiQuest, a live-action game.

Hotel-room options will include suites with multiple bedrooms for large families or multi-generational groups. Admission to the water park and family entertainment activities will be included in the price of a stay.

Great Wolf also released video of the ceremony, renderings and other details about the project which can be found here.

State plan for Seaside: Demolish buildings, spend $7.1 million on “passive park”

Erica Moser

Waterford ― A plan for Seaside State Park will include “the removal of the deteriorated buildings,” the Connecticut Department of Energy and Environmental Protection said Wednesday in its announcement that the state has committed $7.1 million to implement a “passive park” design using federal American Rescue Plan Act dollars.

The plan will also include new restrooms and walking trails, picnic areas, improvements to the shoreline, parking upgrades and historic interpretation of the property, according to a news release from DEEP. Deputy Commissioner Mason Trumble said the passive park option does not include any options for private development.

The former sanatorium has sat in disrepair for years.

Trumble said there’s “not a specific timeline” for the demolition of the buildings. Seaside, designed by the famous architect Cass Gilbert, was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1995. Being listed on the register does not prevent a property owner from altering a property.

A Friends of Seaside Park newsletter last year said the state unfortunately decided the the Infirmary Building and Nurses’ Residence must come down, Day columnist David Collins reported in November.

DEEP said at the time, “Demolition of the buildings is one of the options being considered for the park, but the final plan will be dependent on funding levels.”

Asked Wednesday why the buildings couldn’t be preserved, Trumble said DEEP explored a few options ― passive park, ecological park or destination park ― in its planning several years ago, but “really at the end of the day it came down to feasibility related to funding.” Now, Trumble said he is excited at the opportunity to protect a gorgeous site and increase access to Long Island Sound.

DEEP will convene a working group in the coming months to start planning for the park design, with input from the public.

Seaside first served as a facility for children with tuberculosis and lastly a center for the developmentally disabled before closing in 1996. Developer Mark Steiner spent years trying to build on the property, but former Gov. Dannel P. Malloy terminated his contract in 2014 and designated Seaside a state park.

The decision to demolish the buildings “literally comes as a 180-degree turn, and there’s really nothing factually to support it,” Steiner said Wednesday. He added, “The buildings are deteriorating because they let them deteriorate.”

After the state park designation, DEEP began a planning process over several years, and the agency put out a request for proposals for its vision of a hotel, waterfront enhancements, and the restoration of existing buildings.

But the state concluded the RFP process with no award, and Seaside has remained a state park open for passive activities such as walking, fishing and birdwatching.

“This is Connecticut’s first new shoreline state park in over 50 years, and we are thrilled to be able to engage in the work, laid out in the Comprehensive Plan, of a passive state park design at this beautiful location,” DEEP Commissioner Katie Dykes said in the news release.

She added that DEEP looks forward to working with local officials, the Friends of Seaside State Park and historic preservation advocates to best “honor the memory of these historic buildings” in the park design.

“We are looking forward to collaborating with DEEP on the redesign of the park and enhancing its natural habitat so that this unique coastal property can be appreciated and enjoyed by all,” Friends of Seaside State Park President Helen Post Curry, the great-granddaughter of Gilbert, said in the news release.

“The Town of Waterford appreciates the significant first step by the state to transform Seaside into a resource which will allow the citizens of Connecticut to once again safely enjoy this great coastal asset,” Waterford First Selectman Rob Brule said.

Rep. Kathleen McCarty, R-Waterford, said she is gratified Seaside is receiving funding from DEEP to move forward on plans for a passive state park, saying Seaside “must be maintained and preserved for future generations to enjoy.”

In 2021, former Sen. Paul Formica, R-East Lyme, introduced a bill to require the state “to develop and issue a request for proposals to develop or dispose of the former Seaside Sanatorium facility in the town of Waterford and to preserve the adjacent area for a park with public access.” The bill didn’t come up for a vote in the House or Senate.

The $7.1 million is part of $21.5 million in ARPA funds that Gov. Ned Lamont and the legislature authorized for infrastructure improvements at state parks, as part of the $51.5 million Restore CT State Parks initiative. The other $30 million is bonded.

Inflation is pushing wages higher

Robyn Griggs Lawrence

As inflationary pressures and a continuing labor shortage push construction wages to record levels, contractors are looking beyond monetary reimbursement to attract and keep talent.

Contractors are reviewing their budgets to find creative ways and additional financial incentives to retain workers in today’s inflationary environment, said Misha Nikulin, managing director at Deloitte’s engineering and construction practice.

Average hourly earnings for construction workers climbed 6.1% from December 2021 to December 2022, exceeding the 5% rise in average pay for all private sector production workers, according to Associated General Contractors of America’s 2023 Construction Hiring & Business Outlook.

Even though 72% of contractors increased base pay rates and about a third boosted bonuses and benefits in 2022, 80% reported having a hard time filling positions, the report found. The survey gathered data from more than 1,000 construction firms.

But workers care about more than just a good salary.

“Employees are expecting a competitive and well-rounded employee value proposition that supports them at every stage of their career,” said Alison Tripp, national recruiting leader for Redwood, California-based commercial general contractor DPR.

The problem: Labor shortage inflates wages

The construction industry’s long and well-documented struggle to find workers shows no signs of slowing down and is widely believed to have become endemic. Workforce shortages, which make projects take longer and cost more, will likely intensify, according to AGC, with 69% of contractors expecting to need more workers in 2023.  

“Construction was dealing with a labor shortage before the pandemic caused widespread labor shortages that have impacted all industries,” said Associated Builders and Contractors Economist Zachary Fritz. “Now there’s more demand for workers, and that made the construction industry’s shortage even worse.”

On average, 4.8% of construction jobs were unfilled through the first 11 months of 2022 — the highest on record, Fritz said. In March 2022, 3.3% of construction workers quit their jobs — again, the highest number ever. And people aren’t staying in the same sector when they leave their jobs.

“Contractors are now competing not only with other contractors, but also with Amazon and the distribution segment and potentially jobs that offer remote work,” Fritz said. “So, that’s pushed wages up, and they’ve particularly accelerated over the past year. Construction wages have increased faster than overall wages in 10 of the past 12 months and increased at a faster rate than overall monthly inflation in each of the past six months.”

Construction companies have always had to pay a premium to attract workers who are willing to work outdoors in the elements and have limited flexibility to come and go from jobsites, said Ken Simonson, chief economist for AGC. That premium averaged 21.5% from 2000 to 2019, but this year — despite wage increases — it has dropped to 18%.

“Construction firms are going to have to raise pay even more steeply relative to other businesses in order to get back to that historic premium or go above it,” Simonson said. 

Additionally, contractors will have to find ways to reduce the number of workers on site, or the skill level of their workers, and they will have to pay more overtime for existing workers to stick to timelines.

Potential solutions: Culture, benefits and owner negotiations

Unable to compete on salary alone, contractors are proactively working to make construction more attractive and competitive with other industries.

After surveying and conversing with craft employees to determine their needs, DPR addressed employment issues with a new suite of benefits focused on developing long-term career paths for craft workers. That included utilizing dedicated employee coaches and Culture Con events in which employees have direct dialogue with leadership. DPR also restructured its paid time off to offer every administrative employee four weeks of PTO.

“Our benefits program helps employees prioritize health and wellbeing and provides resources to plan for the future,” Tripp said.

Firms are also focusing on workers’ mental health, work-life balance and opportunities to engage in meaningful work, said Greg Sizemore, ABC’s vice president of health, safety, environment and workforce development. More and more construction companies are moving toward creating employee-owned organizations.

Contractors may need to promise full-time employment rather than contract work and offer higher per-diems for workers who travel to jobsites, said Portland, Oregon-based Eric Grasberger, construction and design group chair for national law firm Stoel Rives. They also need to consider schedule and contract revisions with owners.

Owners’ single focus on completing projects on time gives contractors leverage in asking for incentives to pay for rising labor costs, Grasberger said. Contractors are increasingly asking for contingency funds they can tap or price-adjustment clauses to cover higher labor costs.

“Fixed bids are expected to be impacted the most by increased wages and inflation,” said Deloitte’s Nikulin. “Therefore, the contracting models and financing arrangements are being actively revised to reduce the negative impacts.”