CT Construction Digest Tuesday June 14, 2022
East Hartford Silver Lane corridor redevelopment plans advance
Joseph Villanova
Development along East Hartford's Silver Lane moved forward last week, with town officials making a key approval and setting the date for another.
In a 6-1 vote, the Planning and Zoning Commission approved zoning changes on Wednesday for the 26-acre lot of the old Showcase Cinemas, proposed for construction of a 477-unit apartment complex.
New Britain-based Jasko Development plans to construct “amenity-rich” apartments at the site, with features including a dog park, swimming pool, and clubhouse.
The Town Council authorized the mayor to execute a sale agreement on the Showcase Cinemas property in September 2021, which would see the town sell the property to the developer for $1 after a number of prerequisites were met.
The Town Council approved development and tax agreements for the apartments in February, and officials expect the sale agreement to be finalized next year.
An application for the zoning changes states that the apartments would consist of 477 units spread across eight buildings — two four-story and the rest three-story.
The zoning changes include a master plan for the site and the movement of six parcels within the Showcase Cinemas site from the B-6 business district to a new Planned Development District 1 to facilitate development of the apartments.
The Redevelopment Agency voted unanimously Friday to hold a meeting July 20 to finalize a redevelopment plan for Silver Lane and send it to Town Council for approval.
The plan recommends the town purchase properties and make zoning changes to facilitate development of the Silver Lane Revitalization Area, which runs from Mercer Avenue to Forbes Street.
The plan, generated by consulting firm Goman & York, focuses on specific parcels, including Charter Oak Mall and Silver Lane Plaza, and does not recommend any changes to existing residential zones or properties.
Donald Poland, managing director with Goman & York, said at a meeting May 25 that the firm is confident the primary uses for the corridor will be residential and community-scale retail.
The Planning and Zoning Commission voted unanimously Wednesday to send the plan to the Redevelopment Agency for its approval.
Once the Redevelopment Agency approves the plan, Town Council will consider it for adoption.
The plan’s proposed acquisitions would be aided by a $10 million grant for the town approved by the state Bond Commission on May 26. The town’s grant application states that the funds will be used for the purchase and redevelopment of parcels in the Silver Lane corridor, including Silver Lane Plaza.
Sherman Street bridge in Norwich to close June 27 for reconstruction
Norwich — Construction equipment arrived Monday and a small orange sign warns Norwich motorists that the Sherman Street bridge will close to traffic beginning June 27.
Manafort Bros. Inc. was awarded the contract for the $10.3 million project to replace the aging double bridges over the Yantic River and adjacent former mill canal. The company brought in equipment Monday and placed a sign at the bridge. Equipment is parked in the Upper Falls Heritage Park.
Beginning June 27, the park vehicular entrance will be closed throughout construction, but the park will remain open for pedestrians, with access from a staircase on Sherman Street.
Public Works Director Patrick McLaughlin said the original plan called for reopening the bridge during the winter. But with the project starting about two months later than planned, the bridge might need to be closed and work continue during the winter months.
"Right now, we're saying it's to be closed indefinitely," McLaughlin said. "We have some time to make up to get it done by next fall."
Developer seeks 152-apartment plan for River Road in Shelton
SHELTON — Plans have been filed for construction of a 152-apartment development on River Road.
Developers, listed on the application as KWIZZ, LLC, of Oxford, are seeking a Planned Development District, or PDD, for the nearly 10-acre site listed as 435 River Road. The lot is zoned commercial and was approved for a PDD in the past, but the owners are seeking a new one.
The vacant property is across the street from Cumberland Farms and Hook Line and Sinker as well as the entrance to Jordan Avenue.
The plans are before the Inland Wetlands Commission, with the developer’s presentation beginning last week and continued to the commission’s next meeting.
“You’ve done a very nice job,” said Inland Wetlands Commission Chair Gary Zahornasky about the plans proposed for wetlands mitigation during the June 9 meeting. “You have eliminated a low value wetland and created a nice wetland mitigation area.”
Plans have also been filed with the Planning and Zoning Commission, which earlier this month voted to impose a temporary moratorium on high density developments. The moratorium began June 10, but all applications submitted prior to that date must be heard.
The development calls for the construction of four separate buildings — each with 38 apartments — and a 5,500-square-foot clubhouse. Each of the apartment buildings are proposed to be 11,800 square feet. There are 274 parking spaces proposed.
The property is bounded by residential housing to the north, residential and commercial to the south, commercial to the east and Coram Road to the west. There will be access to the site from River Road as well as from Coram Road, according to the proposed plans.
DOT looks to improve congested Westport intersection
Kayla Mutchler
WESTPORT — There were 29 total crashes at the intersection of routes 57 and 136 within the past three years, according to state collected by the state Department of Transportation.
Of those, about 80 percent were rear ends. Now, the department is looking to make the notoriously congested intersection safer and less confusing with a proposed project near the Merritt Parkway.
Project Engineer Shraddha Joshi said right now there is an uncertainty for drivers as to who has the right of way.
The project is expected to cost $6 million with 80 percent federal funding and 20 percent state funding. There will not be a contribution from the town, according to DOT.
“Efforts to improve the area go back nearly 20 years, with various concepts and proposals being developed, but no satisfactory solutions were ever advanced,” Principal Engineer Marissa Pfaffinger said at a recent meeting on the project.
In 2019, the Western Connecticut Council of Governments on behalf of Westport requested the DOT investigate the intersection, where it re-evaluated older concepts, as well as developed and refined new ones.
The current plan includes replacing the existing flashing beacon with a traffic signal at the main intersection of route 57 and Route 136. There will be an additional traffic signal at the intersection of Wassell Lane and Route 57, using the same controller as Route 57 and Route 136. A green light will only come on for Wassell Lane when there is a vehicle waiting to approach.
“The only change to Wassell Lane properties is that the access point to change is now going to be signalized, but there is no actual property impact,” Joshi said.
According to the public meeting notice, the existing traffic signals at the intersections of Route 57 at the Merritt Parkway northbound and southbound ramps will be replaced because they are beyond their expected service life. The pavement markings will also be revised to provide a longer left turn lane to the Merritt Parkway southbound ramps.
The project includes widening roads at the intersections so there can be 11-foot-wide thru lanes, 10-foot-wide turn lanes and a 5-foot-wide shoulder to accommodate bicycles. The plan also proposes replacing sidewalks and installing pedestrian crossings at all four approaches in the area.
Joshi said that the existing bypass will be removed, and grass will be added. It will also remain within state right of way and the duty maintenance forces will maintain it.
The state will negotiate to acquire the needed right of way property rights.
Construction is expected to be over one season lasting from March to November. The staging and sequencing of the construction will be decided during the design phase in coordination with Westport. Residents who live in the area will be able to get to thier homes throughout the project.
The DOT expects to relocate 11 utility poles and one fire hydrant.
The state also has other possible proposals in their alternative analysis, including roundabouts.
“The roundabout layout that would be necessary in order to accommodate all of the traffic is what we would call a two-by-two roundabout,” Pfaffinger she said, “so two entering lanes on every approach and two circulating lanes.”
However, she said a single-lane roundabout is better for drivers, as it is less confusing than the two-lane option. She also said the roundabouts were not selected as a preferred alternative because it could cause additional impacts on the surrounding properties and backups to the Merritt Parkway with traffic signals.
A comment period is open until June 24. The DOT will then assess the level of support from the community and town. Comments can be sent to DOTProjectPP-158-009@ct.gov.
‘Catastrophic’ Middletown water main break could have been much worse, officials say
MIDDLETOWN — When Downtown Business District Coordinator Sandra Russo Driska first learned of a large water main break Friday night, the busiest dining day of the week, she sprung into action.
The city sent a text to newsletter subscribers around 5:15 p.m., saying service was affected citywide, and urged people not to call 911 as they were already aware of the breach at Main and Court streets.
The city sent a text to newsletter subscribers around 5:15 p.m., saying service was affected citywide, and urged people not to call 911 as they were already aware of the breach at Main and Court streets.
Within minutes, Mayor Ben Florsheim posted on Facebook that there were no health concerns associated with the break. Although initially people were told they may have to boil water, it turned out to be unnecessary.
Without knowing which and how many businesses were directly affected, Russo Driska contacted Water and Sewer Director Joseph Fazzino, and began sending a series of messages to DBD members with updates as she received them. She also used social media.
It turned out that businesses and restaurants south of the rainbow Pride crosswalk at Main Street Market to College Street were affected, while those north of the crosswalk had water restored earlier in the night.
Russo Driska set out on foot to alert business owners, some of whom ran outside.
Fazzino, who said Monday it was a “catastrophic” break, got the call at 4:45 p.m. The pipe had a section missing on the side, he said.
He wasn’t able to determine if it occurred because of age, or a pressure surge — or water hammer.
“It wasn’t a sheer crack,” he said. “The side of the pipe blew out.”
Although it was installed in 1895, the main had undergone cleaning and lining repairs about a decade ago, and new four-way valves were installed at the intersection, Fazzino added.
“It was like new, but you never know what could happen,” he said.
By 6 p.m., all the valves surrounding the intersection had been closed off, he said.
Merchants did have water — but only a trickle, Russo Driska said, including her own home.
“A restaurant can’t function that way,” she said, explaining that eateries had customers already being served or were working on catering jobs.
In all, only six businesses were affected, among them Fiore II, Typhoon, La Boca and Amici Italian Grill, and four had service restored within an hour, Russo Driska said.
“The water department identified the problem, and was able to [contain] it so that everyone else’s pressure rose back up, and their water was back to normal,” Russo Driska said.
“For the few restaurants affected Friday night, it wasn’t bad, then, they repaired it. It was fixed by Saturday morning, which was honestly incredible,” Russo Driska said. “In 14 hours, they had it identified and fixed.”
She added that “it was full business by Saturday night.”
City construction crews had to proceed slowly to avoid worsening the problem, Fazzino said. They toiled throughout the night to get service restored by start of business the next day.
The road was paved as a temporary measure with gravel, and later, two inches of asphalt, the water and sewer director said. Once it settles, crews will return to make it a foot thick.
In December, the American Rescue Plan Act Task Force earmarked $2.7 million to implement much-needed upgrades to the water and sewer systems, which Fazzino said, won’t fully fund the “quite a bit more” that needs to be done.
A large, capital improvement plan study was conducted by a consultant, which examined the area with the most frequency of water breaks, and critical nature of each main, with recommendations on priority areas, the water and sewer director said.
Oak Ridge Drive is one of those, because of multiple breaks in the past, Fazzino said. In the near future, a water main line on Saybrook Road will also be replaced with the money.
The Water Pollution Control Authority, Common Council, and mayor will decide on further infrastructure projects, Fazzino said. To fund that, a referendum for additional money could be put to voters in November or Middletown may apply for a state infrastructure bond, he said.
Russo Driska commended city crews for working diligently to resolve matters “to make sure businesses suffered as little as possible.”
She originally thought the issue could persist throughout the weekend.
“It was so far from that happening,” she said. “For such a big issue on a Friday night, it could not have gone smoother.”
STAMFORD — A planned new K-8 school in the under-served south Stamford area could be housed in two separate buildings about a mile from each other, officials said.
The tentative plan is to use the current KT Murphy Elementary School site for a new building that could either serve students in grade K-4 or 5-8. Another building, the former Rogers Magnet Elementary School at 83 Lockwood Ave., would house whichever of those cohorts doesn’t go to the Murphy site.
Superintendent Tamu Lucero spoke about the plan at a meeting of the city’s Long Term Facilities Committee last week.
She said the students who would attend the proposed split K-8 would come from the current Murphy and Toquam Magnet Elementary School attendance zones.
However, because Toquam is a magnet that takes students from outside of its attendance zone, a decision would have to be made on whether or not to continue the magnet program or turn the south Stamford sites into neighborhood schools.
A school building master plan presented in February called for building or expanding four schools, including a potential new K-8 school in south Stamford. As part of the plan, four schools would shutter: Cloonan and Dolan middle schools, Toquam and Murphy.
Initially, city and school officials had studied Cove Island Park as the potential home for a south Stamford school, but that plan was quickly abandoned after swift opposition from local residents and the Audubon Society, all of which sought to maintain the park. Cummings Park and Czescik Park were also eliminated as possibilities.
“We were unsuccessful with finding a location for (a full K-8 facility) in the South End,” said Lucero during the meeting.
The Lockwood facility was not considered at first because school administrators said they had hoped to convert that space into a pre-school facility to house about 675 students, a project that would cost roughly $51.7 million. They submitted that proposal to the state and were told the state would reimburse 20 percent of the cost.
But officials withdrew the project once it became clear that federal dollars would not be available to help fund it, said Lauren Meyer, spokesperson for the office of Mayor Caroline Simmons.
Currently, the 100,000-square-foot building at 83 Lockwood Ave. houses the Children’s Learning Centers of Fairfield County pre-school program and the nonprofit Domus Kids, which runs a number of programs inside the structure.
The desire to bring a neighborhood school to south Stamford is nothing new. In many of the city’s poorest neighborhoods, students are mostly bused to other schools in the district.
Lucero said representatives from architecture and design firm SLAM Collaborative are conducting tests on both the Lockwood and Murphy campuses to determine whether or not the city will be able to build a K-4 on one campus and a 5-8 on the other.
She said the change in grade at the Murphy site in particular was viewed as a plus by the contractor, as it would allow them to fit more into the potential new building.
“We think we are going to be in a good place,” Lucero said.
If approved, the city would be eligible for a reimbursement rate of 60 percent for the two projects. Previously, Stamford received a 20 percent refund for school construction projects, but that was changed through special legislation on the state level.
Lucero said the city could receive an 80 percent refund from the state if the district decided to make the new south side educational facilities inter-district magnet schools. That means 25 percent of the classroom seats would have to go to students outside of Stamford.
But at the June 8 meeting, she said staying a fully Stamford school would make more sense.
“It really doesn’t make any financial sense to give up 25 percent of our seats,” she said.
If officials agree to split a new K-8 between the Murphy and Lockwood sites, grant applications for each would needed to be submitted to the state by June 2023.
High pay attracts workers, but construction’s employment gap widens
Rising hourly wages brought more workers to construction in May, but the industry still posted a record number of job openings to start the month, according to analysis by the Associated General Contractors of America.
About 36,000 new employees donned hard hats and reported for work on jobsites in May, according to BLS data, but that didn’t come close to filling the 494,000 construction job openings at the end of April, a 40% increase from the number of openings in April 2021.
The increase in openings represented the largest total since recording of it began in 2000, according to AGC Chief Economist Ken Simonson.
For hourly workers in the trades, pay rose in May by 6.3% year over year, the highest increase since December 1982, according to Simonson. As those wages increased though, earnings in the overall private sector rose 6.5%. The slightly higher increase for all workers only steepens the uphill battle contractors must climb to find workers.
In addition, the number of unemployed construction workers fell by 39% to 392,000. That could indicate fewer experienced jobseekers remain for builders to hire, Simonson said.
“I think the implications are that contractors would have hired far more workers in April — perhaps twice as many — as they were able to,” Simonson told Construction Dive. “The same patterns of record or near-record openings and of openings exceeding monthly hires has prevailed for the past several months but never or seldom had happened before. This indicates construction employment is being held down not by lack of demand but lack of supply of qualified and willing candidates.”
For better or worse, Simonson said the solution to labor woes is pretty simple.
“For contractors to get more workers on board, I think they’ll have to raise pay even more,” he said.
Since construction employers cannot offer the flexible hours or remote work other industries have adopted, contractors will have to pay a higher premium, Simonson said, to attract workers to their jobs that often entail working outdoors doing physically demanding tasks in various weather conditions.
Even turning to modular or offsite construction won’t solve the problem, Simonson pointed out, as that still requires workers skilled in the trades. At a time when other issues plague the industry, the labor shortage seems set to continue for the foreseeable future.
“I expect workforce challenges to outlast materials cost or supply chain issues,” Simonson said.
Why Amazon’s warehouse pullback is good news for contractors
A slowdown by Amazon is a boon for others in the warehouse sector, especially for procurement of materials, according to industry sources.
Last month, Amazon announced plans to shed at least 10 million square feet of warehouse space after reporting slow growth and a weak profit outlook that it attributed to overbuilding, according to Bloomberg.
As the e-commerce giant hits the brakes on expansion, that should translate to shorter lead times for currently scarce materials such as roofing components, roofing insulation, bar joists, precast and steel, said Tom Belanich, industrial director at Messer Construction, a Cincinnati-based general contractor. Other materials that might become more available include warehouse dock equipment, HVAC equipment and electrical equipment, said Belanich.
“When Amazon was ramping up, extremely active and building new facilities, the lead times for those materials began to stretch further and further out,” said Belanich. “Then, obviously, the demand for those went up significantly, which caused the price to go up.”
Now, Amazon hitting the pause button on its warehouses should have the opposite effect.
“When you reduce the demand for those things, certainly it’s going to improve the lead time and we should start to see some easing of the cost implications for those materials also,” Belanich said.
‘Fighting over Amazon’s bucket’
Charles Byerly, CEO Of Westport Properties, an Irvine, California-based owner and operator of self storage, multifamily and industrial properties across the U.S., said the slowdown by Amazon will undoubtedly free materials up for other new development.
“When you look at roof trusses as an example, those have been six to 12 to 18 months [out], depending on exactly what they are,” said Byerly, and noted that Amazon’s slowdown “is certainly going to put priorities in different buckets other than just Amazon’s, because everybody was fighting for that bucket.”
Amazon went on a massive spending splurge during the pandemic in order to capitalize on booming demand for e-commerce and home delivery. In some cases, Amazon bought everything in production for months, putting significant pressure on an already strained supply chain. That was further exacerbated when contractors turned to hoarding materials earlier this year.
Amazon was the largest builder of warehouses over the last three years, totaling $10 billion, or about 6% of the total construction activity, according to Dodge Data & Analytics.
But including projects built specifically for Amazon by developers like NorthPoint Development and others, Amazon’s market share jumps to around 13%, said Dodge Chief Economist Richard Branch during a construction outlook webinar.
Amazon is “such a large player in this market that if they start pulling back on construction activity, it will pull the market down with them,” Branch said, referring to overall warehouse starts. While that means the warehouse sector could slow as well, a pullback is welcome in other ways.
That’s because an Amazon slowdown has positives beyond just material availability, said Bob Smietana, vice chairman and CEO of HSA Commercial Real Estate, a Chicago-based national full-service commercial real estate firm. The land market should ease as well.
“With one of the big players in space allocation for distribution real estate in the U.S. slowing down, for some of us that’s actually good news,” said Smietana. “It’s going to eliminate some additional competition.”
A booming sector
Even if warehouse starts slow as a result, there’s still plenty of work to go around.
For example, Brian Sudduth, president of Miller Construction Co., a Fort Lauderdale, Florida-based general contractor, said there is still enough demand in Florida and that the projected Amazon pullback hasn’t affected its outlook. In fact, Miller’s warehouse backlog in 2023 is greater than what it had coming into this year.
“I don’t see [a slowdown] here in central South Florida,” said Sudduth. “When you add in all the other industrial developments that have happened throughout the state, it hasn’t resulted in a slowdown.”
Prologis, a San-Francisco-based REIT that invests in warehouses, also still sees room to grow in warehouse development. Non-Amazon customers in the first quarter of 2022 accounted for 85% of new e-commerce leases, up from 66% in 2020, according to a Prologis report.
At the same time, commercial real estate consultancy CBRE forecasts 850 million square feet of leasing in 2022, down from the record of 1 billion square feet in 2021.
But if that projection becomes reality, it would still be the second-highest leasing year on record.
Similarly, Smietana said HSA Commercial’s outlook on the sector remains strong.
“In the markets that we’re in, we’re still seeing projects going forward and spaces getting leased,” said Smietana. “Maybe that ends up being reduced a little bit, but we’re still embarking on new projects.”