CT Construction Digest Wednesday September 4, 2024
Wetlands applications submitted for massive Amazon warehouse proposal in Waterbury and Naugatuck
Following a lengthy due diligence review, Pennsylvania-based industrial real estate developer Bluewater Property Group is pushing ahead with plans for a massive robotic-assisted Amazon warehouse on a 183-acre site straddling Waterbury and Naugatuck.
A limited liability company associated with Bluewater last week submitted wetlands applications for a multi-story warehouse building with a 652,400-square-foot footprint, 59 loading docks, 542 trailer locations and parking for 1,040 cars and six motorcycles.
“I think it’s a signal it’s still moving forward,” Waterbury Town Planner Robert Nerney said of the applications and the development.
The wetlands applications are scheduled to be formally accepted for review by wetlands boards in Waterbury and Naugatuck this week, but these initial submissions are unlikely to spark much discussion or meet with approvals during the wetlands meetings in both communities this week.
The applications are clear indicators that Bluewater has opted to push forward with development following a lengthy review. Waterbury owns roughly 150 acres of the development site and several development concepts introduced in recent decades have failed to materialize.
Bluewater introduced its warehouse concept in 2022, saying the building would contain up to 3 million square feet of floor space and employ up to 1,000 people. The City of Waterbury signed off on increasing building heights to a maximum of 130 feet to accommodate the project.
The original $2.5 million purchase agreement between Waterbury, Naugatuck and Bluewater required the developer to complete due diligence by last November. That deadline was extended by a year. Now, Bluewater is on a deadline to give notice of its intent to purchase the site in November and to complete the purchase in December.
An attempt to reach a Bluewater representative was not immediately successful Tuesday morning.
Waterbury Development Corp. Executive Director Thomas Hyde said the developer has clearly put a lot of effort into avoiding impacts to wetlands. Hyde said Bluewater is also working with the city to arrange additional public information sessions.
Afire-scarred and polluted 1.6-acre site along busy Route 10 in Southington resisted development for decades but has recently transformed into two retail buildings hosting an eye doctor, jewelry store, cookie maker and more.
While not a huge project, the nearly $5 million North Main Street redevelopment is significant because it’s an example of the broader steps the state has taken in recent years to encourage and invest in brownfield redevelopment.
That includes state lawmakers’ 2017 passage of legislation that allows for the creation of brownfield land banks, which can take possession of polluted sites — and the accompanying liability for their environmental waste — and work to clean them up to a point developers are willing to take them on.
So far, three brownfield land banks have formed in the state, according to the Department of Economic and Community Development.
The Southington property was the first acquired by the Connecticut Brownfield Land Bank Inc., which is managed by staff at the Naugatuck Valley Council of Governments.
The property has since been redeveloped by Southington-based Lovley Development into two retail buildings.
One of the buildings — a 7,120-square-foot retail property at 318 North Main St. — recently sold to Dr. Farid Shafik for $1.6 million. Shafik will move his ophthalmology practice to the building, which has three retail bays.
Mark Lovley, head of Lovley Development, said he’s retaining ownership of the other 7,860-square-foot building at 316 North Main St., which hosts a day care, two medical spas and a nonprofit educational office.
Lovley, who received a 10-year tax abatement to make the project pencil out, was the only one to respond nearly a decade ago to a town RFP seeking a development partner for the polluted site.
Lovley said construction cost $3.5 million, not including environmental remediation.
The roughly $1.3 million cleanup began in 2022. Building construction launched last year. Tenant fit outs are nearly complete. Lovley expects to have the final fit out — for cookie and ice cream shop Cookie Ranger — completed by the end of September.
“It was eight years of my life,” Lovley said of the redevelopment effort. “There was a lot of work involved. It had been a blighted site for more than 20 years. It’s nice to see it cleaned up. I’ve received a lot of positive feedback.”
A complex history
The North Main Street property has a long history of manufacturing use, which contributed to it becoming a brownfield site.
The Aetna Match Co. manufactured at the property during the late 1800s, according to an environmental assessment by consultant Arcadis. From 1900 through 1989, manufacturer Beaton & Corbin used the property to make ceiling and floor plates, as well as plumbing fixtures and fittings.
Metal hydroxide plating sludge, plating waste, machine oils and degreasing agents were disposed of in two lagoons. Storage tanks held oil, gas, liquid waste and raw chemicals. Concrete pits were used as settling basins for wastewater treatment that ultimately discharged into the nearby Quinnipiac River.
In 2003, a fire at the abandoned site destroyed a 25,000-square-foot building, leaving behind three dilapidated sheds, a concrete bunker with a 10,000-gallon fuel oil tank, other tanks and a boiler room.
Pullman & Comley attorney Gary O’Connor, who worked with the Connecticut Brownfield Land Bank, said the site threw a few curveballs.
Southington enlisted Lovley before the property was in the hands of a land bank. That meant complex three-party agreements spelling out responsibilities, O’Connor noted. There was also a lack of land records documenting the property transfer from Aetna to Beaton & Corbin, which had to be sorted out in court.
And, the pandemic hit just as the town filed to foreclose on the property, resulting in further delay as the state shut down courtrooms and imposed a foreclosure moratorium.
“This property, although it’s not huge, it was like a law school exam,” O’Connor said. “We had to correct the liens. We had to correct the defects in title.”
Naugatuck Valley Council of Governments Executive Director Rick Dunne said his organization provided a $400,000 no-interest loan toward the cleanup. The state chipped in a roughly $600,000 brownfield remediation grant.
The land bank oversaw the cleanup and, once cleared through the state process, transferred the property to Lovley, Dunne said.
“It allows a developer to build on a contaminated site that had remained abandoned for years and probably would have been abandoned forever without this program,” Dunne said.
Southington Economic Development Director Louis A. Perillo III said the town was able to secure another $200,000 state environmental cleanup grant after a cesspool was discovered.
The project creates jobs and eliminates a long-standing eyesore, Perillo noted. It also eliminates potential pollution into the nearby Quinnipiac River, he said.
“We’ve been trying as a town to clean up that site for 30 years,” Perillo said. “Having it cleaned up was very important to our community.”
Another CT utility project sparks controversy in Fairfield after Eversource clears vegetation
FAIRFIELD — Residents are speaking out against an Eversource project that reportedly caused the cutting of trees in town.
The Connecticut Siting Council, which regulates utility projects, asked Eversource last month to address reports of trees and vegetation it cleared in Greenfield Hill for a project to build taller poles along more than nine miles of transmission lines from Weston to Bridgeport.
The utility work resembles United Illuminating's proposal to erect taller monopoles along the railroad tracks between Fairfield and downtown Bridgeport, but, unlike that saga, Eversource's construction had received little to no formal pushback until recently.
"We're asking for discretion," said Lindsay Hersh Autz, who lives on Lampwick Lane. "We're asking for (Eversource) to use a reasonable standard and not just indiscriminately remove all vegetation within (its) entire right of way. That's just excessive... It's inconsiderate of our whole community."
Hersh Autz said Eversource hired workers to cut down tree branches in her yard that were hanging in the right of way, as well as small trees, shrubs, bushes, climbing plants and weeds between her property and the transmission line poles behind it.Top of Form
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Neighbors said Eversource has told them the company plans to clear vegetation within a 25-foot radius from the base of the lines, but they questioned the threat the greenery poses to the wires above. Hersh Autz emailed a complaint to the Siting Council earlier this month in hopes of striking some solution to what she described as "unchecked power" Eversource has in Connecticut.
While it's unclear what action the Siting Council can take, other locals, including Anne-Marie and Carl Preller, said they too have lost vegetation on their own property in the form of three 20-year-old trees screening their home from the transmission line corridor.
Fairfield residents said Eversource committed to replace some of the vegetation it's removed, including the Prellers' trees, but neighbors said some damage is "irreparable" for the time being.
"You can drive bulldozers over a wetland right next door to the town reservoir," Carl Preller said, nodding to the Hemlock Reservoir on the other side of Black Rock Turnpike. "I don't understand that."
Utility companies' legal power has been a matter of public debate since UI's proposal in Fairfield and Bridgeport set off a groundswell of public opposition last year due to private property access and potential damage to the local environment, economy and skyline.
Roughly three months after the Siting Council approved the project, albeit a revised version affecting a new swath of properties that never had the chance to intervene in the process, state lawmakers passed legislation reforming the council's proceedings that weigh project applications.
Until recently, the same outcry had been absent from Eversource's work further north.
Siting Council Executive Director Melanie Bachman notified Fairfield, Bridgeport, Easton and Weston about the Eversource petition to rebuild the poles in November 2022 and offered them the chance to return questions or comments. Fairfield returned none, according to a newsletter released by the Office of the First Selectman earlier this year.
The council approved the project about three months later. Eversource officials said consumers would bear 100 percent of project's costs, which it estimated would total about $124.29 million, according to a copy of questions and answers between the company and Siting Council last year. Eversource states that its consumers would absorb over 19 percent of the costs, other Connecticut consumers would bear nearly 6 percent and consumers through the rest of New England would be subject to 75 percent.
Eversource spokesperson Jamie Ratliff, in an email Tuesday, said costs are recovered over the length of the project's useful life and that does not begin until the project is in service. Additionally, since the costs of transmission projects are spread across all New England states and the recovery of those costs will be over a very long time period, monthly bill impacts for customers would be minimal.
The purpose behind Eversource's project seems largely the same as UI's. Ratliff said steel poles are replacing aging infrastructure along its transmission lines to ensure its electric grid is more resilient in cases of extreme weather.
The Siting Council's website states construction started last year, and neighbors said Eversource has since built the poles, which stand up to 100 feet high. The lines for the project run along the Weston's southern edge, through a northwestern corner of Greenfield Hill and around a small pocket of Easton south of Cricker Brook before dipping back into Fairfield, heading east through the Stratfield neighborhood and ending in Bridgeport's North End, according to a map in the petition.
Hersh Autz said large trucks started shredding all vegetation in the right of way behind her property one day in early June, and the company's supervisor for the project threatened to call the police on neighbors who were asking questions.
She said she was promised remediation work and more communications during a productive meeting with Eversource and town officials the next week, but workers returned to her property twice, the second time cutting more shrubs and vegetation. The company had previously told her the work was done behind her property, but after the second round of clearing,
Eversource admitted to a miscommunication and said workers would continue returning to remove more shrubs and trees, according to her Siting Council email.
The day after receiving Hersh Autz's complaint, Bachman notified Eversource of her concerns. Bachman said the right of way near Hersh Autz's Lampwick Lane address was never included in the changes the Siting Council approved after granting Eversource's initial petition for the project, and she acknowledged that a wetland behind Hersh Autz's property, where vegetation was cleared, would be subject to the project's stormwater pollution control plan and a stormwater permit from the Connecticut Department of Energy and Environmental Protection.
Bachman instructed Eversource to detail the extent of the vegetation clearing in the right of way by Hersh Autz's property and respond in writing by Tuesday. As of Tuesday afternoon, she said no response had been given.
Ratliff, the Eversource spokesperson, said vegetation work for the project is taking place on land the state and Aquarion Water Company own near Lampwick Lane, and workers with Eversource may have trimmed tree branches there. Ratliff said Eversource removes branches growing toward its right of way in addition to tall trees and shrubs, adding that trees don't need to touch high-voltage lines to cause an outage. She said the vegetation removal can also clear room for native and low-growing plants.
She said the company has paused its work for the project to address concerns from local residents.
"This transmission project coincided with planned vegetation management work and was included in our explanation of the scope of the project to the town and our petition to the Siting Council," she said in an email. "When possible, we do try to coordinate work done in an area to limit environmental and community impact while also being more cost effective."
Ratliff said Eversource updates municipal leaders and property owners whom a project may affect about any scheduled work, and the company has reached property owners via mail, phone and in-person visits in addition to its outreach to local leaders.
CT Construction Digest Tuesday September 3, 2024
Massive CT flooding prompts need to inspect bridges: 'That brook became a river'
SOUTHBURY — Dan Sammataro, with his hard hat and reflective vest, was briefing DOT Inspection Team 1 one recent morning. It had been 10 days since the historic thunderstorms pounded parts of Southwestern Connecticut, flooding the nearby Stiles Brook that rose over a section of Route 6 and cascaded down the driveway of the adjacent 19th century farmhouse.
Team 1 was there to check on Bridge Number 05420, a concrete box culvert that drivers might not even notice on a regular summer day. But on the afternoon of August 18, the six-foot by 10-foot culvert clogged in the ferocious flood when the suddenly raging river, 10-feet deep or more, topped the road here about two miles north of the town’s center in its downhill race, carrying broken trees and shrubs toward the Pomperaug River.
Sammataro was talking about the goals of the team's visit as three bridge inspectors stepped into hip waders and rubber boots before they crossed the two lanes and carefully made their way down the tons of freshly installed rocks where the flood had taken away the bank of the now one-foot-deep stream, about five feet wide. They were there for the fourth time since the storms, to probe around and below the concrete to assure its stability, as southwestern Connecticut recovers from the disaster linked to three deaths.
In the middle of the state highway, a hard-hatted DOT worker was holding a stop sign, as the single lane of traffic traded the right of way. A construction team was in the southbound lane of the little bridge, with showers of sparks as they cut away sections of the metal guard rail that had been twisted by the flood. A dump truck and backhoe were in place as the crew of contractors continued the clean up.
The brook wasn’t exactly a slow summer trickle, but its flow had reduced enough for Team 1 to hop the Jersey barriers, pick their way down the slope of rip rap and make their way into the two-lane-long culvert, where they tested abutments and the concrete wings with a metal rod.
“We've been getting some decent rain events the two years I’ve been here but obviously nothing of this nature,” said Sammataro, 38, a supervising engineer for the DOT. “Last week we inspected it. There were some repairs to the embankments and this is a follow-up.
Department of Transportation procedures kicked into place that Sunday night, as agency officials closed the region's most-damaged bridges and roads, then set up detours for traffic. For many locations, the state's seven bridge inspection crews made multiple visits.
"We make reassessments and get into the channels too, to probe and see if they are structurally undermined," Sammataro said, recalling that Stiles Brook was still too high to fully inspect the culvert in the days immediately after the 10 to 12 inches of rain caused the town's historic flooding, the heaviest downpours in the state. Two women were killed in Oxford. The body of a third victim, a Weston man, was found in Westport.
Zach Lalima, a DOT bridge safety inspector with six years of experience, held the six-foot probing rod, with markings every 12 inches for measuring. In the front bib pocket of his waders was a folding ruler. With him was Matthew Zoccali, a transportation engineer and Fahim Nabizada, a bridge safety inspector who joined the agency a few months ago.
The inspection took about 15 minutes as nearby traffic traded back and forth over the single open lane.
"We’re checking anything that has to do with substructure, any washout running underneath and there wasn’t any," Lalima said. "That’s like the main thing. So there is nothing structural going on in this bridge. Everything is good. They fixed the channel and filled everything in. Today, it's like it was back before everything started."
The term of art for the bridge inspection teams is "scour critical." When bridges and culverts are designed, the DOT's hydraulics and drainage department estimates their structural capacities on a scale of one to nine. Those rated three or below are classified scour critical, requiring crews to inspect them after major rain events.
"There’s a large amount of data that goes into how they are evaluating it," Sammataro said. "There is stream flow, flood plain data. Scour critical means how susceptible the foundations are to being undermined. In a storm event, how susceptible is this bridge to having a structural issue where then foundations might be washed out? So, some designs and channel configurations are less susceptible than others. Now, they are trying to build structures where they wouldn’t be susceptible to things like this. You’ll see us replace a smaller town bridge that might be scour critical and the new design will push the abutments back away from the channel, so there’s no substructure components even in the water or close to the channel and it will improve its scour critical rating."
This culvert had little damage compared to the quarter-mile section of Route 67 about two-and-a-half miles to the south, where a brook filled a culvert and collapsed an abutment, diverting the flood and closing a long portion of road adjacent to a town park.
"That's really the corridor that got hammered the worst and then things branch off of it," Sammataro said. To the south and west, Route 34 was still closed in Oxford and traffic was still being diverted on Route 67 in Oxford, where the Little River left a corridor of destruction into Seymour. "Any debris you could think of got washed into these channels."
Back at their DOT van, parked in the driveway of the farmhouse and red barn owned by Casey and Jeannette Chen, Lalima, Zoccali and Nabizada went over the checklist of their observations.
"Outside of the guard rail and some of the stuff up top I think underneath they should be OK," Sammataro said. "When they probed last week they didn’t find anything. If they came out and probed this and found that there was any undermining under the foundations or anything like that, that’s one of the scenarios where we would close the structure. Or if the channel bottom dropped out three feet when they went underneath and they weren’t able to get in, that’s a scenario where we would send the divers in to go look. So that’s kind of what we’ve been dealing with this week."
Just then, the Casey and Jeannette Chen drove up the slightly sloping driveway, heading out for breakfast on the sunny morning. During their nine years in the house, a former tavern with five fireplaces, the nearby stream never come close to the kind of flood they saw that Sunday afternoon. "That brook became a river," said Casey, who retired from the fields of IT and architecture. "It was coming over the road literally like a raging river coming over the hill," said Jeannette, showing a reporter some video.
Fortunately the flood didn't threaten the house or barn as it roared down the driveway they share with a neighbor, who is in the construction industry and quickly patched the two-foot-deep holes gouged by the swift brown water.
Sammataro was off to another bridge before heading to DOT's headquarters in Newington.
"We’re doing our best trying to try to keep the roads safe," he said. "You know that events like this can happen, but you hope the next one is a long time away. Regardless of how anybody feels about climate change, something is changing because the rain we get now is not like what it used to be. We’re seeing it more and more, obviously not at the scale we saw last week. but it’s a regular part of our life."
Stalled Bridgeport soccer stadium delays minor league team’s debut
BRIDGEPORT — Officials with the Connecticut Sports Group acknowledged Friday what had become obvious over the last few months — given ground has yet to be broken on a stadium, their minor league soccer team will not be playing on the lower East Side for at least another year and a half.
"After consulting with the league and local officials, we have decided to debut the ... team in 2026," the organization, run by entrepreneur Andre Swanston, said in a press release. "This additional time will enable us to complete much-needed infrastructure work around the stadium site and continue to build out our talented staff."
It was last October when Swanston unveiled a multi-phase proposal to bring professional soccer, along with housing and retail, to the former greyhound racing track site on Kossuth Street along the Pequonnock River. By January, Connecticut Sports Group said it had a minor league team, Connecticut United, in place and was aiming to have a stadium erected in time for the 2025 season, with a larger major league venue to come.
But financing has been an issue.
Swanston had sought an initial $30 million in state aid. So far, only $16 million has been committed, mainly for cleanup of any contaminated soil on the construction site and to create public access to the waterfront, things that would need to be done ahead of any development on the property should soccer fall through. Half of that $16 million comes from the legislature's newly-created Community Investment Fund, with the balance made up of grants from the Connecticut Department of Economic and Community Development for cleaning up old and contaminated industrial sites.
Though supportive of Swanston, Gov. Ned Lamont this year repeatedly expressed reservations about sinking major state dollars into the soccer stadiums, arguing he would prefer to leave that to private investors. Swanston has indicated he has significant private funding in place but has been tight-lipped about budget details.
State Rep. Antonio Felipe, D-Bridgeport, a proponent of bringing soccer to the city, said Swanston and allies need more time to convince other state lawmakers about the merits of investing in the soccer dream. He said the year's delay is "something a lot of us have seen coming (but) it's in no way an admission of failure."
"I've seen what they've done and are prepared to do for the city. I'm very excited for it," Felipe said of Swanston, Connecticut Sports Group and Connecticut United. "I just think a few other people need to be brought on board. ... But it's going to take more than the time that would be allowed to have a stadium built in the next year."
Even if state officials issued the Connecticut Sports Group a blank check, there would still be bureaucracy to deal with. The $16 million in existing aid was authorized in June, but that did not mean the funds were immediately forwarded to Swanston.
The $8 million from the Community Investment Fund was technically awarded to the Bridgeport Economic Development Corporation, a quasi-public nonprofit run by Edward Lavernoich, which can partner with the city or private developers. Lavernoich this week said it will likely take about four more months before the necessary paperwork and legal reviews are finalized to free up that $8 million to spend.
"There's always strings attached when you're talking about bigger grants you get from the state," he explained. "It takes some time to figure out. These awards are always done 'in concept' and there are always spots you've got to iron out. ... I expect we'll have grant proceeds drawn down by the end of the year."
Lavernoich also acknowledged there are still plenty of unknowns about the scale of the environmental remediation of the Kossuth Street land, approximately 16 to17 acres in size, noting the property had "a long history" of uses before the defunct greyhound track.
"This is a big, complicated site," he said. "So there's going to be a mix of differential remedial methods that make up the overall remedial plan."
The former greyhound property was purchased in March 2022 by a limited liability company with ties to Robert Christoph senior and junior, the father/son team that has spent years redeveloping the nearby Steelpointe site on the harbor, home to Bass Pro Shops, other smaller retailers, a new marina and Boca restaurant, with luxury apartments under construction. Swanston has an undisclosed deal to control the land for his needs.
State Rep. Christopher Rosario, D-Bridgeport has been another supporter of Swanston's. He is optimistic the city's legislative delegation might be more successful when the Connecticut General Assembly reconvenes early next year in lobbying colleagues and the governor for additional support to bring professional soccer to Bridgeport.
"I personally always felt it was an aggressive timeline," Rosario said of having a minor league stadium in place by 2025, noting the actual Connecticut United team was not announced until just before the start of 2025's legislative session. "Should we all get reelected (in November) we're going fresh, crafting a new biennial (state) budget. ... And now this isn't kind of crammed in (and) has a lot better chance of moving along."
Rosario continued, "I think I'm still 'glass half full,' still optimistic. I still highly believe this project is going to go forward. It's just facing a delay that unfortunately happens with these big-type projects."