To be clear, if the legislature capitulates and increases the thresholds of our prevailing wage law, it will be a symbolic gesture at best. CCM and our elected officials are under no illusions that weakening wage standards for construction workers won’t realize any significant savings for our municipalities. If CCM were actually committed to lowering […]
While plenty of smaller projects are still underway, the grand opening of the University of Connecticut’s new branch campus Wednesday means for the first time in about a decade and a half, there is a lull in major redevelopment downtown. Though it evolved over time, the bulk of it ultimately became what is now known […]
House Democrats say the sales tax would increase from the current 6.35 percent, but they said the final rate would be determined after discussions with the party’s caucus. An earlier Democratic proposal called for raising the sales tax to 6.99 percent, but it is widely believed the new proposal would be lower than that. http://www.courant.com/politics/hc-pol-democratic-revised-budget-20170822-story.html
Blindly cutting municipal aid without loosening draconian mandates and labor laws will be counterintuitive, giving municipal leaders little wiggle room to shave costs and forcing local taxpayers to shoulder the burden in the form of higher property taxes. Municipalities have long argued for curtailing the state’s prevailing wage law, which requires municipalities to pay a […]
A Connecticut city plans to convert a stadium currently housing its minor league baseball team into an outdoor venue for concerts. Bridgeport Mayor Joe Ganim says the city-owned stadium will be redeveloped into an amphitheater with a $15 million investment through a public-private partnership. Developer Howard Saffan says the amphitheater will open in 2019 and […]
The $1.4 million “Hartford Lofts” project would convert the space that was a hotel and rooming house and would be the first residential condo project in downtown in more than a decade. CRDA has committed $400,000 in loans to the project along with $850,000 from the Hartford Community Loan Fund. The balance of $150,000 is […]
Standing along the Connecticut River Tuesday, Rep. John Larson announced a $1 trillion infrastructure bill that would fund projects across the country — including his $10 billion proposal to tunnel I-91 and I-84 through Hartford — by taxing carbon emissions. The America Wins Act, as Larson is calling the bill, would create between 13 million […]
Efforts to lock up state & municipal construction projects with prevailing wage and project labor agreements will probably decline over the next four years, predicts Charles Krugel, a management-side labor and employment lawyer and HR counselor in Chicago. “We’ve already seen the chipping away of previous public sector union rights in historically unionized states like Wisconsin and […]
Though spending levels are far from final, Senate and House appropriators have generally rejected the sharp cuts President Trump proposed for important infrastructure accounts. Senate appropriators, in unanimously clearing their 2018 DOT-HUD measure, spurned Trump’s proposal to zero-out DOT’s highly popular Transportation Investment Generating Economic Recovery (TIGER) grants and his plan to slash transit capital […]
In its July 2017 North American Crane Index report, construction research firm Rider Levett Bucknall (RLB) counted nearly 400 fixed cranes in use across 14 major North American cities, indicating continued, steady activity in the construction industry. Cities where crane counts have declined still have projects in the pipeline that could boost construction crane numbers […]
