Original plans presented in November showed the town was ready to shift all street parking from angled parking to parallel parking, which would decrease the amount of street parking but mean more of the streetscape could be used for wider sidewalks, expanded outdoor dining, and other amenities like street furniture. Those plans also showed a buffered sidewalk-level bike lane on Farmington Avenue that has also since been removed from designs. Town Manager Rick Ledwith said on Wednesday morning at the Town Council’s Community Planning and Economic Development committee meeting that the town has heard feedback from residents preferring the original plan known as option A over the redesigns that were presented in April. Ledwith said it’s likely that more details about the plans will come at June’s committee meeting. The town is expected to finalize plans this year with the hope of starting construction in 2025.

https://www.stamfordadvocate.com/westhartford/article/west-hartford-ct-center-parking-bike-lanes-dining-19459469.php

The gravity of removing traffic lights that bring Route 9 traffic to a halt in downtown Middletown was evidenced during a state Department of Transportation informational hearing late last month. CTDOT Project Manager Stephen Hall delivered a presentation April 30 at Wesleyan University on the draft proposal to reconfigure exits in the often highly congested area near the Arrigoni Bridge and densely populated North End. The cost of the project aimed at easing the large number of crashes in the area is estimated at $143 million. Eighty percent of the project cost would be borne by the federal government and 20 percent by the state. Several downtown CTDOT projects have been completed or are underway, such as the pedestrian bump-outs on Main Street, reconfiguration of St. Johns Square, work on the Route 17 on-ramp to Route 9 North, and closing access to Route 9 at Miller Street, Hall said.

https://www.stamfordadvocate.com/news/article/route-9-middletown-traffic-lights-removal-19459235.php

CT Examiner joined a number of state and local officials, employees of Eversource and Ørsted, and union officials aboard the 143-foot Cecelia Ann for what was for most their first look in person at South Fork Wind. With a maximum generating capacity of 132 megawatts, South Fork is the only commercial-scale offshore wind farm operating in the United States, producing about 6% of the electricity currently generated by Connecticut’s only operating nuclear power plant, Millstone. South Fork, which went online in March, is the first offshore wind farm to be assembled and staged off the New London State Pier, a project that dates to 2022. Each tower extended out of the water 788 feet, about 56 stories or the height of the Woolworth Building in Manhattan – taller than any building in Connecticut, according to a voice over a speaker, with blades 319 feet long, longer than a football field. Spaced a mile apart to ease navigation, the turbines seemed closely spaced against an infinite empty blue plain. Also visible is a substation that raises the voltage for sending the electricity all the way to Southport, Long Island.

Local Officials Cheer as South Fork Wind Begins Churning Out Electricity

A one-third mile stretch of the creek, now clean, had held some of the contaminated soil that the since-defunct Raymark Industries had dumped across Stratford while manufacturing automotive brake products before shutting down in 1989. Since September 2020, an EPA-led project has removed about 95,000 cubic yards of the contaminated soil from the creek and 28 properties of commercial and open space, including roughly 9,000 in Ferry Creek, according to the agency. Blumenthal said Stratford could be an example of environmental cleanup efforts and that prevention was preferable to remediation. “We should take a lesson from Raymark, which has become synonymous with environmental catastrophe — Pay now or pay later. Prevent it or pay for it,” Blumenthal said. “And the costs are astronomical when we fail to respect the environment.” Despite the cleanup progress, EPA environmental engineer Jim DiLorenzo, who is managing the project, said at least 65,000 more cubic yards of Raymark contaminated soil are still in the ground. He said construction crews plan to finish another 5,000 cubic yards by June on the EPA’s Ferry Creek Boulevard headquarters, in addition to some wetlands and open space on Lockwood Avenue.

https://www.stamfordadvocate.com/news/article/stratford-raymark-contaminated-soil-remediation-19447104.php

Structural issues and the presence of asbestos at the middle school have raised questions about how and where students in grades 6 through 8 will attend school next year. Superintendent Mary Ann Butler said at a school board meeting Thursday that engineers who inspected the school found no immediate safety concerns. However, she said, they discovered a section of the second floor needs to be replaced and that a section of the first floor is sagging due to the weight of environmental systems and utilities. In addition, asbestos remediation is necessary, and foundation issues need further study. Butler said the town’s building inspector and fire chief and an engineer with civil engineering firm Fuss and O’Neill inspected the middle school on April 19, April 23 and last Wednesday.

https://www.theday.com/local-news/20240513/in-stonington-school-board-grappling-with-structural-problems-at-middle-school/

A study of noise along Connecticut’s roadways has recommended that the state Department of Transportation erect 38 new noise barriers along its interstate highways and state roads. However, according to a DOT spokeswoman, there is no federal or state money to pay for them at this point. The study was conducted to bring the state up to date with the Federal Highway Administration’s noise regulations. Half of the noise barriers recommended are located in Fairfield County, 12 along Interstate 95. The other seven in that county are along Route 7 in Norwalk, Route 8 in Shelton and Bridgeport and Interstate 84 in Danbury. At 6 p.m. May 23, the DOT will hold a virtual informational meeting about the report, where the public can ask the experts about their conclusions.

CT roads need 38 new and expensive noise barriers. Why there’s no money to pay for them.

The dilapidated Enfield Square mall is slated to be transformed — through a $250 million project — into a new mixed-use area, complete with retail, housing, two hotels, and recreation space. Woodsonia Acquisitions, based in Nebraska, has entered a purchase and sale agreement with New York-based Namdar Realty Group to buy the mall that was in danger of closing less than a year ago. The estimated $250 million project — dubbed Enfield Marketplace — is expected to include numerous retail and restaurant spaces, more than 450 residential units, two hotels, and walking and biking trails, according to a resolution the Town Council passed Monday night. The municipality is not assisting Woodsonia in purchasing the parcel and it will remain private property, Town Manager Christopher Bromson said.

http://www.nhregister.com/journalinquirer/article/ct-enfield-square-mall-namdar-woodsonia-19454664.php

Orange-based Avangrid, the corporate parent of The United Illuminating Co. as well as Southern Connecticut Gas and Connecticut Natural Gas, is looking to move ahead with $191.6 million in capital investments covering the operations of its utilities in the state. The ability to do that depends on both regulatory decisions and an ongoing legal appeal, company officials say. Sarah Fliotsos, Avangrid spokeswoman, said the company “looks forward to investing as much as we can in Connecticut.” The accounting of Avangrid’s capital investment in Connecticut across its three utilities comes a little over a week after Eversource Energy announced it would immediately halt nearly $100 million per year in investment spending for five years. A total of $152 million was budgeted by UI for capital expenditures on its distribution network in 2024. Because PURA’s ruling failed to fully fund that budget, UI officials cut the expenditure by about 50 percent, leaving about $78 million for infrastructure work in 2024.

https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:https://www.ctinsider.com/business/article/ct-avangrid-ui-natural-gas-rates-investment-19450421.php&strip=0&vwsrc=0

Since 2016, when southeastern Connecticut learned of a plan by the Federal Railroad Administration to construct a high-speed rail bypass through several historic towns in the region between Old Saybrook and Charlestown, RI, town officials and members of the public have been paying closer attention to rail projects along the Northeast Corridor. Last Friday, CT Examiner talked by phone with Amtrak’s Jason Hoover, Assistant Vice President of Major Programs–Bridges, who is overseeing the replacement of the century-old Connecticut River Rail Bridge, and Joseph Barr, Director of Network Development in the East Coast, who is working on the New Haven to Providence Capacity Planning Study. Our overall goal nationally is to double ridership by 2040 as well as to get to net zero emissions by 2045. The NEC is our strongest ridership corridor to start with, so when we’re looking at doubling ridership on a national basis, obviously the NEC is a big part of that although I also want to make sure that we never downplay the importance of our long distance routes as well.

Amtrak Talks Connecticut River Bridge Replacement, High-Speed Rail Planning

City and state officials along with members of the development team Friday morning broke ground on a new mixed-use, housing development at the corner of State and Chapel streets in New Haven’s Historic Ninth Square District. The $56.4 million project, led by Boston-based Beacon Communities, is an adaptive reuse with an eye toward historic preservation. Construction is expected to be completed by the end of 2025, and will bring much-needed housing options to New Haven, where nearly 1,000 new or renovated apartments are expected to come online in 2024, with thousands more having been developed in the past few years and as more are set to open in the coming years. Beacon Communities has worked on several senior, affordable or historic renovations around the Northeast, including the Edith Johnson Towers and Montgomery Place projects in New Haven, and the Montgomery Mills historic restoration project in Windsor Locks.

New Ninth Square mixed-use project breaks ground in New Haven