A volunteer committee will take a closer look at the school district’s $750,000 plan to build an office for administrators after Town Council called for more oversight. The council has required the project to be reviewed by the Municipal Building Committee, with some members calling into question the school board’s capability to manage its own facilities. The school board had requested to use $750,000 in capital reserves to fund the construction of a permanent Central Office at Sarah Noble Intermediate School. Town Attorney Randy DiBella emphasized the school board’s request called for using capital reserves for “the construction of a permanent Central Office.” Construction projects, he said, are required to go before the Municipal Building Committee. The costs of relocating the Central Office to Sarah Noble at 25 Sunny Valley Road was originally estimated at around $4 million, according to a 2019 relocation study conducted by the architectural company Silver/Petrucelli & Associates. The school board has since worked with the town to design a less costly relocation plan.

https://www.stamfordadvocate.com/newmilford/article/new-milford-schools-central-office-council-review-18117252.php

In a history spanning just several years, Fullstack Modular has developed a portfolio of successful and planned projects that range from a sleek, six-unit apartment building sandwiched in-between stately rowhouses, to a 32-story high rise with dozens of affordable units towering over a basketball arena and one of the nation’s busiest subway stations. In the company’s soon-to-be home of Connecticut, however, such projects are at the center of one of the state’s most-heated political battles. Just 2.2 percent of residential land in Connecticut is zoned to allow houses with four or more units as a right, according to an atlas developed by Desegregate CT, an advocacy group that favors denser and more affordable development. Fullstack’s decision to invest up to $12 million in developing its new headquarters in Hamden — as well as a connection to New Haven’s Gateway Terminal — was seen as a coup for Gov. Ned Lamont’s economic development efforts, which have focused on bringing new companies and taxpayers into Connecticut.

https://www.stamfordadvocate.com/business/article/ct-fullstack-modular-housing-restrictive-zoning-18000012.php

While construction was projected to be completed in 2023, the new building is now not set to open until the 2025-26 school year, and in the interim, students say they are suffering. The construction is entering its seventh phase this week which involves site work, mechanical, electrical, plumbing, concrete and interior finishes, according to a spokesperson for the city. Once phase seven is complete, the facilities will be ready for furniture. At a May 15 School Building Committee meeting, the committee approved partial phase seven trade contracts for $108,168,404. The construction is part of a district-wide effort to upgrade schools with state-of-the-art facilities, according to district spokesperson Jesse Sugarman. The decision to split into two campuses was based on availability, according to Sugarman. The two buildings are both former Hartford Schools buildings that were vacated.

https://www.stamfordadvocate.com/capitalregion/article/where-ongoing-renovations-hartford-s-bulkeley-18121008.php

The town obtained favorable rates in its recent $13.1 million bond sale that will primarily provide financing for the new police headquarters project, according to town CFO Dawn Norton. The town received 11 bids from various underwriting firms with the winning bid of 3.19 percent from Robert Baird Inc., she said. The town is preparing to break ground this spring on the $16.4 million project to build a new police headquarters, officials said. Construction expected to take about 20 months, officials said. In the 2022 annual town meeting, voters approved the construction of a new 19,000-square-foot headquarters with 77 percent of the vote. It will be nearly twice the size of the town’s current police station. The new police facility, which will be built on an 11.17-acre site at 238-240 Danbury Road, was approved, with conditions, on Feb. 27 by Wilton’s Planning and Zoning Commission.

https://www.stamfordadvocate.com/news/article/wilton-bond-sale-finances-police-headquarters-18120982.php

DOT now aims to settle on a conceptual design by June 2024, produce construction drawings by November 2025, seek bids a few months later, then start construction in June 2026 — exactly one decade after Malloy’s press conference. The complexities of redesigning a relatively short stretch of highway to the satisfaction of myriad stakeholders around Middletown, a city of 47,000 at the center of the state, has been an instructive, if humbling, undertaking for a short-staffed DOT with far greater ambitions and challenges. Designers shifted to working on a conceptual plan for reconstructing not just I-84 but its riverfront interchange with I-91, a section of I-91 that stands between the downtown and river and, possibly, the clover-leaf exchanges that consume acres of valuable land on the other side of the river in East Hartford. Costing billions and requiring 15 years to complete, it would be the mother of all highway makeovers. The Middletown project is a smaller-scale dress rehearsal for the more ambitious production in Hartford, which most likely would have to be designed, funded and built in stages, given its cost and size.

CT’s long, winding trip to fix a short stretch of Route 9

Hartford Mayor Luke Bronin, a strong proponent of mixed-use, mixed-income housing redevelopment, said apartment occupancy remains strong coming out of the pandemic, a good sign for the city. But to build momentum back behind revitalization and achieve a 24/7 vibrancy, more housing — perhaps much more — will be needed to offset the loss of office workers, Bronin said. Coming out of the pandemic, further rental conversion of office buildings offer a probable path. But some say those moves have to be done thoughtfully, recognizing that more workers are likely to return to offices in the years ahead. In the past decade, CRDA has taken a leading role in providing low-cost, state taxpayer-backed loans to fill in financing gaps in apartment conversion projects in the city and surrounding suburbs. That role has led the quasi-public agency to take an increasingly larger profile in urban planning. David Griggs, executive director of the MetroHartford Alliance, the region’s chamber of commerce, has an upbeat outlook when it comes to revitalization. Griggs said he believes the city either has regained the revitalization momentum that it had prior to the pandemic “or we’re pretty darn close to having it.”

Here are 7 Hartford development projects to watch this summer. ‘Downtown housing is the thing’

Part of a 10-year agreement involving the city, school district, and the Hartford and New Britain trade unions that allows residents to get apprenticeships in various trades, the fair gives students the chance to explore career opportunities, said Yolanda Rivera of the CT Building Trades Institute. Trades represented at the fair included HVAC, iron workers, brick layers, operating engineers and carpenters. Programs for pipe fitters, plumbers and welders take five years, and consist of full-time work and a week of in-class training every six weeks. Apprentices in HVAC programs take classes two nights a week. All programs include 250 hours of training, Hewins said. Apprentices going into construction require 1,600 work hours per year of on-the-job training, while HVAC has 2,000 hours annually.

https://www.rep-am.com/localnews/2023/05/25/torrington-high-school-students-learn-about-apprenticeships-at-fair/

The Senior Center Building Review Committee, during its meeting Wednesday night, was scheduled to recommend a site for the combined new senior center and health department project. Instead, the committee opted not to select a site, with its members appearing to agree that more information needed to be gathered regarding the two primary locations under consideration: 116 Cook Ave. and the former Westfield Care & Rehab facility on Westfield Road. The cost of studying and designing plans for two sites instead of one is expected to be an additional $40,000. Scarpati said the $2 million grant the city received from the state Department of Economic Community Development to tear down the building at 116 Cook Ave. doesn’t prohibit the city from building a senior center there. However, if the state deems building a senior center on the site is not permitted under the grant, the city would need to pay back the grant through a loan.

https://www.myrecordjournal.com/News/Meriden/Meriden-News/Committee-votes-to-study-two-senior-center-sites.html

Residents pushed back against an affordable housing project to add 40 apartments on Berkeley Road saying the project is too big for the area, which is already busy and full of smaller lots. The proposed 34,000-square-foot building at 277 to 301 Berkeley Road would be about 47 feet tall on one side and about 60 feet tall on the other, given the slope in the property. John Fallon, the attorney for the developer, Berkeley Rd. LLC., said he believed the parking would be sufficient and would remove the cars parked in front of the proposed site because the tenants would park in the designated lots. He said the project is needed and helps address Fairfield’s housing needs, since a third of the town’s households are housing cost burdened, meaning more than a third of their income is spent on housing.

https://www.ctpost.com/fairfield/article/berkeley-road-affordable-housing-fairfield-18117008.php?src=rdctpdensecp

Developers looking to build thousands of wind turbines off the Mid-Atlantic and New England coast are coming up against a force even more relentless than the Atlantic winds: the Iron Law of Megaprojects, offering a warning of the trouble ahead for green-energy projects. The Iron Law, coined by Oxford Professor Bent Flyvbjerg, says that “megaprojects” — which cost billions of dollars, take years to complete, and are socially transformative — reliably come in over budget, over time, over and over. Offshore wind projects are not immune to the Iron Law, regularly experiencing vast cost overruns before a single watt is generated. A similar situation is playing out in New London, Connecticut, where a state-funded pier facility being built to support that state’s offshore wind buildout has more than doubled in price from an original estimate of $95 million to $250 million.

https://oilprice.com/Alternative-Energy/Renewable-Energy/Clean-Energy-Megaprojects-Face-Iron-Law.html