New Haven Independent

DaRos plans to use between five and six acres of the Tabor property, which the town owns, to build a state-of-the-art public works facility. In addition, Tabor Drive will be widened and lifted so that it no longer gets submerged under water at high tide. There will be a new “T” intersection at South Montowese St. Tabor Drive then will be expanded clear across the land to Pine Orchard Road. This will provide a sorely needed East-West passage.

Another four or five acres will be used to put in storm retention basins. As for the remaining 60-plus acres, DaRos is still convinced that the best use of the land is as a recreational sports area, with a full baseball diamond, a girls softball diamond, two lacrosse fields and at least one soccer field.

DaRos’s plan comes as the town grapples with the fall-out from the Tabor land trial, a $12.4 million verdict against the town by a jury that found the town wrongfully took the land by eminent domain, thereby denying the developer profits, start-up costs and other fees. Earlier, the trial judge ordered the town to pay $4.6 million to the land owners, Thomas Santa Barbara, Jr. and Frank Perrotti, Jr.

The new town attorney, William Clendenen, Jr., has taken a variety of legal steps seeking to offset the significant monetary damages the town faces. He told the RTM last month that in his experience, “in litigation of similar types, insurance carriers have provided defenses. Now I don’t know why our insurance carrier declined to provide that coverage. I also don’t know why the town didn’t do anything about it. We are looking to find that out and to see if there is any possibility to bring insurance coverage to the table to assist the town…” He is seeking advice from several top insurance attorneys.

In May, former First Selectwoman Cheryl Morris reversed her previous stand and hired two outside law firms to try the Tabor dispute. The first was McCarter & English, the firm that had represented the town on the land value until former Town Counsel Ed Marcus took it away from them in Nov. 2005. The second, Updike, Kelly & Spellacy, was recommended by Marcus and was brand new to a case it would try three months later. Clendenen asked the two law firms for their “candid, confidential evaluation as to why certain things happened so we can evaluate effectively what rights we have on appeal.” He wants them to take each issue and to provide documents relating to “errors.”

Meanwhile, the trial judge William T. Cremins Jr., who presided over the back to back trials last summer, has now denied the town’s motion to set aside the verdict and to seek a new trial. He wrote that he had already ruled (and denied) the arguments by the town during the takings trial. The town also asked the judge to lower the jury’s damage award. He denied that as well. He ruled on Nov. 19 and notified attorneys on Dec. 12.

The next step is a full-fledged appeal to the state’s Appellate Court. A conference with a retired appellate justice is expected to take place this month.

While the case continues, DaRos turned his attention to projects long on the drawing board. He said that when he returned to Town Hall in November he asked: “How come we didn’t do this? Or how come we didn’t do that? Everything seemed to be floundering.” He described the town as on “auto-pilot.”

The public works and fire department buildings had been slated to be renovated or rebuilt in 2003, when DaRos left office. “Town Hall had been renovated. So had the Blackstone library. So had the police station. “Their turn was next,” he said. Only it didn’t happen.

He learned that plans for a new public works and fire department facility required finding new land to house a campus for both buildings at a cost of roughly $4 million.

He said he began to think about that because there was a strong belief there was no better place to house the fire department than where it is located right now, on North Main Street. “They have two roads right now. And we can improve the access.”

So why move? he wondered. After various meetings, DaRos decided to leave the fire department where it is. “They will take the whole site, giving them room to expand. That decision was rather easy.”

Public works will be moved to Tabor. “We do own Tabor,” he said with a little gleam in his eye. The new building, two stories high, will sit on roughly six acres of land and will be equipped with bays to service town trucks, fire engines and cars. He has hired engineers and architects to work up the plans. The building will be located where two proposed football fields, bottom right, were slated to go in a 2003 town rendition of the Tabor site.

DaRos said that capping the methane gas and using it to heat the building is a perfect way to remediate any pollution that might be on the site. “What is happening right now is in that plume there are volatile organic compounds which if built up could be a problem. But we could cap that thing and it won’t emit it anymore. In other words, the plume can’t get to the atmosphere. We are going to make that building as ‘green’ as possible.” He said there were also plans to put a solar array on the roof.

How much will the project cost? DaRos said the public works and fire department buildings will probably cost between $16 and $17 million dollars, less than the original projection because this plan eliminates $4 million to purchase land.

As for possible contamination from the landfill, one of the reasons the town was fearful of a massive residential housing development on the site, DaRos said that by law the landfill will close. Second, by capping the gas and using it as an energy source there will be less worry about potential air pollution from the gas, the wind and the atmospheric pressure. “This is both environmentally friendly and good engineering,” he said.

“It is going to take years to do this. Not to do the public works building, but years to develop the site for public recreation because if you could picture what 500,000 or 600,000 yards of fill is, it is quite immense.”

The town was badly served at the trial, some believe, by its own attorneys, because it was barred from calling environmental and financial experts to offer expert testimony on the developer’s purported lost profits. At the time, New England Estates had an option on the land but no approval from the town’s Planning and Zoning Commission to build. Moreover, while the jury gazed daily at color photographs of the Tabor land, looking all lovely and green, what they didn’t know was they were looking at invasive plants hiding land stripped of all soil and clay.

The Tabor site had been mined for its soil and clay for many years. NEE would have needed hundreds of thousands of yards of soil just to get the topography up to he level of approval, and that cost was not detailed in its financial analysis, sources said.

The elevations described on maps show the real picture, DaRos said. “The road is 20 feet high. The land is 9 feet. That is 11 feet lower than the road. And when I said it will take 500,000 yards of fill to make just the depression here, my measurements are very, very conservative. Because I knew we had depression, but I didn’t think it was 11 feet deep.

“So the point I was making if anybody could have listened in the court from just one person, a financial expert for the town, it would have been impossible for the developer to stand up there with a straight face and say it would cost them $80 a square foot to build that housing.”

Their so-called profits, DaRos said, did not take into account the minimum $5 million they would have had to spend not to level, but merely to make a depression on the land. But first they had to buy the property, and then they needed yards of soil to get it to ground level. Then they needed to make off-site improvements. “Add that up and their $12.4 million profit disappears,” he said.
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