Rendering of city’s plan for Union Station.
The Harp administration and the city’s parking authority unveiled a 100-year plan for developing and maintaining Union Station and the area surrounding it — if the state will give the city control.
The plan and the extra push from the city came Thursday afternoon during the waning days of the state legislative session. The session ends next Wednesday, and the future control of the train station is on the agenda. One bill would not only turn the station over to New Haven but convey several vacant parcels of state-owned land to the city. (Read the city’s full plan here.) The state Department of Transportation is fighting to maintain ownership of the station — and possibly remove the city’s parking authority as the contracted manager in three years.
The city’s new plan for Union Station has three main parts. The first involves capital improvements to Union Station itself, with an estimated cost of $21 million. The second part envisions a new parking garage next to the current parking garage in the space that’s currently a parking lot. The new parking garage is to be set back from the street to allow for a “commercial liner building, to be constructed in tandem with the garage or at a future date.” This liner building would face the street and have space for shops. The garage and commercial building have an estimated price tag of $26 million.
Finally, the plan envisions spending $15 million to expand the commercial space inside the station from 1,600 to 4,600 square feet, create “café/restaurant space with indoor and outdoor seating,” open up the upper floors of the station to commercial tenants and reopen the station’s balconies to the public.
The plan envisions covering the costs of the project through a mix of public and private funds. Under the plan, the proposed parking garage — which has been an ongoing source of tension between the city and the state — would be paid for with a $26 million state grant. The city would then lease the land between the garage and Union Avenue to a private developer for the commercial liner building, envisioned as a “mixed-use residential project.” Funds from cash from the station would be used to issue bonds that could then pay for the development of the space inside the station.
“After recent news of Aetna’s increasingly likely departure from Connecticut, it is now more important than ever for the state to act boldly to develop dense, vibrant urban spaces that attract workers, jobs, and investment,” Mayor Toni Harp said in a press release Thursday.
Though Gov. Dannel Malloy (pictured at the press converence) has not endorsed New Haven’s legislative moves to gain control of Union Station and has in the past opposed the city’s push to get the state to build something more than a second car garage, he echoed Harp’s sentiment during a press event at the state Capitol Wednesday. He too reiterated the need for investments in “vibrant urban centers” in the face of first GE and now Aetna’s impending move. He also praised New Haven as one of the state’s successes.
“Every day that I have been governor of the state of Connecticut, I have made the argument that we need to support vibrant cities, specifically that New Haven, and Hartford, and Bridgeport and Waterbury needed greater assistance from the state and that they need it in education, and transportation and more in housing,” he said. “Sometimes I’ve had some success, but more often than not I’ve not been able to deliver.”
Malloy said that transportation has been the most frequent concern he has heard when it comes to whether a business will keep jobs in the state. Transportation impacts the cost of housing. He said Wednesday that he isn’t sure that the legislature buys into what needs to be done to provide a transportation fund.
“I think on a broader basis Connecticut needs to wake up and recognize that we are not competing for that demographic,” he said. “Companies are telling you that they want to be in cities. And we’re not building or rebuilding cities the way that Boston has, or Manhattan has or the outer boroughs in New York.
“We should stop playing around with our support for what have been our historic urban centers,” he added. “If we don’t help New Haven, Hartford, Bridgeport, and Waterbury and others the next size down, we’re not going to be competitive. And not just this year or the next year, but the next 20 years. How long do you have to look at the demographics, how long do you have to look at the decisions that companies are making about where they want to open their operations before you start to make the changes that you need to make?”
Union Station is owned by the Connecticut Department of Transportation, which leases the station to Park New Haven (aka the parking authority) to manage it. The city has sought to buy the station from the state. DOT spokesman Kevin Nursick could not be reached for comment Thursday, but the DOT has resisted the idea of turning the station over to the city in the past.
In March, DOT Commissioner James Redeker said that DOT was “contemplating a competitive procurement process for a service provider or providers” for the facility once a second parking garage was built. The city and state clashed over the management of the station at the capitol in the same month.
In April, the Board of Alders approved extending the city’s lease with the state by three years, with two one-year renewal options, though as the Register reported on May 11, the city said it would fight paying a $3.7 million invoice the state sent to the New Haven Parking Authority.
The city’s plan for Union Station is explicitly part of its Hill-to-Downtown Community Plan, “developed as a framework to rebuild areas of the Hill neighborhood that were severely impacted by urban redevelopment.”
As the city’s document states, the community plan “calls for more than 2,000 new homes and 2,500 new jobs all within walking distance of Union Station.” In addition, “the plan calls for development of Union Square, a landmark public space directly across from the front door of Union Station, as part of the planned revitalization of Church Street South.”
In early May the chair of the Hill South Management Team, Sarah McIver, wrote a letter to House Speaker Joe Aresimowicz urging lawmakers to take action on the conveyance bill that would turn Union Station over to the city.
“Union Station is part of our neighborhood,” she wrote. “It is a place our residents are proud of and a part of a transportation network that our residents, our schools, our businesses, our hospitals, our citizensdepend upon. Current DOT plans for building a second garage have failed to accurately gauge the impact on local traffic, environment, and public health — all concerns that our people would have to live with.”
Read the full letter here.