City Moves To Escape From ​“The Escape”

The perennially-stalled and never-opened ​“Escape” youth homeless shelter lurched towards its formal demise at a city government hearing Monday night.

Members of the Board of Alders Finance Committee voted unanimously at the hearing to approve steps necessary to terminate the city’s lease with a Dixwell church five years to the month after the beleaguered project was first announced.

The Finance Committee’s monthly meeting was held online via the Zoom videoconferencing platform and on YouTube Live.

During the four-hour meeting, local legislators unanimously supported a proposed order that would ​“unsequester” $200,000 in capital funds that the city and alders first budgeted in Fiscal Year 2017 – 2018 (FY18) for necessary repairs for the planned ​“Escape” site at 654 Orchard St. in a building owned by Bethel AME Church.

City Budget Director and Acting Controller Michael Gormany and City Engineer Giovanni Zinn explained that freeing up these previously budgeted funds that have been frozen in place for three years is a necessary precondition for ending the city’s lease with Bethel.

That’s because the lease requires the city to leave the space usable — or fit for a ​“certificate of occupancy” — if the city were to back out of the project and turn the former community outreach center site back over to the church, which owns the Orchard Street building. And that’s exactly what the current mayoral administration plans to do.

“The city has decided not to renew the lease with the teen center,” Gormany said Monday. ​“Per the lease, the items that were changed within the location, we must return back to how we originally leased the premises.”

Zinn agreed, stating that the city is currently negotiating with the church ​“to see how to best move forward to fulfill our obligations, to bring it back to a state that releases the city from its obligations” once the lease expires at the end of September.

The unsequestration order now advances to the full Board of Alders for a final vote.

Years Of Delays; Current Obligations

Monday’s committee vote represented the formal beginning of the end of the ​“Escape” teen center project, which was first announced in September 2015 and was long championed by former Mayor Toni Harp and former Youth Services Director Jason Bartlett.

The project was heralded by the previous mayoral administration as a landmark opportunity to support homeless youth by providing after-school homework help, athletics, music activities, and 15 beds for homeless young people between the ages of 17 and 24. Instead, the subsequent half-decade saw the project mired in public delays, budget overruns, and private in-fighting at City Hall.

The site was initially supposed to open in January 2016. Then March 2016. By March 2017, the city had already spent around $350,000 trying to fix up the property—and city staffers requested an additional $200,000 in capital funds for needed repairs to the building’s leaky roof, electrical wiring, and HVAC system. The alders agreed, but ultimately sequestered those dollars until the administration and the local legislature determined how best to proceed, if at all, with the long-delayed project. In March 2018, Bartlett presented to the alders again on continued construction-related delays at the site, and the alders ultimately agreed to another $50,000 in capital funds budgeted for the project.

Behind the scenes, Bartlett and a variety of city staffers engaged in years of disagreements over who should get paid for construction work at the site, how they should get paid, and whether to pull the plug on the project altogether. Click here for a previous Independent article about that, based on a review of hundreds of related city emails.

Virtually none of those details were discussed at Monday night’s hearing. Instead, the committee alders and city staff stayed focused on the immediate logistics of ending the lease — with the occasional oblique reference to ​“past troubles” with the ​“Escape” project.

Gormany (pictured) and Zinn said that the city is still negotiating with Bethel as to how exactly to meet the terms of the lease and end its formal relationship with the church later this month.

Zinn said the city will likely use the $200,000 in unsequestered capital funds to pay the church to make whatever building fixes are still necessary to restore the Orchard Street site to a usable condition. He said the city will also likely sign a memorandum of understanding with the church ​“that releases the city of any liability after that point.”

“We can’t just walk away,” Gormany said. ​“We have to return it to some semblance of how we originally took possession of the church.”

If the church winds up needing less than the full $200,000 to complete the repairs, Dixwell Alder Jeannette Morrison asked, what happens to the remaining unsequestered funds? Can that money be used for other youth-related projects?

Gormany and Zinn stressed that these are capital funds, not general operating funds. ​“The funding was for repairs, not for programming,” Zinn said.

Gormany said that, per city ordinance, unused capital funds can be repurposed in only two ways: for a ​“capital sweep” that goes towards a reduction in debt service by making payments on outstanding bonds, or through a redesignation towards another capital project, such as sidewalk repairs.

Zinn said that the city’s estimated cost of repairs from May 2017 of around $200,000 is still what the city believes is needed to fix up the site, since the city hasn’t done any work at the site since construction was paused three years ago. He said the church is still coming up with its own estimated cost for the remaining needed repairs.

“I think it’s important for the city to have a positive and constructive ending of the business relationship with this church in regards to this one-time proposed teen center,” Westville Alder and Finance Committee Vice-Chair Adam Marchand said before voting with his colleagues in support of the unsequestration. ​“Clearly the project did not work out and had a lot of problems along the way. And I’m going to leave it at that.”

Edgewood Alder and Finance Committee Chair Evette Hamilton agreed. ​“We definitely need to wrap this up and close it out,” she said. ​“An unsequestration of the funds will allow us to do that.”

Vision Remains For Helping Youth

After the meeting, Bethel AME Church Rev. Steven Cousin told the Independent that he wasn’t surprised by the city’s decision to end the lease and the committee’s vote on Monday, particularly considering Mayor Justin Elicker’s criticism of the many delays with the ​“Escape” project during his campaign for office in 2019.

“It’s to be expected,” he said. ​“We knew there were some issues surrounding the project. We knew that was one of the platforms the mayor ran on, regarding the stalled construction at the center. It was rather expected. We’re just hoping for an amicable split from the city.”

When asked about the current state of the Orchard Street site that the city has been leasing for the past five years, Cousin said, ​“It was stopped mid-construction.” With so many years of no work and no maintenance by the city as tenant, it doesn’t look good.

Cousin was asked about his vision for the site going forward once it is all fixed up and returned to the church. He said he still very much intends to provide some kind of space for neighborhood youth in need — particularly during the ongoing pandemic, as street violence has increased across the city, and as school remains almost entirely online for the first 10 weeks of the school year.

Cousin’s church is one of several in the city that have opened their buildings to schoolchildren looking for an in-person ​“hub” of support with online learning.

“We’re still looking for giving children a safe space to go,” Cousin said.