St. Mary Street, in the neighborhood where remediation took place.
Sam Gurwitt Photos
Walter Morton at WNHH FM.
As Walter Livingston Morton IV was digging around in state bonding ordinances this spring, he found a welcome surprise: $6 million still lying around in an old state-issued bond for remediation of the Newhall Street area in the southern part of Hamden.
Homeowners there had told another town employee that they were having trouble with their foundations after the ground had been filled in to remediate the soil of toxins left by over a century of industrial dumping.
Morton, who as Hamden’s director of legislative affairs is responsible for advocating for the town’s priorities in Hartford, started looking into what the town could do to help those residents.
“Lo and behold, we found that for this Newhall project, that was completed almost ten years ago, there was about $6 million left over in monies that hadn’t been expended,” he said.
“Of course, it’s always a little too good to be true,” he added. Because of the way the bonding ordinance had been written, the town could not just use those extra funds to pay for fixes to its residents’ foundations. Morton learned that in order to use the money, the state will have to tweak the language of the bond and get the new language approved by the legislature and governor.
The town created Morton’s position last year to help in situations like this, when the town needs help pushing something through the legislature, governor’s office, or another state agency. The language change is just one of Morton’s priorities this year.
Morton appeared on WNHH Radio’s Dateline Hamden to discuss that priority list on Tuesday.
Between 1800 and 1950, the wetland area around Newhall Street in the Highwood neighborhood of southern Hamden was used to dump waste, mostly from the Winchester Repeating Arms Company. The dumping contaminated the soil under many residential blocks in the neighborhood, as well as at the old Michael J. Whalen Middle School and the community center next door. The town closed down the old middle school and built a new one near Town Hall.
In 2010, soil remediation began at residential properties affected by the contamination. The old community center is now a business incubator.
Morton said that after soil had been hauled out and replaced, some houses had settled, which damaged their foundations, and Economic Development Director Dale Kroop had heard from some of those residents.
Morton said that legislators and the state Department of Energy and Environmental Protection (DEEP) support changing the bonding ordinance’s language to unlock the leftover $6 million. He said DEEP would like to use $2 million of it for some of its own additional remediation work, and that it would let Hamden use the other $4 million.
“So that’s something that is a big win,” said Morton. “It’s not often that you kind of find a pot of money lying around from the state.”
State Rep. Mike D’Agostino said he has run the language by the Office of Policy and Management, and he’s hopeful it can pass this year.
Firehouse, Keefe Center Await Bonds
The Newhall remediation bond language change is not Morton’s only bond-related project this year. Also on his priority list are two construction projects that will require state bonding.
One of the projects would construct a new $4.3 million fire station to replace Hamden’s century-old Station 2.
The other would be a $1.3 million renovation at the Keefe Community Center, which, as Morton put it, “is in need of some love, to say the least.”
State Rep. D’Agostino originally submitted proposals for bonding for those two projects to the legislature a few years ago. He said finally passing those bonding ordinances this year is one of his top priorities.
Morton attributed the delay to a much-belabored tolls bill. As the legislature battles to pass a bill that would create truck-only tolls at 12 bridges throughout the state, state bonding for various projects in towns throughout the state has screeched to a halt like a cluster of trucks in a bottleneck at a toll.
Gov. Ned Lamont has fought a protracted battle to create tolls in Connecticut, and legislators say the bill is on the brink of passage. Last week, leaders in both houses of the General Assembly said they were ready to pass the bill, but as the CTMirror reported, they needed to convince members in each chamber that the votes were actually there, and might look into voting at exactly the same time instead of having one chamber vote first and send the bill to the second. (On Tuesday night it was announced the vote has been postponed again, until at least next week.)
Last year, the governor said he was holding up his 2019 two-year bonding plan until tolls had passed the legislature so the state could be sure of its revenues. Morton said that holding up bonding on various projects throughout the state is a bargaining chip to pressure legislators to pass the tolls bill. It’s a “negotiating tactic for tolls,” he said. “It’s some leverage that frankly the governor’s office has over legislators.” Hamden State Rep. Josh Elliott agreed with Morton’s assessment that the governor is holding up his bonding to pressure legislators on tolls.
D’Agostino at a League of Women Voters forum in January.
D’Agostino, however, said the firehouse and Keefe Center projects are not actually tied to tolls. Tolls have held up the 2019 bonding plan, he said, but the firehouse and Keefe Center projects are not on the 2019 bonding agenda. Rather, his goal is to get them into a 2020 bonding package, which is not tied to the passage of tolls.
He said the money could come in the form of a specific bonding allocation for Hamden, or it could be rolled into a larger pool of bonded money and then carved out for the town.
“If I had a magic wand, I would wave it,” he said. “Sometimes it’s just really the whims of the governor’s office and what they want to support” that gets bonding for town projects through the state.
Extend The Reval?
Morton canvassing in New Hampshire in January for presidential candidate Joe Biden.
When he arrived at WNHH for his interview, Morton carried a stack of yellow packets outlining Hamden’s 2020 policy priorities. Along with the remediation-bond language change and the bonding for the fire station and Keefe Center, it also listed a few non-bond-related pieces of legislation.
In the number one slot, the packet listed special legislation to extend the deadline to complete a revaluation. State law requires that towns conduct full revaluations every ten years. Hamden is up for a full reval in 2020.
In the fall, former assessor John Gelati discussed his preparations for the 2020 reval on Dateline Hamden. At the time, the project appeared to be on track. In November, however, Gelati was pushed out of his position.
“There was some at least initial concern that maybe it would be a little tight in the timeline, as we had some turnover in the office, to maybe get it done,” Morton said. He said the town has not yet determined whether the legislation will actually be necessary, but that “it’s just something we put in there to make sure we’re covered, ‘cause the last thing we wanted to do was to be in a situation where hey, we need an extension but we missed our window.”
He said that Town Attorney Sue Gruen had done some research and found that the state has passed similar extensions for towns in the past, including Naugatuck, Madison, and Stafford in 2017.
D’Agostino said he has “serious concerns” about passing legislation to allow Hamden to extend its reval. He said he had yet to receive an explanation from Mayor Curt Leng’s administration about why the extension is necessary. He said he is concerned about the effect an extension could have on the town’s high-tax “neighborhood 40” district, which saw a hefty tax increase in the 2015 revaluation.
If the town decides the extension is necessary and D’Agostino decides to support the request, he said such technical requests are “fairly commonplace.”
Morton’s list also included a piece of legislation that would give municipalities more flexibility in determining the threshold of who is eligible for senior tax relief. With a high mill rate, Morton said the town is looking for ways to ease the burden on Hamden’s seniors, who often do not have a steady stream of income but still see their tax bills increase each year.
Morton also discussed plans for the High Meadows property that the town may buy from the state, efforts to get more revenue from the state, tiers in the state’s Municipal Employees Retirement System, tax equity, and school district regionalization. Watch the full video of his appearance on WNHH FM’s “Dateline Hamden” below.