Newhall To Hamden: Focus On ​“Foundations First”

They talked about their homes sinking into contaminated soil, the walls cracking, their myriad of health issues. 

They wore shirts the color of cement to dramatize their plea: Fix our foundations first.

The scene was the public input session of a hybrid meeting of the Hamden legislative town council at Hamden Town Hall earlier this month. The purpose of the five founding members representing the Hamden Newhall Neighborhood Association (HNNA): to protest the allocation of funding to build a town community center campus on Newhall Street until the town repairs their homes.

Earlier this year, the legislative council allocated $9,108,259 of federal American Recovery Plan (ARPA) funding to create a new community campus at the former Michael J. Whalen Middle School complex in the Newhall neighborhood. Federal Uniform Guidance and ARPA regulations stipulate that all contracts and purchase orders have to be fully executed by Dec. 31, 2024.

The idea of a community campus arose from Hamden Mayor Lauren Garrett’s vision to use the ARPA funds to transform the blighted middle school property just over the Newhallville/Newhall border into a two-story recreation center with a gymnasium, weight room, and study lounge, as well as several rooms for various programming, among other amenities. 

The HNNA maintains that the town can still legally use the ARPA funds to fix their foundations. While Hamden has entered into agreements for demolition of the complex, as well as design and construction of a new complex, no work has begun, they said, and there is an out clause in the contracts. In addition, the HNNA said the town, until last Monday’s meeting, has never sought the community engagement that ARPA requires for the receiving and spending of the funds. 

That claim, it seems, flies in the face of the allegedly overwhelming support for the community campus based on neighborhood canvasses over the summer, according to Sean Grace, Mayor Garrett’s chief of staff. 

The story begins in 1956, with the construction of Michael J. Whalen Middle School on top of a landfill containing decades of industrial waste from New Haven manufacturers. When the town of Hamden looked into expanding the middle school in 2000, the history of dumping came to light. The state Department of Environmental Protection initiated an investigation. That led to the Regional Water Authority and the town partnering on a massive cleanup effort that entailed removing the contaminated soil and replacing it with clean soil on the middle school parcel, as well as 300 neighboring residential properties. 

To hear Tonya Campbell, one of those property owners, tell it, the job is not finished. After an investigation showed the soil in her yard containing three times the legal limit for lead and arsenic, the LaRosa Building Group, the contractor on the soil remediation project, fixed a steel girder underneath her home because the main support beam was sinking. They repaired cracks in the kitchen wall and the rear stoop which was pulling away from her house. 

That was 2015. Nine years later, the cracks in her kitchen walls are back. Another assessment revealed the support beams sagging again.

“What some don’t realize is that our foundations are cracking because of the work done to remediate the site,” she said. ​“When they came in with all that big equipment, it caused our foundations to crack so we ended up with more problems than we had before.”

Legislative Council member Rhonda Caldwell, whose district includes Newhall, highlighted the backlog of assessments on the damage to the properties wrought by the contractors — as of Nov. 27, 29 out of roughly 300 properties had been completed — as a reason to put the community campus needs on hold. She raised a motion to reallocate roughly $6.4 million originally slated for the community campus to repair the foundations. The 15-member council voted 8 – 7 to table Caldwell’s motion until the next council meeting on Dec. 16. 

In a phone interview, Mayor Lauren Garrett took issue with the alleged backlog. ​“That’s an older number,” she said. She also maintained that the process is a lengthy one, requiring completed surveys for contact information and written permission from residents to perform the assessments. 

She contended the town was not responsible for remediating the privately owned areas. ​“That was always handled by the Olin Corporation [formerly Winchester Repeating Arms Company] or the state,” she said. The $3.5 million set aside by the legislative council for a full engineering assessment was about ​“the town stepping in to make sure it was done correctly,” she said.

A number of Hamden residents, while expressing empathy via Zoom for the plight of those in Newhall, voiced support for the community center as a place that would provide safety, stability, and mentorship, as well as job training, for youth. ​“The money that we have in hand should go where it’s needed, and that is to the center,” one said. 

Tina Jennings-Harriott, a HNNA founding member, said the group is not opposed to a community center. ​“We just want our homes, where we pay taxes, where we put our hard-earned money into our mortgages each month, we want them to be repaired first,” she said. 

She talked about the collateral impact of the damage. ​“Many of you might have been excited to hear about rain after the drought, but not us. It means we have water in our basements, and that creates mold that is unhealthy,” she said. ​“There are a plethora of health issues right in front of you that we have to live with day in and day out.” 

For Yvonne Jones, ​“while the mayor is trying to build a legacy, families can’t build generational wealth, their foundations are crumbling, they can’t sell their homes, they can’t move, they can’t do anything,” she said.

Danielle Campbell, a fourth-generation Hamden resident, said her home was torn down during the clean-up because it was structurally unsound. ​“My great grandfather built that home for our family on polluted land that people knew was polluted,” she said. For her, ​“it’s not just about foundations being fixed. It’s about respect, about making sure that we, like everyone else in this town, have housing that gives our families a chance to live and thrive.” 

Another long-term Hamden resident spoke about her mother’s home, which was purchased by her grandparents in 1958. Since the contaminated soil in her yard was removed and replaced with clean soil, ​“her basement has been full of mold to the point where her grandson, my nephew, cannot go to school without using an asthma pump,” she said. ​“If you think we are going to let my nephew go to a community center steps away, you are sadly mistaken.” 

Jones said that the town had not gone far enough in remediating the land on the site of the proposed community center. ​“You guys are going to send our children to a center built on contaminated land.” She suggested the unoccupied L.A. Fitness on Skiff Street, which is on the bus line and between the middle school and the high school, as an alternative site for the community center.

Jameson Davis, a Mount Carmel resident who attended Michael J. Whalen, recalled a game he and his classmates would play at a water foundation. ​“It was how long you could hold your breath because the water smelled like rotten eggs,” he said. ​“I’ve had classmates with all types of cancer, teachers being diagnosed with cancer.” He challenged the council ​“to answer the most important question, what are the current levels of contamination in the soil on that site.”

In the phone interview, Garrett characterized the residents’ contention that the center would be built on contaminated land as ​“absolutely false.” She cited a May 11, 2023 letter from DEEP stating that the Regional Water Authority had complied with all requirements set forth in a July 2001 order to investigate and remediate sources of pollution on properties in Newhall. 

“Everyone’s assuming they know better than the Newhall residents,” said a man who described himself as a ​“short timer,” having lived in Hamden for 15 years. ​“They shouldn’t have to fight this hard for you to do the right thing.”