Paul Bass Photo
Edward Anderson rose to “indict” the “raw deal” the city struck with a developer. Mayor Toni Harp rose to offer a plainspoken, expansive defense.
The passionate exchange erupted toward the end of a two-and-a-half-hour public meeting about a long-awaited plan to start filling in a New Haven neighborhood that disappeared a half century ago during the heyday of urban renewal.
And it added a new element to debate over the plan: In addition to previous criticisms about parking, new questions arose about the sales price and choice of developer.
The meeting took place Sunday afternoon at Hill Career Regional High School on Legion Avenue. It concerned a plan to sell a 5.39-acre lot at 243 Legion directly across the street from the school —the block bordered by Legion, Sherman, MLK/North Frontage and Dwight — to a developer for $2.65 million to build in two phases a pharmacy, a medical office building or hotel, an 850-space garage, and a new three-story headquarters for a not-for-profit agency called Continuum of Care that helps people with psychological and developmental disabilities.
The $50 million project is part one of “Route 34 West,” a long-term strategy of rebuilding the 16.2 acres of surface parking lots and median strips the city created by bulldozing a neighborhood that ran from Dwight Street down to the Boulevard, separating the Hill, Dwight and West River neighborhoods from each other.
“I’m here to indict the way the city’s doing the business. I’m here to ask the mayor to rethink this,” declared Anderson (pictured at the top of the story), a veteran local activist.
“It’s a raw deal. … Put this stuff out to bid.”
Harp, who had said little while her appointees and the developer addressed the crowd’s concerns in sometimes bureaucratic jargon, took the opportunity to respond in plain English to Anderson and some critics who had preceded him. She spoke of the need to keep Continuum of Care, a fast-growing statewide agency with over 600 employees, in New Haven. She spoke of the need to bring jobs and new tax revenue to town.
“You know I’m getting basically criticized because we’re going to have to raise taxes,” Harp told the crowd. “One of the ways you don’t raise taxes is if you have development.”
How Best To Fill In?
About 60 people showed up to Sunday’s meeting, which came four days before the proposal’s first public hearing at the Board of Alders.
Some speakers praised the plan in full for bringing back life and mixed commercial activity to long-fallow land surrounded by fast-moving traffic. West River activist Stacy Spell and Hill activist Leslie Radcliffe (pictured) recalled the bustling activity on that land in their childhoods. Radcliffe recalled her mother bringing the family to buy jeans and sneakers at Eli’s at the corner of Orchard and Legion, before all the stores disappeared in the 1960s.
“It’s been 50 years since there’s been anything but a parking lot,” Radcliffe said. “I’d like to leave a little more to my grandchildren than a parking lot.”
“It’s time out for the blight!” declared Spell. “It’s time to add to the tax base. It’s time to create jobs.”
Opponents supported the first part of the plan: the $11 million, 30,000 square-foot home for Continuum of Care. They objected to the vision for the rest of the block, calling it a suburban-style, car-centric “business park,” in the words of Anstress Farwell of the Urban Design League. The critics compared the project unfavorably to the recently approved plan to have the Montreal-based firm LiveWorkLearnPlan develop a $395 million mini-neighborhood atop the old New Haven Coliseum site.
Many speakers, such as Hill activist Ohan Karagozian, the vice-chair of the Hill North Community Management Team, and Dwight preservationist Olivia Martson (pictured) , focused on the 850-car garage envisioned for the second phase of the plan for the block. They argued it would increase New Haven’s already-high asthma rates.
Yves-George Joseph, vice-president of Centerplan, part of the development team (along with Continuum of Care), responded that the current surface lot already parks 602 cars; he said the 850-car garage, a “worst-case scenario,” would accommodate people using the block without adding measurably to local traffic or pollution.
Frank Panzarella of West River suggested that the developer, as well as Yale-New Haven Hospital (whose employees currently park along Route 34 West’s surface lots), set up parking areas on Long Wharf or on Marginal Drive by the Yale Bowl, then shuttle people over.
Anderson v. Harp
Chris Bockstael, Svigals Partners architects
A conceptual view of phase one, with Continuum of Care headquarters bottom right.
All that was prologue to Anderson’s ringing denunciation of the deal late in the meeting and the defenses by Harp and her team.
Anderson (pictured) focused first on the fact that the city agreed to sell the 5.39 acres for $2.65 million without putting the property out to bid. The buyer is Centerplan, a Middletown-based development company run by former state Rep. Robert Landino. Anderson noted that the city agreed to turn over the old Coliseum land to LiveWorkLearnPlay after a competitive, public process in which developers responded to a city request for proposals (RFP). he suggested that the city is selling the Route 34 West land for “less than it’s worth” to a “favored developer who’s very politically connected.”
“We’re being told to swallow this and marry these guys, Centerplan, or tough luck. What if we want housing there? What if we don’t want a garage? What if we don’t want a Rite Aid? What if we don’t’ want to be detracting from Whalley Avenue with big-box retail?” Anderson asked.
“Right now we’re getting a half-acre going to a nonprofit. We’re getting a Rite Aid. We may be getting an office building, and we’re getting a huge parking garage which is going to be for the benefit of somebody, but I don’t think it’s going to be for the benefit of us.”
He added that it “can’t look good” to the outside world when the city sells land without a competitive bid.
“This site is bigger than the Coliseum site. The Coliseum site was really serious. It took a lot of time to figure out what we were going to do with that. We got a lot of choices. We figured out which was going to be the best for the city. Here we don’t have any choices. They get the land. They’re paying $2.5 million. Rite Aid’s going to give them the first $2 million, if not the whole two and a half. They’re getting three or four acres. We have no idea what they’ll do with it.”
Matthew Nemerson, the Harp administration’s economic development administrator, started to respond to Anderson. Then a voice in the audience called for Harp, who had sat silently onstage throughout the afternoon after offering introductory welcoming remarks, to answer instead.
Nemerson handed Harp the microphone. And she was off.
Chris Bockstael, Svigals Partners architects
Phase two, with the garage in the center.
She pointed out that Centerplan is buying the property (in addition to financing $42.5 million of the $50 million project).
“We have an opportunity for development,” she said. “We have a developer who actually wants to pay dollars. You know, we hear about LiveWorkLearn and Play. I support that as well. But they need $12 million from us [for the Coliseum project]. And because we think it’s a great project, everybody likes it, we’re going to come up with $12 million. They need another $20 million from the state. This developer [Centerplan] is giving us money for the project. That’s almost unheard of in New Haven.”
New Haven’s not putting a dime into the Route 34 West project, she said. The state, at her urging as a state senator, agreed to give Continuum of Care $7.5 million to help build its headquarters on the land. But that headquarters costs $15 million, so Continuum of Care needed a developer as a partner to build it. And the developer needed to build commercially on the rest of the block in order for the project to make financial sense, Harp said. The project will produce an estimated $950,000 a year in taxes to the city once completed; 91 percent of the land will be taxable, everything but the Continuum of Care footprint.
“We didn’t want them to move out of town,” Harp (pictured) said of Continuum of Care. “The former administration didn’t want them to. I support them. I think they’re good corporate citizens and hire a lot of people who live in New Haven. So we started out with wanting them.”
Harp (pictured) vowed to keep a promise to include the critics as well as the rest of the public in a planning “charette” to envision how to develop the rest of the 16 acres. Housing promises to be high on the priority list.
Then Harp turned to the asthma question.
“I know a little something about public health,” she said. “And what is causing the asthma frankly in all of our urban cities in Connecticut is because we’re on highways. And it’s really not as much the traffic that is in town but the air quality that blows from the cars that are on the highways. And we are at the junction [of] 95 and 91. And that is really what is driving up our asthma. And it certainly doesn’t help to have cars wandering around our neighborhood looking for places to park. And that is what will happen if we don’t have a parking structure. …
“I heard ‘Marginal Drive.’ Marginal Drive is a park! I got a call from West Haven at the last snowstorm saying they don’t want us to dump and use Marginal Drive for our snow because of contamination. I don’t think this neighborhood wants cars there.”
From left, Nemerson, Johnson, architects Jay Brotman and Chris Bockstael, and developer Joseph confer before the meeting.
Liveable City Initiative chief Erik Johnson, City Hall’s lead negotiator on the Route 34 West project, challenged Anderson on his claim that the city undervalued the property. He detailed how his team arrived at the $2.65 million sales price: It obtained an appraisal of the land at $3.9 million. It subtracted $900,000 for the cost the developer will assume in cleaning up contaminated soil. (“Urban fill — it’s not the worst thing in the world. You can’t eat it,” Johnson said. “You’ve got to dig it up and cart if off some place where it can be stored safely.”) Then Johnson’s team lopped off another $350,000 for the cost of building the not-for-profit Continuum of Care portion of the block. That left the $2.65 million.
“How is that less than market value?” Johnson asked Anderson.
“I’d like to see the appraisal,” Anderson responded. You can hire an appraiser “to say anything,” he said.
During the exchanges, officials did not respond to Anderson’s question about why they never put the land out to bid instead of negotiating with just one preferred developer.
Asked the question again afterwards by the Independent, Johnson repeatedly responded that former Mayor John DeStefano “made that decision.” Continuum of Care approached the city with the plan and brought Centerplan along with it as a development partner, he said. The city was focused on keeping Continuum in town.
Asked the same question, development chief Nemerson also stressed that the previous administration made the call to negotiate directly with Centerplan rather than seek competitive proposals. Asked why, he responded, “I have no idea. I sat down on my first day, and I got the plan.”
Nemerson was asked whether he considered ditching the plan he inherited and going out to bid.
That could delay the project another year, Nemerson responded, without producing any more money for the city. “We believe this is a market deal,” he said of the sales price. He said he will continue to negotiate with the developer on design details, such as seeking to make the pharmacy at the corner of Orchard and Legion more than one story tall.