City To Guv: Slow Your Roll

Community activists, bicycle advocates and New Haven politicians vowed Thursday night to fight Gov. Dannel P. Malloy’s demand that the city accept his old-urbanist design for a 1,000-car garage at Union Station.

Just hours after Malloy declared at a Thursday press conference that the state will build a long-desired second parking garage for New Haven’s Union Station only if it is just that — a parking garage only, with no retail or bus depot — about 20 activists and officials offered their new-urbanist response at a gathering at Trowbridge Square Park in the Hill section.

They gathered ostensibly to talk ​“sustainable planning” for the train station. But the governor’s take-it-or-leave-it demand led speakers to focus on condemning his latest stance in the discussion about the plans for the garage. They demanded less space for cars and more space for buses, stores and bikes.

After decades of the delay, the DOT has presented plans for a $40 million-$60 million, 1,000-space, seven-level garage to be constructed on a current 260-space surface lot next to the perpetually full existing garage.

Malloy said Thursday that the state promised a parking garage, period, not an ​“economic development” project. He said plans for a mixed-used, mixed-income rebuilding of the Church Street South complex across the street from Union Station will address economic development concerns.

New Haven State Rep. Roland Lemar called the Malloy administration’s garage design ​“a disgrace, and sad to say, a slap in the face of this community.” Lemar said just 30 minutes before the governor spoke, he had met with state Department of Transportation officials, who continued to indicate a willingness to work with the city generally and the Hill community specifically on a design that addresses New Haven’s future and not its past.

“This lack of awareness of these ongoing conversations that folks have been working on for years is kind of shocking to me,” Lemar said of the governor’s edict. ​“It’s certainly not how this community has worked, and certainly not how it has worked with me and my relationships with him and his office. It’s certainly not how the city and state have ever communicated before.”

Lemar said Union Station does need parking. But the city also needs to prepare for a future that is less car oriented. He said New Haven has been consistent in that message to the state.

“People have been having the conversation about a second parking station for years now,” Lemar, a former city planner for the city who now sits on the state legislature’s Transportation Committee. ​“Every one of those conversations between the city, the state and the neighborhood, and local officials, we’ve said we don’t think it should be a 1950s-‘60s-‘70s style parking garage. What we develop in this city should reflect what our city’s needs are. We do not need a thousand car garage to serve suburban commuters. It’s of no interest to people who live here.”

Hill Alder Dolores Colon said that one of the major interests of the community is not further exacerbating the health problems that exist in the neighborhood, with its high asthma rates. Aaron Goode of the New Haven Environmental Justice Coalition added that the Hill is already recognized as ​“environmentally overburdened” part of the city because of the nearby power plant, the sludge incinerator, the major port receiving large amounts of diesel vessels and two interstate highways. A 1,000-parking garage would only pollute the air further, he said.

“I think that instead of building garages, we need for the governor to turn his vision … here to New Haven where there are lots of poor people who need better transportation to get to jobs,” Colon said. ​“We need more buses with more regular schedules and fewer cars. And we certainly don’t need a thousand cars coming and circling up to a seventh floor and circling down to go home, spewing carbon exhaust fumes so please let’s rethink this large garage. Let’s improve transportation and get the fumes away from the people more susceptible to being injured by them.”

Evan Preston of the Connecticut Public Interest Research Group, said the garage as planned would be ​“doubling down on a failed strategy from 60 years ago by forcing people to depend on cars.”

“That is not going to solve the transportation problems that Connecticut has,” he said. ​“It’s foolish to think spending money in that way is going to benefit us in the long run when you look at demand from younger generations wanting to live in places where they don’t have to depend on a car.”