Neighbors Take On Route 80 Mess

When you’re on a pedestiran-unfriendly state road conducive to car-flung litter and dominated by two out-of-town big-box chains, creating a special services district (SSD) to keep the district safe and clean is a heavy lift.

Quinnipiac Meadows neighbors took up the challenge.

They began to form a committee to create an SSD along Route 80, after Tuesday night’s regular meeting of the Quinnipiac East Community Management Team (QECMT) meeting.

The meeting drew 20 people to the cafeteria of the Bishop Woods School on upper Quinnipiac Avenue. They heard city economic development staffer Carlos Eyzaguirre discuss how New Haven’s current special services districts — Town Green, Chapel West, Whalley Avenue, and Grand Avenue — are doing and what steps are required to create a Route 80 Business District.

An SSD is a delineated area in which local businesses agree to pay a small fee on their properties to pay for joint marketing, street cleaning, lighting, maintenance, and beautification.

A majority of the property taxpayers and a majority of the designated district’s assessed value must vote in favor of creating a district. That vote or formal referendum, conducted by mail over a period of three weeks, would come about after the Board of Alders votes to enact such a district.

Then the SSD votes for officers and decides what issues to pursue, how much money to raise, and what to spend it on.

So you don’t want to proceed unless you have the key property owners on board, Eyzaguirre counseled.

The special circumstances of Route 80, he pointed out, are that by far the largest property owners and taxpayers are Lowe’s and Walmart.

“We ran the numbers,” he said: It turns out those two stores represent $24.5 million of the total $48 million of assessed property value in the designated area. They definitely would have to be on board as the rest of the businesses, including the fast food establishments, are small by comparison.

Another big challenge: ​“None of the other SSDs are on a state road,” Eyzaguirre said, so the state would also have to be involved.

A third problem: ​“It’s a little hard to interact with [big-box chains]. Even out of town landlords on a smaller scale are hard to find,” Eyzaguirre added.

Then once you find them, you have to make the case that they should pay more of what are essentially property taxes for an SSD. That involves delicate negotiations. For example, if businesses in a prospective district running much of Route 80 within the city agreed to add one point to the current 43 mill rate, that would generate only $57,000. Raising the rate by two mills would generate about $100,000. How much additional cleanliness or safety measures would that buy in a far-flung district?

“I can’t say this would be an easy lift,” Eyzaguirre said, but he was by no means discouraging residents, who had invited him to lay out the realities.

This past summer, longtime resident Vinnie Marottoli, frustrated with the mounds of litter along the roadway, had proposed a ​“Back to Sender” party of street trash for all the corporate and fast food culprits.

Tuesday’s meeting has been one of the results.

“It’s a hard sell,” said QECMT Chair Kurtis Kearney, who has spent many a Saturday morning involved in cleaning up garbage along Route 80, much of it generated by the fast food restaurants. ​“Would the state kick in?”

Eyzaguirre couldn’t say, although he committed the city staff to add to the research they’d done and to continue to help if the process proceeds.

Fereshteh Bekhrad, a developer and one of the original officers in the now ten-year-old Grand Avenue SSD, said that an SSD is not the only way to go in order to augment public safety and cleanliness.

Some other kind of business association might be in the offing, on a kind of voluntary basis, that doesn’t involved the complex process Eyzaguirre outlined.

“You can start a business association with grants,” she said. Lowe’s, for example, might want to contribute a vehicle that could go around and do street cleaning and collect the garbage littering the fast moving road.

Eyzaguirre praised that idea. ​“We need to put a little pressure on them as a community so they know we’re out there. That’s the first step,” he said.

Before the meeting was over, Bekhrad had signed up some people on a subcommittee of the QEMT to do precisely that.