New Union Station Deal Draws Near

A planned new 55-year accord between the city and the state over the future of Union Station is in the final stages of negotiation, with formal submission of a detailed ​“lease and funding” document expected within two months.

City parking authority Executive Director Doug Hausladen gave that update Monday night during the latest monthly virtual meeting of Park New Haven. The hour-and-a-half long meeting was held online via Zoom.

Hausladen, helming his first parking authority meeting as the agency’s full-time director after stepping down from his previous city transportation role last month, won the unanimous support of the commission to finish negotiating that new Union Station deal with the city and the state.

“We are in need of doing some final predevelopment work for the Union Station campus,” Hausladen said.

That includes soil boring testing of the station’s current east parking lot, conducting a traffic study for potential new parking on the west lot, assessing opportunities for ​“pedestrian conveyance” — that is, people walking and moving around between the different floors of the current building, reviewing the transit hub’s existing HVAC system, and studying if and how the station might be able to expand its retail footprint from the current 10,000 square feet to 30,000 square feet across the basement, concourse, and second floor.

“This motion will authorize us to move forward on some of that predevelopment work. This will help us in between this meeting and the next to move items forward and support the city in getting the lease and funding document submitted for final approval.”

Click here to read the full motion voted on Monday night.

The parking authority vote came more than 10 months after Mayor Justin Elicker and state Department of Transportation (DOT) Commissioner Joe Giulietti signed a so-called ​“letter of intent” at a Union Station press conference celebrating the transit hub’s centennial — and the newfound city-state amity on an issue long rife with discord.

Hausladen and parking authority attorneys Joe Rini and Cliff Merin said that the final terms of the new Union Station deal will likely be submitted to the Board of Alders in August or September. The parking authority will also review and vote on that final lease before it is signed.

The outline of the potential deal described on Monday night repeated many of the high-level terms first made public at that Union Station press conference last September. Those include:

• The state, which owns Union Station, will lease the property to the city for 35 years with two 10-year extension options. The new agreement would replace the existing city-state lease, which expires in 2022.

• The city will have the parking authority operate, staff, and maintain Union Station, as it does today. ​“The city is selecting us to be the station manager, the parking manager, and the brokerage manager,” Rini told the parking authority commissioners Monday night. ​“The one in charge of developing and pushing forward all the future development.”

• A new Union Station Operations Committee will have final sign-off on all upgrades to the station proposed and, if approved, implemented by the parking authority. That committee will replace the current joint advisory committee that makes many of those same decisions today.

• A total of 600 new parking spaces will be built on the Union Station campus. That may be all in one new garage on the eastern lot, or spread across two different parking and transit oriented development (TOD) structures on the eastern and western lots. The 600-space parking number marks a reversal from the intentions of the previous gubernatorial administration, which for years pushed to build a new $60 million, seven-level, 1,015-space parking garage atop the surface lot adjacent to the station’s current garage. Local public transportation advocates, planners, and environmentalists pushed hard against the state for years to drop the parking garage plan.

• The basement, first and second floors of the station will be revamped to allow for new retail options, restaurants, and improved pedestrian access to the upper levels.

The scale of these redevelopment plans, Hausladen said, ​“is in the realm of $100 million and, when you consider the private sector, could be upwards of $200 million, depending on the size of the development east lot.”

Where will that funding come from? Still to be determined, Hausladen said. Some will likely come from state bonds, some from parking authority bonds, some from federal grants, and some from a public-private deal with a developer — perhaps in the form of a ground lease or a public land sale of the eastern lot (that is, the surface parking lot on the downtown side of Union Station).

“It’s going to be creative to get to that overall figure,” Hausladen told the Independent on Tuesday.

Many of those funding decisions will be made after the city-state lease is signed and after the city puts out requests for proposals for two phases worth of redevelopment work.

On Monday night, Hausladen told the commissioners that the predevelopment work still needing to be done at Union Station is ​“in the realm of $100,000.” Not all of that work needs to be done before the final proposed lease between the city and the state is submitted to the Board of Alders, but it should be done before the city puts out a RFQ.

Since the parking authority is slated to manage this project for the city and the state, parking authority commissioner Larry Stewart asked, shouldn’t the authority get some kind of management fee for doing all this work?

Hausladen said that there are a number of benefits to the parking authority continuing to manage Union Statin — and overseeing a larger redeveloped transit hub.

For one, allocating the parking authority’s current administrative costs across more garages keeps parking prices down . ​“That keeps us competitive and means we can manage more parking and provide more services to the City of New Haven,” he said.

“We’re going to be compensated appropriately and justly,” Hausladen added, saying that the parking authority will get a percentage of overall revenue generated by the station and will be directly compensated for the time and labor of parking authority staffers who work directly at the station.

Plus, he said, locking in a 35-year deal with two 10-year extensions ​“keeps us in business for 55 years.”