Hartford

For years, the northern gateway to downtown Hartford has been the somewhat smelly 14-story tall pile of trash known as the North Meadows landfill.

According to this article at the Courant, it closed today:

The landfill closes today, and the Connecticut Resources Recovery Authority, which began leasing the dump from the city in 1982, will take in its last truckloads of trash.

The 138-foot-high hill contains nearly 10 million cubic yards of municipal waste from CRRA’s 70 member towns, and ash from the agency’s trash-burning power plant in the South Meadows.[…]

As of Thursday, municipal trash that can’t be burned will be trucked to a private landfill in Chicopee, Mass. Ash residue from the South Meadows plant will be sent to a private landfill in Putnam.

CRRA is looking at a location in Franklin for a possible new ash landfill and expects to complete a study of the site in 2009.

There are no definitive plans yet for what will be done with Hartford’s infamous hill when the site-capping is completed in 2011.

Tom Condon has an interesting op-ed piece in Sunday’s Courant discussing how I-84 came to its current alignment in Hartford, and what that did to damage the city’s neighborhoods. Also included in the op-ed is word of a consultant being brought in to look at I-84’s future, as the DOT contemplates rehabilitation of the Aetna Viaduct east of Sisson Avenue:

The Hub has now completed a request for proposals to engage a consultant to study alternatives to the viaduct. The city is putting up money, and the state might as well.

If all goes well, there’ll be a report next year on how to redesign and de-emphasize I-84 with the goal of a vital and mixed-use center city — similar to what was there before the highway was built.

The consultant will look at the possibility of burying the highway, lowering and decking over it, or rerouting the interstate traffic and turning the highway into a boulevard.

Although I expect the expense of doing anything other than just repairing the viaduct will be prohibitive, I have to say that the idea of turning I-84 into a surface boulevard, diverting interstate traffic to a different alignment (probably 72-9-91-15) is intriguing.

However, there’s still a ton of commuter traffic that will have to be dealt with in any such proposal.

Seen at the Courant’s Capitol Watch blog:

Clinton will hold a town hall meeting on the economy at 9:30 a.m. [Monday, 28 January] at the Learning Corridor educational complex in Hartford, then go to Springfield. No details were immediately available on public access.

In the process, she will lose a lot of votes in north-central Connecticut, due to the rolling roadblock that the Secret Service will presumably require on I-91.

Seen in the Courant:

Residential properties not occupied by the owners should be taxed at higher rates than owner-occupied dwellings, according to a recommendation by Hartford’s Property Tax Task Force.[...]

Under a 2006 revaluation, tax increases on properties not occupied by owners — whether multifamily homes, apartments or condos — are capped at 3.5 percent. But the task force’s plan would eliminate that cap and generate an additional $23 million in tax revenue by 2010, Wareing said.

In turn, the city’s commercial property tax owners would see a significant drop in their tax burden.

The task force was assembled when implementation on the most recent revaluation in the City of Hartford was halted after folks realized the property tax on businesses would double, due to the relative inflation in commercial property values versus residential values.

Considering that the last think that already-blighted Hartford needs is to drive the few remaining homeowners and businesses outside the city, I think it’s not a horrible idea.

The Courant article mentions the understandable fear that rents would rise on rental properties. The response given is that competition from rentals in surrounding towns would keep rental prices in check…which I can only partially buy.

The fact of the matter is given the limitations on how municipalities in Connecticut can raise revenue, someone’s going to feel pain. Thus, given the unlikeliness of additional flexibility being granted to Hartford, this idea seems to be the most reasonable of all the unreasonable solutions possible.

After 2½ years of being nothing more than a four-block hole in the ground, while the state and developers squabbled over plans and site remediation, it looks like the Front Street portion of the Adriaen’s Landing development on the south end of downtown Hartford might finally be moving forward. From the Courant:

More than two years after the state picked the HB Nitkin Group to develop the residential and entertainment district that is intended to link the Connecticut Convention Center with the rest of downtown, the developers presented their final designs Friday to the state.[...]

And, should it be built, what the $60 million project will look like is this — ground-floor retail space that begins on Columbus Boulevard and wraps around the corner to bring more retail to Front Street, a central, one-way street that bisects the site.

Above the 65,000 square feet of what the architects call high-ceilinged, “large, glassy shop fronts” will be a total of 115 studios, one-bedroom, and two-bedroom apartments at roughly 550, 750 and 1,200 square feet, respectively. Behind them will be internal courtyards.

Plans are for Front Street to be primarily a dining and entertainment district, to bolster the underutilized Connecticut Convention Center and the mostly empty downtown Marriott, with perhaps a few high-end retail stores geared to catering to business folks.

Considering Hartford’s colorful past of failed or half-done urban redevelopment projects, including the 2½ year delay on Front Street, it’s hard not to be skeptical or cynical towards the project. Admittedly, downtown Hartford isn’t quite the urban wasteland it was when I moved to the area 9 years ago…but giving people an additional reason to be downtown outside business hours would good.

However, considering the location (south end of downtown, near Travelers, but not much else), and the lack of success the Convention Center has had… I’m not holding my breath on success.

Also, I’ll mention my perrennial gripe about downtown Hartford’s projects—they focus too heavily on apartments! If the powers that be really want to turn downtown around, they need to give folks a reason to be downtown and have a stake in that area’s continued improvement. If some of the new residential development could be condos geared towards younger, up-and-coming professionals, it would probably be a good thing.

I know that before my wife’s accident, back when we both worked there, we definitely would have considered buying a condo downtown, if only there had been anything nice and not outrageously expensive available.