New Haven Register (Sunday) (New Haven, CT)
Beach Street Road-raising hits roadblock
WEST HAVEN — City officials believe some economic development projects along the city’s shoreline may have to wait, as an ongoing plan to use state bonding to raise Beach Street to guard against flooding during major storms has been delayed by the state permitting process.
At a May 2 town hall meeting, Mayor Nancy Rossi provided an update on the project — which received $5 million in state bonding — saying that she expects the project “should be good around September/October.”
Although the city held a public hearing on Oct. 6, 2021, offering visualizations of its plans to raise Beach Street to Elevation 11 — 11 feet above sea level — a spokesman for the state Department of Energy and Environmental Protection said the state received applications from the city in January and February for the two necessary permits.
On April 8, the city engineer received a “notice of insufficiency” letter from DEEP outlining 16 edits, revisions or areas where more information was needed before the permit applications could be granted.
A month went by before the city replied, officials with DEEP and the city said.
“We sent a partial reply on May 9, 2022, and will send the remaining reply early next week,” Rossi told the Register in an email Thursday. The DEEP spokesman said the department’s understanding is that the city is preparing its response to the notice of insufficiency.
Rossi said she believes City Hall has the staffing and expertise necessary to handle the application process, and the gaps in response time are because there’s a lot of work required through the process.
“It’s not something you do in an hour. There’s plans and consulting other engineering firms,” she said. “It takes a while but (City Engineer Abdul Quadir) is going to keep pushing it through. We want to get started.”
Last year, city officials celebrated the economic development potential of several private land transactions along the shoreline — developers purchased the sites of both the former Chick’s Drive-In and Debonair Motel. However, little has happened to advance those projects as the city awaits the state permit to raise the street, its second and third phase of a roadraising project that began in 2017.
In May 2020, state Rep. Dorinda Borer, D-West Haven, chairwoman of the House general bonding subcommittee, was instrumental in obtaining $5 million in state and federal funding to begin Phases II and III of the road-raising project.
Borer expressed disappointment that construction has not begun yet.
“It’s frustrating to work so hard to secure funding to continue to see these stalls,” she said. “Our waterfront is our greatest asset and our jewel and there’s really enough waterfront for everything: we have residential homes and open space and opportunity for development and we should capitalize on those different strengths and we’re not reaching our potential.”
According to DEEP, when the city applied for the two permits to raise the road by the West Haven Water Pollution Control Facility — the first phase of the project — both applications “were initially insufficient and required several rounds of revisions and supplementary information to be submitted.” The city’s first application was submitted in August 2017 — months before Rossi was elected as mayor — and the Phase I Flood Management Certification was issued in December 2018. The public notice of the state’s tentative determination to approve a Phase I Structures Dredging and Fill / Water Quality Certification / Tidal Wetlands permit was published in December 2018 and the final SDFTWQ license was issued in July 2019.