The Middletown Press (Middletown, CT)
Yale, hospital buildings bring city cash
Building permits total millions
NEW HAVEN — Cranes, scaffolding and work crews across the city bring muchneeded money to the city’s treasury, and no checks are bigger than those sent to Building Official Jim Turcio by Yale University and Yale New Haven Health.
Turcio starts out each budget year counting on more than $3 million combined in building permit fees from New Haven’s two largest employers and occupiers of much of the city’s real estate.
While both the university and the health complex that includes Yale New Haven Hospital are mostly tax exempt, that doesn’t mean they don’t pay the city a large chunk of money every year.
“My budget starts off at $6.6 million,” Turcio said. He expects at least $1.5 million in permit fees each from Yale and Yale New Haven, plus $3.6 million from other residents and businesses doing “your normal roofing, siding, bathroom, kitchen remodels, building remodels.”
“It’s nice to start off at $6.6 (million) every year. You already know you’re going to get that amount,” he said. Then there are the years with big projects that bring in large fees. This year is budgeted for $17.9 million, helped by the planned Neurosciences Center at Yale New Haven’s St. Raphael
campus, where two new buildings will go up, moving the hospital’s entrance from Chapel Street to George Street.
That will be built above the McGivney Advanced Surgery Center, which “was a year in planning and a year and a half to get it designed and built,” according to Stephen Carbery, vice president of facilities, design, construction and real estate for Yale New Haven Health.
For the first half of 2019, permits from Yale or Yale New Haven totaled $7.6 million, based on $252.2 million worth of work on buildings throughout the city. That amount was inflated from a normal year because of upfront payments for the Neurosciences Center.
So far, Yale New Haven has paid the city $2,899,987.10 in permit fees based on $95,835,000 in new construction. That is part of a promised $8.9 million in prepaid fees for what will become an $838 million project, occupying 505,000 square feet of space. “We hope to cut the ribbon in December of 2023,” Carbery said.
New Haven charges $50.26 for the first $1,000 of construction and $30.26 for each additional $1,000. And little jobs can add up.
The 231 permits issued in the first half of 2019 average $33,090.17, but 96 of them cost less than $500. They are for electrical and mechanical work, sprinklers and exploratory demolition. They include exhaust and ventilation work, roofing, signs, fire alarms and even temporary tents.
At the university, with a central and medical campus, plus Yale Bowl and athletic fields, totaling more than 400 buildings on 340 acres, renovation and maintenance are continual. But it wasn’t always that way.
“Twenty, 25 years ago, we weren’t getting permits out of Yale,” Turcio said. But starting in 1993, Yale launched “the largest building and renovation program since its transformation during the period between the World Wars,” according to “A Framework for Campus Planning,” published in 2000.
ThenPresident Richard Levin wrote that the Yale Corporation, “contemplating the enormous task before us … decided to tackle the problems of our decaying physical infrastructure.”
Yale renovated all 12 of its residential colleges, then built two more on the north end of campus. The Robert Sterndesigned Pauli Murray and Benjamin Franklin colleges on Prospect Street boosted the fiscal 2015 permit fees to $17.4 million. Other projects have included a renovated Yale Bowl, built in 1914.
Next year, in addition to continued construction to turn Yale Commons into the Stephen A. Schwarzman Center, there will be major renovation work at the Yale Peabody Museum of Natural History and Kline Biology Tower, neighbors in Yale’s Science Hill area.
Besides these major projects, Turcio said, “Yale’s always preserving buildings. The normal permits they pull now are just maintenance on all these buildings.”
And Yale is doing much more than quick fixes. “You see some of the best work you’re going to see as a building inspector at Yale and at the hospital,” Turcio said. “It makes our jobs a lot easier. As a building official they’re open to me. A lot of times contractors will be our point person” on a project.
Turcio said the public soon will be able to keep an eye on building and renovation projects in the city. “Very soon, sometime this year, you’ll be able to go online and print whatever you want, any changes to any building,” he said. The Building Inspection and Enforcement Department has been digitizing its records back to the 1860s.