New Haven Register (New Haven, CT)
DeLauro announces $3M toward Fair Haven Health expansion
NEW HAVEN — Fair Haven Community Health Care will be able to serve its clients, who are some of the city’s neediest families in a neighborhood full of recent arrivals, better once it it finally achieves its long-planned expansion, according to officials.
That effort got a boost Tuesday when U.S. Rep. Rosa DeLauro, D-3, announced $3 million in federal aid to help pay for a 33,500-square-foot expansion of FHCHC, located at 374 Grand Ave.
“This award is a gamechanger,” DeLauro said.
FHCHC currently is occupies three connected houses along Grand Avenue between James and Lloyd streets. The expansion project includes an entirely new, 33,500square-foot building a few doors up at Grand Avenue and James Street, as well as additional parking and renovation of the existing clinic.
The $3 million federal award is in addition to a previously announced $3 million grant from the State Bond Commission and will go toward a construction project estimated at $25 million, with total costs expected to approach $39 million or $40 million, said FHCHC CEO Dr. Suzanne Lagarde.
“For 50 years, this facility has been a leader” in providing health care to the people of Fair Haven, said DeLauro, ranking member (and former chairwoman) of the House Appropriations Committee.
“You provide a quality of care for the people in the community” and “it’s comprehensive health care,” DeLauro said. “... I’m so proud to be a partner on this mission” to provide “patient-centered care” that is culturally tuned to people’s needs, she said.
“Even as you grow, you’re able to bring highquality care” to people who need it, DeLauro said.
“It’s really impossible for me to overstate the importance of this organization to the Fair Haven community,” said Alder Sarah Miller, D-14. “Every improvement is an improvement for all of us.
“It’s really heartbreaking how people in this neighborhood” struggle to cope with and pay for “things that should be included in the social safety net,” she said.
State Rep. Juan Candelaria, D-New Haven, said FHCHC has “done an excellent job of meeting the needs of the neighborhood.”
“I’m happy to learn that our Congresswoman Rosa DeLauro was able to secure the funding that we need,” Candelaria said.
Lagarde said the work will be done in three phases, with three residential buildings behind the existing facilities along Woolsey Street coming down beginning in April, work to expand the parking lot to follow, demolition of an adjacent building to begin in July and construction of the new building scheduled to begin in August.
The third phase of the project also includes renovation of the first floor of the existing clinic building, which will lower the number of examination rooms from 28 to 20, Lagarde said.
Two $10 million allocations of federal American Rescue Plan Act funds disbursed by the state also are helping to pay for the project, said Lagarde, thanking state Sen. Martin Looney, D-New Haven, state Rep. Toni Walker, D-New Haven, Candelaria and state Rep. Al Paolillo, D-New Haven, for their roles in landing the funds.
More than 32,000 unique patients were served last year, more than 90 percent of them minorities, Lagarde has said. That same percentage also have household incomes below 200 percent of the federal poverty level, she said.