Highway Chief Explains FFH Grant, Demolition, Road Repairs

By John Voket

The mystery about a $30,000 state bond commission action earlier this month, initially earmarked for a study on stormwater runoff from state facilities on the Fairfield Hills property, has been turned into actual hands-on remediation. Local Public Works Director Fred Hurley told The Bee this week that a somewhat mysterious bond initiative for a Fairfield Hills project was traced back to a long-ago request by the state Department of Public Works for a stormwater runoff study.

But Mr Hurley said while the bureaucracy in Hartford churned slowly through conception, planning, and requesting funds for the study over a period of years, town crews at Fairfield Hills were closing off and filling in a series of tunnels that DPW officials originally cited as part of the reason for the study.

Once all parties involved came to the table together and realized bonding for a study was not necessary, state officials were able to apply the $30,000 bond to remediating most of the remaining utility tunnels in question of hazardous materials.

Mr Hurley said the company Aais Corp of West Haven, which just completed a remediation project for the town at Litchfield Hall demolition site, is also doing the work across the street on the state property.

“They are a qualified vendor for the state of Connecticut,” Mr Hurley said. “So they came to that job on a completely separate contract.

Regarding the almost completed razing of the former hospital building adjacent to the Newtown Youth Academy and Newtown Municipal Center, Mr Hurley said the huge pieces of steel and the thousands of bricks and other salvageable materials are being taken away by the demolition vendor.

He said that negotiating for the demolition company to also remove the materials from the site helped bring the overall projected cost of the job “from $1 million, down to around $600,000.” The public works chief said that if the town had to contract separately for the sorting and removal of demolition debris, it likely would have driven up the overall cost of the project between $300,000 and $400,000 or more.

“Our experience is there is a definite advantage to having the demolition company also do the recovery and removal work, and it is an extremely common practice in private and public sector construction work,” Mr Hurley added.

On the local front, the highway official said he was not thrilled to hear about a day of rain predicted for Wednesday, because it would further stall his crews who were working diligently to fill or erase the worst areas of plow or water damage to Newtown’s streets.

He said while the state roads are in the hands of the state Department of Transpiration, his crews are following and patching along the patterns of town plowing routes. With stretches of fair weather predicted for Friday and next Monday, he was counting on getting repair crews back out to make the most of it.

“We also make intersections a priority, when they don’t involve state roads, because of the increased traffic hazards that exist regardless of the physical road conditions,” he said.