(The following story by Don Stacom appeared on The Hartford Courant website on March 10, 2009.)
HARTFORD, Conn. — The biggest piece of Connecticut’s federal stimulus aid for transportation will be used to replace a deteriorated Amtrak bridge in Branford and refurbish a stretch of the Merritt Parkway in Trumbull and Fairfield, a panel agreed Monday.
“This gets a lot of people working and it does projects that your DOT believes are essential,” Transportation Commissioner Joseph Marie told the Recovery Working Group in a meeting at the Capitol.
The panel approved Marie’s proposal to allocate up to $143.8 million for those two projects, along with $58.2 million for a series of smaller jobs ranging from bridge repairs in Enfield and Westport to overhead sign replacement for highways throughout the state.
As the panel discussed how to get the most work for the money, state Rep. Anthony Guerrera, D- Rocky Hill, and co-chairman of the transportation committee, said that the primary goal must be to get the money out fast to the state’s beaten-down construction contractors.
“The industry out there is paralyzed. I’m hearing unless this is going by summer, there’s going to be more unemployment and you’ll see some of the smaller companies folding up,” Guerrera said.
John Olsen, president of the state AFL-CIO, warned against spending money to benefit out-of-state companies or workers.
“I’m concerned about local labor. There’s a lot of unemployment out there,” he said. “We should try to use local materials, local labor.”
Lisa Moody, chief of staff for Gov. M. Jodi Rell, said that Connecticut will write its contracts to ensure they benefit local businesses and workers as much as the law permits.
Bids for the Amtrak bridge and Merritt Parkway work are already out, and contractors’ price quotes will be submitted by the end of the month. To expedite the process, the state Department of Transportation has begun advertising many of the smaller jobs, too, advising bidders that the work might be funded through stimulus grants.
“It behooves us to get all of these started before the construction season runs out,” Marie said.
The DOT chose high-priority projects that could be started quickly, but it also tried to spread funding around the state and between different types of projects so that the maximum number of workers would benefit. So rather than spending everything on repaving, the state will include guard rail work, traffic signal installation and reconstruction of bridges, Marie said.
The complex formula divvying up President Barack Obama’s $787 billion stimulus program gives Connecticut $302 million for repairing roads and bridges. The DOT will spend 70 percent on state projects, and individual regions will use the rest for local projects. It will award another $137 million for mass transit, with most of that total going to regional transit planning areas. The DOT wants to use its share of that fund to replace its oldest buses.
“Our bus fleet is getting old, well past midlife crisis,” Marie said.