Shelton Mayor Mark Lauretti didn’t want to be in City Hall Friday afternoon.
“I just want to say two things and then I’ll keep my mouth shut,” Lauretti joked with U.S. Sen. Chris Murphy inside the mayor’s office. “Number one, I should be playing golf right now. Number two, does Sen. Blumenthal know we’re meeting?”
Ribbing Blumenthal’s love of news cameras wasn’t the only reason the mayor eschewed a trip to the links. On Friday he and other officials updated Murphy on Shelton’s downtown redevelopment — and asked him to help obtain federal funding to keep it moving forward.
Murphy said he’s trying to spend as much time as he can when not in Washington visiting old brownfield sites so he can lobby the feds on Connecticut’s behalf.
“A lot of what I’m trying to do is be able to bring back more stories, more empirical evidence of the need, so that I can win more money out of the appropriations process in Washington,” the senator said.
Murphy noted the Route 8 corridor has plenty former factories and industrial buildings, several of which are concentrated in downtown Shelton, which is in the midst of a decades-long redevelopment from manufacturing center to residential district.
Such properties, Murphy said, point to the fact that “the country owes us a debt that they haven’t paid.”
“The fact is this country grew economically because of the industrial revolution that occurred here in New England,” Murphy said. “So the whole reason that South Carolina and Alabama and Texas get to grow today economically is because we grew 100 years ago. But we grew when we didn’t know what we were putting into the walls and what we were putting into the ground.”
“We now have a bill that the whole country needs to help us pay,” Murphy went on. “The whole country got the benefit of the industrial expansion that happened in the northeast.”
While the fiscally conservative Lauretti said he’s not always a fan of state and federal spending, “the brownfields initiative is a real star for government because, at the end of the day, you take properties that are unproductive and have been unproductive for 25, 40, 50 years, and get them back on the tax rolls with private investment at the table.”
“How is that not a good thing?” Lauretti went on. “And I think Shelton is a shining example of that.”
Case in point — the Birmingham condominiums, a former corset factory on Canal Street immediately north of the Derby-Shelton bridge.
The long-vacant building had been contributing $4,000 yearly in tax revenue to the city’s bottom line. After it was redeveloped, the figure jumped to $400,000.
To the north of the Birmingham, the 250-unit Avalon apartments, formerly the site of a defunct asphalt plant, opened in 2013 and were fully leased within six weeks.
And there are plans on the table to redevelop the old Spongex building to the south of the Derby-Shelton bridge into apartments, with the developer building a new road connecting Canal Street to the bridge and adding commercial and retail space to the south of the new road.
That proposal is on the agenda of a Planning and Zoning Commission meeting scheduled for Tuesday (Jan. 12) at 7 p.m. in City Hall.
Lauretti said Friday that the city also plans to extend its Riverwalk north for several miles, past an old canal lock off the Housatonic River that gives the street, which is itself being rebuilt, its name.
Across Canal Street, the long-abandoned Chromium Process sits empty, and the city has obtained about $1 million in grants to clean it up and demolish it.
The mayor said that the city, which obtained the property through a tax foreclosure, needs about $600,000 more to get the building taken down, with a short-term view to capping the site as a possible location for parking.
He hoped Murphy could help get that money into the city’s coffers.
Parking is a major concern among residents downtown.
Lauretti has said in the past that a high demand for parking is a good problem to have, a point he reiterated Friday when asked if there’s a long-term plan for the Chromium Process property other than parking.
“I don’t want to commit to anything right now,” Lauretti said. “Our goal is to get it environmentally clean, get the building down and get the site leveled and we’ll decide in the future what it’s going to be.”
