An image from a few years back showing what the road could look like.
DERBY — On paper, the shovel-in-the ground start date for the Route 34/Main Street widening project is spring of 2021.
But interviews with local and regional officials show there are hurdles to be cleared if that start date is to be met.
The Derby Mayor’s Office and the Naugatuck Valley Council of Governments (NVCOG) talked about three hurdles during interviews this week with The Valley Indy:
1. United Illuminating, after three years, has not provided a final plan detailing how the company will relocate its infrastructure. Once UI submits its plan, it will have to be reviewed, a process that could take time and cause additional planning complications (a statement from UI is posted at the bottom of this article). This information is from Rick Dunne, NVCOG’s executive director.
2. Frontier, the telecommunications company, made it known that relocating some of its equipment on Elizabeth Street/Route 34 would cost $2 million and add another year to the project. That section of the Route 34 widening project is being tweaked so that Frontier will not have to move its equipment, causing planning complications. This information is also from Dunne.
3. The state Department of Transportation (DOT) is balking at spending money on items such as decorative lighting for the widened Main Street. This worries the mayor’s office and NVCOG, who point out such items were part of the discussions from the start and are needed to prevent the expanded Route 34 from looking like a Jersey Turnpike-type monstrosity plopped into downtown Derby.
“We’re sitting here having to make the case as to why we need decorative street lighting on our Main Street,” Andrew Baklik, Mayor Rich Dziekan’s chief of staff, said. “The DOT is saying ‘you could just put cobra heads,’ the tall street lights, but the city has been saying for years that we want to maintain a Main Street feel. That has always been a caveat of this project, and a major condition of this project all along. It’s not supposed to be a freeway.”
Baklik and Dunne noted gave city-owned land to the state for the project with the understanding the city’s requests would be accomodated.
The widening project has been in the planning phase for years, as Baklik noted. The goal is to improve traffic flow, which bottlenecks in downtown Derby. Route 34 is a state road that gives access to Route 8 and leads into New Haven where motorists can hop on I‑95.
The project is a partnership, essentially, between the state Department of Transportation and the Naugatuck Valley Council of Governments with input from the City of Derby.
Back in 2017 the project’s engineers posted a video to YouTube illustrating what the road could look like. Don’t take every aspect of the image literally, as the design has been tweaked some since then:
The city and state demolished buildings on the south side of Main Street in anticipation of the road’s widening. The undeveloped Derby Redevelopment Zone is there, too.
The area is often derided on social media, where it is often compared to “bombed out” countries.
The NVCOG website describing the widening project still notes construction is “scheduled to start in the late summer or early fall of 2020.”
In February, the Derby mayor’s office said the project would go out to bid in August or September. Now it’s the end of the year.
In the weeks before COVID-19 hit Connecticut, Carmen DiCenso, Derby’s part-time economic development liaison, told The Valley Indy that Derby needs help, and called on the city’s representatives in Hartford to move the project forward.
The state last took down buildings on Main Street to make room for the widened road in March 2019 (at that point officials said the project would go out to bid that summer).
The Valley Indy asked about the status of the Route 34 widening project when Gov. Ned Lamont held a press conference in Ansonia last week to announce Derby’s neighbor was getting an economic development grant.
Lamont referred to state Rep. Kara Rochelle, who attended the press conference along with state Sen. George Logan.
Rochelle said the City of Derby was completing paperwork, referred to Baklik for additional information, and noted the construction’s start date was spring 2021.
Rochelle also mentioned the state of the economy — which is a mess because of the economic impact of the COVID-19 pandemic.
That raises the question — is there a chance the state could mothball the Route 34 widening project, and cite the economy as the reason?
“We’re too far into it. The state would never want to repay the millions of dollars to the federal government for not building the road,” said Dunne, NVCOG’s executive director. “It would not make sense financially because the state would have to pay millions to the federal government.”
Dunne said the construction of the road was estimated in 2010 to be about $11 million. That price has escalated by another $3 million to $4 million mostly due to complicated work to map and plan where to put utilities, Dunne said.
That price doesn’t include what the state spent on acquiring property, demolishing buildings and the purchase of rights of way along the route (budgeted at $8 million) Dunne said.
Click here for a detailed project description.
In response to a Valley Indy inquiry, UI issued the following reply, noting the company is still working to finalize its plan:
“The Route 34 Main Street Derby Reconstruction is an important project that will benefit to the community and support economic development in the city and the Naugatuck Valley. UI is fully supportive of this project, and has been working in collaboration with the state Department of Transportation and its contractor as they finalize the project design,” UI said through spokesman Ed Crowder.
“This is a complicated project that requires active coordination among multiple parties, including the state, the city, construction companies, and utilities such as UI and telecommunications companies. Over the course of the planning phase, several changes have been made to the design in order to avoid costly relocation of the utility infrastructure. UI has worked with the state and its contractor to accommodate these changes, which will be reflected in the final plan presented by the contractor.”
