CT’s long, winding trip to fix a short stretch of Route 9

By Mark Pazniokas

The Connecticut Mirror

On the first day of summer in 2016, Gov. Dannel P. Malloy and transportation officials greeted reporters on a sunny parking deck in Middletown, a spot affording views of a placid bend in the Connecticut River and a treacherous half-mile of state highway.

AUBURNDALE, FL

- Barbara Thompson, 60, of Auburndale, FL, passed away June 30, 2022, at Good Shepherd Hospice Auburndale, Florida. She was born on April 17, 1962, in Southington, Connecticut, to Joseph Picard and Jane (Riedinger) Picard.

Barbara loved almost all outdoor activities. She enjoyed gardening, having fun with her family and friends, swimming, going on cruises, and taking vacations just enjoying the goodness of being with her family and friends. Barbara’s favorite color was purple.

The color purple has been associated with royalty and peace, and that is what Barbara’s family and friends felt being around her. She was an outstanding person full of love and joy, her smile clearly says it all. Her presence will truly be missed, but her love, kindness, and bright smile will forever live on in the hearts of all that knew and loved her.

Barbara is survived by her loving husband, Thomas Thompson, Auburndale, FL, her mother, Jane Picard, Auburndale FL, two brothers, Bruce and Brian Picard and a host of nieces, nephews, cousins, aunts, and uncles. She was preceded in death by her father, Joseph Picard.

They came to announce a solution to a puzzle: How to remove two sets of traffic lights on Route 9, a contributor to about 260 crashes in three years on what otherwise is a limited-access highway, without cutting off the city’s riverfront or its rebounding downtown.

Building two bridges to allow northbound traffic to exit into the downtown under raised southbound lanes was the “minimalist” answer, as described then by the state’s chief highway engineer. Malloy urged patience: A final design and construction would take years, completion unlikely before 2023.

Seven years later, Connecticut has a new governor, the state Department of Transportation has a new commissioner, and Middletown has a new mayor. But as another summer approaches, the signals remain on Route 9, snarling traffic on a highway connecting I-91 and I84 in Greater Hartford to Old Saybrook, I-95 and shoreline beaches.

It turns out the Rubik’s Cube nature of highway doovers how to fix one problem without creating two others is harder than it looks.

Responding to concerns about the concept Malloy presented and revisions that followed, the DOT is now working on Alternative 11, assessing suggestions by Middletown officials in November. Alternative 1, the plan presented in 2016 and revised after public input, remains in contention.

DOT now aims to settle on a conceptual design by June 2024, produce construction drawings by November 2025, seek bids a few months later, then start construction in June 2026 exactly one decade after Malloy’s press conference.

The complexities of redesigning a relatively short stretch of highway to the satisfaction of myriad stakeholders around Middletown, a city of 47,000 at the center of the state, has been an instructive, if humbling, undertaking for a shortstaffed DOT with far greater ambitions and challenges.

Notably, the delay hasn’t drawn criticism from Middletown’s mayor, Ben Florsheim, or his predecessor, Dan Drew, who both attended the 2016 news conference. Or from Rep. Roland Lemar, a New Haven Democrat and close observer of the DOT as cochair of the Transportation Committee.

“It’s because DOT has been responsive and open to suggestions from the local community about how to ensure that that roadway serves the city of Middletown, not divides it,” Lemar said. “Taking a more deliberative and more community-focused approach has led to delay, but it’s a good one. ”

Highway designers have revised plans repeatedly at the request of Middletown, meeting monthly with city officials as they attempt to balance concerns about river views and access with potential impacts on downtown traffic, historic properties, railroad tracks and an isolated and long-neglected neighborhood, Miller-Bridge.

“It feels to me like we’ve been listened to,” said Florsheim, who succeeded Drew as mayor in 2019. Drew offered a similar assessment and added, “I think everybody knew it was a very complicated project that required a lot of public input.”

Still, others have stopped following the twists and turns of a slowly evolving reality show about a highway makeover. They just want to know how it all ends.

“I am horribly cynical at this point about the process, and I don’t think without reason,” said Dmitry D’Alessandro, the owner of a downtown framing shop and a Miller-Bridge resident. “I don’t care anymore. They’ve said that they’re going to finally do it. I will believe them when they finally do it.”

Don Shubert, the president of the Connecticut Construction Industries Association, said the painfully slow process of birthing highway projects, often more tied to regulatory and permitting issues than public reaction, long has frustrated an industry with an insatiable appetite for work.

“Ten years from conception to construction all over the country is far too

See Route 9, A7 long,” Shubert said. “We need a process where we’re not doing everything, then stepping back and doing it all over again.”

Shubert was speaking generally, not about the repeated reviews and revisions of the Route 9 project. He acknowledged that remaking highways in built-out areas is especially complicated.

“There’s no easy digging in Connecticut,” he said.

Connecticut, like much of the U.S., is deep in a reappraisal of how the construction of tens of thousands miles of highways in the 1950s, ’60s and ’70s hollowed out American cities, carved up neighborhoods and walled off natural assets like the Connecticut River in Hartford and Middletown.

Much of that highway infrastructure, such as the I-84 viaduct that bisects and overshadows a long swath of Hartford, is nearing the end of useful life. The need for rebuilding comes in a time when best practices call for transportation plans that are multi-modal tapestries, woven to connect communities.

Michael Calabrese, the chief of highway design, said the DOT has been paying increasing attention to “ context-sensitive design” for 25 of his 27 years at the agency.

“Basically, it’s go out and talk to the public,” he said.

“The more you talk to people, the more you can figure out the best solution for everybody. So for Connecticut, it’s not a recent mind shift. We’ve been doing this for a long time. So projects just take a while.”

Earlier generations of highway designers focused on the most efficient ways of moving cars from Point A to Point B, less so with the impacts on the communities through which they passed, destroying some neighborhoods and isolating others.

“There has been a cultural change,” said Garrett Eucalitto, the commissioner of DOT.

With a background in transportation planning and finance, both in Hartford and in Washington, Eucalitto embodies and reinforces that change. He was recruited by his predecessor, Joseph Giulietti, and groomed to take over when Giulietti retired in January at the start of Gov. Ned Lamont’s second term.

“We’ve seen the impact of the past decisions. You look at what happened to Hartford,” Eucalitto said, referring to the impact of highways built a half-century ago. “And it had lasting damage on the community that now we’re going to have to undo.”

Three years ago, the DOT halted work on how to replace the Hartford viaduct and accepted a challenge from a public-private partnership to think more broadly and much, much bigger.

Designers shifted to working on a conceptual plan for reconstructing not just I-84 but its riverfront interchange with I-91, a section of I-91 that stands between the downtown and river and, possibly, the clover-leaf exchanges that consume acres of valuable land on the other side of the river in East Hartford.

Costing billions and requiring 15 years to complete, it would be the mother of all highway makeovers.

“The goal is this summer to roll it out publicly: ‘Here are early-action projects. Here are the pieces. And here’s

See Route 9, A8