Fiscal Year Starts With Millions At Risk

A rush of last-minute customers got the city to its goal for permit fees for the fiscal year ending Thursday — as new political events put projections for the new year into doubt.

Dozens of developers and contractors flooded the city’s building department counter on 200 Orange St.‘s fifth floor to take out permits before fees rise Friday. The crowd included the developer of the DISTRICT project on James Street, who brought a check for over $200,000.

As a result, New Haven met its goal of taking in around $10.1 million in fees for fiscal year 2016, said city Building Official Jim Turcio.

The approved city budget for new fiscal year that begins Friday ups projected permit fees to $16.2 million.

Turcio said a big chunk of that — around $4 million — was expected to come from what seemed like a noncontroversial building project: Yale’s plan to tear down its Gibbs bio lab on Whitney Avenue and build a $70 million replacement.

But approval of a site plan for that project has been set back months, if not longer, because of a separate fight between Yale and its UNITE HERE union locals, which back a majority of the Board of Alders. (Read about that in this story.)

In previous meetings with the building department, Yale had planned to pull permits and then start putting in a foundation and footings with the aim of completing that aspect of the job by November, according to Turcio. Then work on building the new building would begin in March. All with permit fees collected safely in this fiscal year.

But to get permits, Yale needs to have its site plan approved by the City Plan Commission. Because of a new zoning amendment passed by the Board of Alders, City Plan hasn’t been able to vote on the site plan. It has to wait until the Board of Alders approves a citywide Overall Parking Plan (OPP) for Yale (even though the bio lab plans don’t require parking changes).

And the alders are taking their time in approving that OPP. It held a first committee hearing Wednesday night on that OPP, which Yale originally submitted in November to City Plan, then again this spring directly to the alders. The alders recessed the hearing after four hours Wednesday night. That means the very earliest the OPP can win approval is the end of July — and that approval does not appear certain.

Even then, the matter would then go to the full Board of Alders for approval. And the board meets only once a month in the summer. The matter would normally get a ​“first reading” at one meeting, then have to wait a month to be voted on by the full board. If that happened, then it would be September or October at the earliest that City Plan could vote to approve the site plan.

There’s an added twist, Turcio said: The city puts into place a new version of the state building code on Sept. 30. That new version is stricter in many areas than the old code, he said. If Yale’s Gibbs site plan doesn’t win approval by that Sept. 30 deadline, Yale would have to redraw the plans and start over.

So he’s worried about that permit fee income.

“I don’t think they’re going to get the plan in by Oct. 1,” Turcio said.

In the meantime, Yale has proceeded with plans to demolish the existing building in September. The demolish plan is in the midst of a 90-day waiting period required for historic buildings.

The city also projected about $500,000 in permit fees for a planned housing-retail-office project in the Hill to be built by developer Randy Salvatore, according to Turcio. But that deal, too, appeared to have unraveled last week at the Board of Alders after six months of negotiations that seemed to have made approval likely.

The fiscal year begins with another potential budget-buster, not of the city’s making: The budget-strapped state Judicial Department decided to stop running the predetention prisoner lock-up at 1 Union Ave. The police department is taking over the facility as of 11 p.m. Thursday. That will cost a projected $1.75-$2 million a year. Officials are looking for less expensive alternative management plans.