nothin Hardball Worked | New Haven Independent

Hardball Worked

Paul Bass Photo

Holmes outside City Hall after “historic” vote.

New Haven lawmakers made quick work Tuesday night of giving Yale University the go-ahead to spend hundreds of millions of dollars on construction projects.

That go-ahead came in the form of two votes taken at a meeting of the Board of Alders — votes that were remarkable not for their unanimous support and seemingly routine nature, but for their contrast to the many months of hardball that preceded them.

One of the votes was an approval of Yale’s overall parking plan” (OPP) for much of its campus in New Haven.

Alders had held up that plan, through delays and other maneuvers, for much of this year — after passing a new rule that Yale must have that plan approved before it can proceed with building projects. In brass tacks, that meant Yale had to hold off on starting to build a 280,000-square-foot replacement for its J. W. Gibbs Laboratory off Whitney Avenue in the Science Hill” part of campus. City Building Inspector Jim Turcio said Tuesday that Yale plans to spend over $120 million building the project, which will bring in $4 million in building permit fees that the city had counted on for this fiscal year.

Now Yale can proceed with obtaining expected City Plan Commission approval, just in time before an Oct. 1 deadline under which it would have had to start the planning and approval process all over (because a new state building code will take effect).

The second vote Tuesday night paved the way for Yale to move ahead with gaining other approvals to spend more than $150 million remaking its Commons area into a new student center, without undergoing the same alder parking-plan approval process that stalled Gibbs.

For much of this year, alders affiliated with Yale’s UNITE HERE union locals have been able to use the OPP process to demonstrate that the city’s legislative body can exert control over the university — at a time when several campus controversies have worsened labor-management tensions.

But then Yale found a way to turn the tables last month and play hardball as well. It threatened to delay an annual $5.6 million voluntary” payment it makes to the city (actually, payment stems from a broader agreement Yale negotiated with New Haven to settle numerous controversies) unless one of that UNITE HERE-employed alders personally asked for the money. The threat endangered the city’s bond rating with the threat of ending a fiscal year with a $5.6 million deficit. (Click here to read a full story about that.) The threat also brought the Harp administration, leading alders and Yale officials together finally to hammer out some differences and enable both the $5.6 million payment to come through in August and the building projects to move ahead. As revealed by the matters on which the alders voted Tuesday night.

Throughout the process, the alders said they were using the approval process to push Yale to take more responsibility for solving street-parking shortages in city neighborhoods caused by their commuting employees.

Hardball politics worked: Depending on your view, the alders’ tactics forced an historically unaccountable university to respond to public demands about a pressing issue, or else Yale’s voluntary” payment blackmail forced politicians to quit holding up needed development for unrelated reasons.

Either way, when the smoke cleared Tuesday night, a stand-off with such high stakes was settled with what may have seemed like penny-ante concessions.

Maybe Perhaps Build A Lot

Marchand, right, consults with Beaver Hills Alder Jill Marks before the meeting.

Those concessions were spelled out in an amendment that East Rock Alder Jessica Holmes introduced at Tuesday night’s board meeting before the approval.

At a hearing on July 27, fellow alder Adam Marchand of Westville had originally drafted language requiring Yale to build a new parking lot in Hamden where commuters could leave their cars and take the shuttle to campus. for commuters. The revised language approved Monday night — the result of negotiations between Yale officials and leading alders — requires Yale to “[g]auge interest in park-and-ride options for Yale commuters coming from the north side of campus. The city and Yale will look into the lots at (1) Mitchell Drive and Willow Street and (2) the lot near the city skating rink on State Street. If sufficient interest (at least 100 people) is shown by Yale commuters, then Yale will develop a pilot program for either a carpool lot or extended Yale Shuttle service to create the park-and-ride option for Yale commuters.”

This is great,” Dixwell Alder Jeanette Morrison remarked from the floor before the vote. She said since she took office five years ago, her neighbors living around Winchester Avenue have complained about losing their street parking to Yale employees. Now, she said, her neighborhood may be able to park in front of their houses.”

Alder Holmes called the deal worked out by the alders and Yale an historic agreement” that addresses longstanding issues of parking and transit.”

The language passed in the amendment also requires Yale to subsidize 50 percent of CT Transit costs for up to nine months for any employee who has parking in the university’s system for at least three months.

At the July hearing, Marchand had introduced a requirement to the approval process, that Yale work with the city to improve bicycle infrastructure to connect neighborhoods of New Haven to Yale’s Campus and to Downtown.” He said afterwards that that would hopefully include paying for a new protected cycletrack from perhaps the north or southern borders of town.

The amendment approved Tuesday night contains no mention of that, but rather repeats the general language about working with city government to improve infrastructure.

I congratulate Yale University on its engagement with board,” Marchand declared. We are helping to get cars off the street improve our carbon footprint,” and improve air quality.

The amendment approved Tuesday night also establishes a process to avoid some of these dramatic showdowns over future building projects. It allows the university to ask the alders to establish at the beginning of a building plan request whether the plan requires a formal change to its overall parking plan. That way —such as in future cases like the Gibbs laboratory, which involved no new parking —Yale will know it won’t have to spend a half year or more waiting for an extra new approval from the alders, on top of needed zoning and City Plan approvals.

Moat Vote

Yale VP Lauren Zucker said she was “happy” with the results of Tuesday night’s votes.

To that end, the process can work the way it did in a separate vote Monday night: The alders voted unanimously to give such a green light to Yale’s plan to build a new student center at its Commons with the help of a $150 million gift from hedge funder and Yale alum Stephen Schwarzman. The alders voted that the plan requires no amendment to the overall parking plan, and therefore no special approvals from their board.

And they did it by unanimous consent.” In other words, but not requiring that Yale wait for the formal process of having an aldermanic committee meeting consider the question and then two full board meetings take place before receiving final word. The measure passed with no dissent or debate.

Yale plans to expand the first floor of its Commons dining hall by 1,700 square feet in the moat area” (now to be enclosed) by Grove Street and add 5,400 square feet to the second floor. It plans to add student meeting and acting rooms, a student lounge and cafe, a multi-purpose room, and a restoration of the Dome Room to its original function,” according to documentation it has submitted to the city. It projects that the project will not require any new parking spaces, or at least not 100 spaces, the amount needed to trigger an OPP review.

Before the meeting began, Hill Alder Dolores Colon made a reference to Labor Day in her divine guidance.

‘Union’ is not a dirty word …” she said. Many people died in this country to get workers protected in the workplace.” And, she noted, American unions created the middle class.”

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