Nora Grace-Flood Photo
The door opens -- this time -- in library's antique elevator (above).
Hamdenites should soon be freed from fears of getting trapped between floors at the public library — and from having their government’s computer systems frozen by far-off hackers — thanks to a newly approved town-wide plan for capital spending.
The Legislative Council voted last week in favor of integrating a final batch of infrastructure investments into the town’s broader $12.85 million capital budget. Pending a final vote on how to pay for each vetted project, Hamden will have put forward its first full capital budget since 2017.
Over the course of the past month, Hamden department heads have sold the council on a number of capital proposals they deemed necessary to keep the town and its physical assets in shape. At budget workshops, officials have made elevator pitches for financing waste maintenance, refurbished firehouses, and sidewalk paving — all undertakings that the town agreed to pay for in early August. (Read more here.)
Two of the latest elevator pitches to pass by the council during last week’s capital workshops involved a replacement for the historic and crankily unpredictable elevator at Miller Memorial Library and a series of information technology investments to elevate cybersecurity.
The Miller Memorial Library elevator upgrade was previously bonded for as part of a larger library fix-up during the last full round of capital budgeting approved by the council in 2017, according to Hamden Constituent Services Director Brian Murphy. So the town still has $73,800 in existing bonded money which could be used to rebuild the lift, so long as the council agrees to transfer the funds towards Library Director Melissa Canham-Clyne’s newly specified proposed use. Canham-Clyne asked Monday for an additional $56,200 to put in a new elevator system at a total cost of $130,000.
The Dover Elevator, a final standing example of a popular model manufactured by the Dover Corporation — a leading company through the mid to late 20th century — is positioned at the back of Miller Memorial. It has stayed there since 1981, when the library was originally built.
“There have been several incidents in the past five years, in particular, of people being stuck in the elevator or the elevator being trapped between floors,” Canham-Clyne recalled.
The elevator has turned out to be an admired antique, according to Canham-Clyne, with niche YouTubers such as user “Connecticut Elevators” sharing videos of their experience riding up and down the three-storied Hamden library. But after 40 years of use, the rare hydraulic lift is “an outdated mechanical system, such to the point that when something does go wrong with the elevator, we have to rely on the service company to go looking for parts across the country to do a replacement of them,” she said.
If it’s an antique, perhaps one that would excite a certain type of eBay enthusiast, could the town sell the elevator?
When one council member asked Canham-Clyne that question, she explained that the library will actually hold onto the ’80s elevator carriage, which is in fine condition, but reengineer the mechanisms that carry that cabin from the building’s first to third floor.
Maybe in another 40 years, she suggested, the town could consider “selling the whole shebang.”
In the meantime, she said, “We want to make sure that the elevator keeps on being functional and safe.”
That same aim — functionality and security — drove the town’s IT team to push to invest in safer tech systems.
The advised measures — four new servers, additional firewalls, and bolstered switching infrastructure — followed a May cyber ransom attack that forced the town offline and limited access to town emails and information for weeks.
“We were in the middle of sending out taxes … and trying to get absentee ballots out for the primary,” said Brian Murphy, the town’s constituent services manager, who also served as a project manager for the cyberattack recovery.
Murphy recalled another event during which a switch — a device that provides connectivity to government offices across town — failed … and once again targeted the town clerk’s office, tax accessor and registrar of voters.
“The hardware was at end of life and not easy to replace,” he said. “It took over a week” to get those town officials back online.
Hamden’s IT team proposed upgrading and minimizing the amount of old hardware across town by both replacing old switching infrastructure and increasing the number of servers. That ensured that more departments that previously had their own internet are getting online thanks to internet outsourced from government center. (The police department and Board of Education will remain on separate networks.)
“We’re creating a uniform environment everyone deals with to be made as efficient as possible, as productive as possible, but also we’re able to make sure it’s done securely,” Murphy said. He noted that the town will introduce firewalls at each of the department locations around town, from public works to the Keefe Community Center, to protect against outside attacks and filter out dangerous information between the town’s internal network and the internet.
His elevator pitch for the new investment: “So much of the government runs on information technology as one of its primary infrastructures. This gets us to a place where we can feel confident that this infrastructure is less likely to fail and allows us to grow out and increase what government can do for members of the community.”
Cyberattack defender Brian Murphy.
All in all, Hamden’s libraries were promised $228,500 for a new elevator plus roof repairs and air conditioning, while $860,000 is slated to go towards the IT makeover.
The council will next vote on exactly how to fund those departments as well as six others, whether that means going out for new bonding, using existing bonded capital dollars, or taking from available cash from a recent school building sale.
In the meantime, Canham-Clyne offered a word to describe her reaction to the intent to finally fix longstanding obstacles in the way of reaching the library’s large print texts and teen magazines or getting online when municipal hackers are on the loose: “uplifting.”
Nora Grace-Flood’s reporting is supported in part by a grant from Report for America.
Another 12.85 million in new debt and skirting our minimum payments by the skin of our teeth.
I look forward to eating more of your tax dollars next budget season and the next 20 to come.