Soil Power Propels Public Works Nominee

A veteran Hamden public works employee is slated to become the town department’s next director — with plans to bring sustainability, including town-made potting soil, to the top of his agenda as well as to community members’ gardens.

That Hamden public works director to-be is Joe Colello, who currently runs the town’s transfer station. 

Mayor Lauren Garrett tapped him for the top public works job in early October. The town’s Legislative Council is slated to vote Monday evening on his appointment.

“I am thrilled to announce the appointment of Joseph Colello,” Garrett wrote in an Oct. 5 press release. ​“I trust Mr. Colello to maintain and improve Hamden’s infrastructure and grounds with care and sustainability. He has been an instrumental supervisor in Public Works, bringing innovative and sustainable methods to Hamden, including organic composting, installing a solar array at the Transfer Station, and utilizing the resources we have to improve safety and productivity.”

If backed by the council, Colello will replace long-time local public works leader Craig Cesare, whom Garrett fired earlier this year. Garrett initially selected engineering department employee Matthew Kott to head public works. Less than two months on the job and before receiving council approval, Garrett rescinded the appointment and moved Kott back to engineering, deciding that it ​“just wasn’t a good fit.” 

Colello’s potential new job includes overseeing the public works and parks departments, including crafting the departments’ budgets. 

“I am honored and humbled,” Colello told the Independent, to have been chosen by Garrett to fill the executive role.

Colello has worked for the town since 1993, beginning as a custodian for the police department and soon after serving as a general laborer for public works. 

“I started from the bottom and went through it all,” Colello said, recalling how he climbed steadily up the department’s ranks to become a truck driver, then a heavy equipment operator and later the superintendent of buildings before overseeing the town’s streets and bridges. Most recently, he has served as the department’s superintendent of waterways, sanitation and recycling.

In his current role, Colello has transformed the town’s transfer station from a home for hazardous waste to a space dedicated to harvesting solar power and recycling debris into sellable products, like wood chips and topsoil. 

Colello said the Wintergreen Avenue recycling center operated as a landfill until the mid-nineties. 

Today, its peak is covered with solar panels as part of what he estimated to have been a $2 million project that ​“didn’t cost the town a penny” through a private-public partnership with the company Solar Landscape, to whom the town leases land. The 1.2 megawatt system cuts a minimum of $30,000 annually from the town’s electric budget and generates enough power to serve roughly 180 homes each year, Colello said.

More recently, Colello has worked with the town’s administration and council to maximize recycling efforts at the station while securing the funds needed during the town’s capital budget planning session to clear out years’ worth of storm and residential debris.

Read here about the town’s move to contract landscaper Running Brook Farm to grind down years’ worth of tree limbs and leaves that previously posed a fire hazard to the town into wood chips and compost.

When the Independent visited the site Friday with Colello and Garrett, more than 100,000 cubic yards of material had been ground up into smaller piles, and wood scraps had been dyed brown and red (black dye is currently shipping) for residents and neighbors to use for landscaping projects.

The town has now also imposed tipping fees to discourage illegal dumping at the station while bringing in needed revenue, and is considering charging comparably low prices for soil and wood chips produced at the station (the council will have to vote on the latter idea first) to offset the cost of manufacturing those products on site.

In addition to those projects, Colello said his favorite thing about his job is the collaborative nature within the department.

“I’m very proud to be a very small part of this fantastic team,” Colello said. ​“We’ve been through every single type of catastrophe together,” he said, remembering when the department stayed open 24 hours for nearly 10 days to clean up after Winter Storm Nemo in 2013, which dropped more than 40 inches of snow on the town.

In addition to continuing to pave roads, plant trees, and make town buildings more energy efficient, Colello said he wants to see the department diversify the white and male concentrated field in the coming years.

For example, he said, he’d like to see the expansion of a Hamden High program named after Colello’s late best friend, Anthony Bernard Greene, a former town tree warden who died of pancreatic cancer. Following his death, the department launched a fund that paid minority students to try out public works jobs — for example, they could, as Colello put it, ​“earn while they learn” how to maintain public spaces and utilize big machinery.

Colello, who is Hamden born and raised, said he has enjoyed watching Hamden grow more diverse and ​“multicultural” during his lifetime — and witnessing a new administration focus on honoring that diversity by increasing representation throughout government jobs. 

Just as his department relies heavily on teamwork, he said, Hamden is a community oriented town. ​“Everyone has something different to offer,” he said. He said that including different public voices in all aspects of governmental decision making is key to building sustainable futures.