WATERBURY AWARDED $200K GRANT TO
STUDY FREIGHT STREET CORRIDOR
WATERBURY,
Conn. – Mayor Neil M. O’Leary praised the announcement Tuesday by Governor Dannel
P. Malloy that Waterbury will be awarded a $200,000 state grant to assess and
determine the cost of cleaning the Freight Street corridor.
Waterbury
recently competed among 34 applicants that requested a total of $15 million. In
the end, 12 applications were chosen to share $7 million.
“I’m proud of the collaborative effort that
resulted in Waterbury being awarded this grant,” Mayor O’Leary said. “It was an
extremely competitive process. Receiving this grant says a lot about the hard work
of everyone on our team.”
The Mayor
led a team of representatives from Waterbury that traveled to Hartford earlier
this year to make the City’s case for the grant. Among team members were CEO Todd
Montello of the Waterbury Development Corporation, Mayoral Advisor Kevin M.
DelGobbo, noted land-use attorney Gary B. O’Connor and the City’s environmental
consultant Arthur Bogen.
Waterbury
leads the state in identifying and redeveloping brownfields, which are
contaminated industrial sites that have been abandoned.
“Remediating
and redeveloping these sites helps jumpstart local economies by rehabilitating
areas, putting them back into use for development and creating jobs for
residents,” Malloy said.
The grant
will give Waterbury the opportunity to assess the level of contamination on the
site and bring it forward to the state Department of Energy and Environmental
Protection and the federal Environmental Protection Agency.
“For 30
years this property has sat dormant. My administration is moving forward with plans
to redevelop it, bringing business and residential development that will add to
our tax rolls,” O’Leary said. “It’s been a long time coming.”
The Freight
Street corridor has a development potential like no other site in the Central
Naugatuck Valley because it sits in the heart of a transportation hub: Route 8
and Interstate 84 are literally seconds away by car, the Metro-North train
station is just around the corner on Meadow Street, bus locations are nearby,
and it will be near the planned Naugatuck River Greenway.
“The Freight Street corridor represents our
last major redevelopment opportunity with the potential to transform our City,”
Mayor O’Leary said. “We are grateful to Governor Malloy for recognizing the
importance of Freight Street to our City’s future and for all he has done and
continues to do for Waterbury.”