Home Care In Madison, CT

MADISON — Construction crews have broken ground on the next phase of a new affordable housing development in town, called Wellington at Madison.

The buildings at 135-137 Cottage Road will consist of 27 units, 24 of which are designated for people who qualify for affordable housing. The 2.6-acre site already has four market-rate units on the property, bringing the total number of apartments to 31.

The four units, located at the east end of the property, were built while the project was being supervised by a different developer, said Marianne McDermott, director of fundraising and communications for The Caleb Group, a nonprofit that has created affordable housing communities in Connecticut, Massachusetts, New Hampshire and Maine. The project, she said, is in collaboration with HOPE Partnership, Inc., an Essex-based nonprofit that develops affordable housing.

“As an entity, they folded,” McDermott said of the previous developer. “That’s when The Caleb Group was called in to do this. We had to kind of start all over again.”

The Caleb Group took over the project in January 2020.

HOPE Partnership Executive Director Karla Lindquist told CT Examiner that there will be seven one-bedroom units available for households making up to 25 percent of the area median income, six one-bedroom and seven two-bedroom units for households making up to 50 percent, and four two-bedrooms for households making up to 60 percent.

The remaining units are designated as market-rate homes.

Part of the Wellington at Madison project involves remodeling the Henry Josiah Miegs House at 131 Cottage Road, erected in 1808. The exterior of the building was preserved, as well as the fireplaces and some of the original interior wood details.

Four units will be constructed within the house, McDermott said, with at least three of them expected to be affordable housing units.

“We’re excited to preserve the Miegs house and integrate it into this community,” she said. “… Every community in the United States needs affordable housing,” she said.

McDermott described Madison as a “high opportunity community” for affordable housing projects.

“The community was supportive of this and was supportive and welcoming and wanted to do this project,” she said. “Towns like that, it costs a lot to live in those communities. There are a lot of different scenarios. People do need affordable housing. It allows for people like older people or young families or working class families. Everyone would benefit from living in a community like Madison.”

The community will hopefully be finished in about a year’s time, she added.

For people looking to apply for the housing units, registration dates have not yet been determined.

“We try not to start a list a year in advance,” she said. “Sometimes it offers false promises. When we have a strong sense of when the property will be completed, we’ll start on applications. The property manager will be beginning a list. People express interest before the project is even completed.”

Depending on the amount of applicants, McDermott said, there may be a lottery. Once applications open, they will be available on the HOPE Partnership website and managed by Demarco Management Corporation.

“With the amount of interest I have been receiving over the past year and a quarter, we’re definitely not concerned we’ll need to advertise it,” Lindquist said.

First Selectman Peggy Lyons said Thursday that she was excited to see more affordable housing being built, adding that the town is working toward the 10 percent affordable housing goal set by the state.

“Most communities have struggled with that. In some ways it’s an unrealistic goal. It’s a challenge,” she said.

One challenge, she explained, is that it’s more cost effective to build dense housing. But there’s a lack of infrastructure in town to accommodate larger communities with affordable housing, she said, plus residents don’t want larger units.

“What’s nice about this is it’s sort of a sweet spot,” she said. “It’s able to operate with a septic system and it’s creating housing options for people.”

Though the project offers more options for Madison residents, Lyons noted there can’t be preferential treatment for locals in the application process.

“I think it’s going to be a great addition to our town,” she said. “We’re excited to see it launched.”

MADISON, CT (WFSB) - Cleanup was underway at beaches by the shoreline.

Flood waters upstream took out many docks and trees along with it. They landed on some popular beaches.

Town beaches were closed Friday in Madison, but have since reopened.

Crews worked all day to clean up debris.

Department of public works, buildings, and grounds crews were cleaning up until Saturday evening.

Crews made multiple runs to the dump with trucks full of trees, tree trunks, and branches.

Some people even picked up trash that washed ashore.

To keep people safe, there was no swimming or boat launching at the Surf Club, West Wharf, and East Wharf.

Beach goers had to make other plans but said it was nice the town was making the effort to clear the debris.

“It’s still nice, watching them clean it up and get everything back to normal,” said Hal Stephens of Madison.

“It’s alarming, it’s sad. This is supposed to be the best time of the year in Madison. We pride ourselves on how clean and pristine our beaches are, and then out of the blue to look out yesterday morning, at 9 a.m. have it be perfect and then quarter of 11 trees washing up ashore,” said Austin Hall, Director of Beach and Recreation for Madison.

Madison Harbor Master Steve Adkins said he isn’t worried about the wood in the Long Island Sound but boaters should still keep an eye out.

“Do you advise boaters to take more caution this weekend?” Eyewitness News asked.

“Without question and don’t go out at night, go out in the daytime, enjoy it and keep your eyes open,” Adkins said. “It’s wood, we all can agree it’s wood. The refrigerators don’t float, they’re at the bottom. The wood is floating and it’s on the surface so you can see it. To me it’s much ado about nothing.”

But the Connecticut River is a different story.

“Coast Guard issued a report yesterday saying keep off the river, keep away from the river. That’s smart,” said Adkins. “You go to the mouth of the Connecticut River right now, there’s this brown sludge coming out of the river.”

State beaches have red flags out as well.

At Surf Club Beach, they’ll evaluate how much washed ashore in coming days and will reassess when the beach will reopen to the public.

Copyright 2023 WFSB. All rights reserved.

Here are some suggestions on where to ring in the New Year.

MADISON, CT —New Year's Eve is right around the corner in Madison, and Patch has you covered with some festive things to do in the area to ring in the New Year.

Heading to New York City to celebrate is always an option, or if you're Taylor Swift, heading to Kansas City, Missouri. But others might be more tempted to stay close to home as they celebrate the beginning of 2024.

Here is a look at some events happening in the Madison area:

In the United States, one of the most popular New Year’s Eve traditions is the dropping of the giant ball in New York City’s Times Square. Other U.S. cities have adopted iterations of the ball drop — the Chick Drop in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania and the giant Potato Drop

in Boise, Idaho, for example.

Find out what's happening in Madisonwith free, real-time updates from Patch.

The end of one year and beginning of another is often celebrated with the singing of “Auld Lang Syne,” a Scottish folk song whose title roughly translates to “days gone by,” according to Encyclopedia Britannica and History.com.

The history of New Year’s resolutions dates back 8,000 years to ancient Babylonians, who would make promises to return borrowed objects and pay outstanding debts at the beginning of the new year, in mid-March when they planted their crops.

According to legend, if they kept their word, pagan gods would grant them favor in the coming year. If they broke the promise, they would fall out of God’s favor, according to a history of New Year’s resolutions compiled by North Hampton Community College New Center in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania.

Many secular New Year’s resolutions focus on imagining new, improved versions of ourselves.

The failure rate of New Year’s resolutions is about 80 percent, according to U.S. News & World Report. There are myriad reasons, but a big one is they’re made out of remorse — for gaining weight, for example — and aren’t accompanied by a shift in attitude and a plan to meet the stress and discomfort of changing a habit or condition.

MADISON – About 650 households were impacted from the torrential storm Sunday with some homes losing powers for several hours, according to officials.

“Most of it was for a very limited time,” First Selectwoman Peggy Lyons said. “A few were up to two hours. The total for the state was closer to 8,000.”

Al Lara, a spokesperson for Eversource said the largest outage he saw at a given moment in the area was over 700 at about 11 a.m. in Killingworth.

“This was a rainstorm that sat over the area,” he said. “As soon as we made one repair, we moved up the street to another. Fuses on lines that automatically disconnect to protect the rest of the distribution from a surge.”

Disruptions ranged from momentary outages to hours-long events, Lara said.

“Throughout the day, we were getting repeated wire down calls,” he said. “Most of them relatively small, affecting one household or under 100 households, related strictly to the heavy rainfall.”

The rainfall, coming down at two to four inches an hour, he said, resulted in damage to trees, causing limbs to fall on power lines causing outages, and sometimes trees getting waterlogged and uprooted.

“The ground can take a considerable amount of rain, but some of these rainfalls at more than two inches an hour, the ground turns to mud and the trees come up,” he said. “It took awhile for crews to get in and restore power,” he said.

One of the larger incidents, he said, happened in Madison when a large tree fell, taking down a pole on Twin Bridge Road.

“That was reported around 2:30 p.m.,” he said, and power was restored within a couple hours.

Lara said that around 5 p.m. three spans of wire came down in Killingworth on Bunker Hill Road affecting both Killingworth and Madison.

“Three different utility poles were affected,” he said, and power wasn’t restored there until 3:44 this morning.

This was a rainstorm that sat over the area. As soon as we made one repair, we moved up the street to another. Fuses on lines that automatically disconnect to protect the rest of the distribution from a surge.

People on the Madison, CT Facebook page started sharing their outages at 10:19 a.m. with an outage on Dorset Lane that took nearly two hours to restore, and outages on Devonshire Road and Cross Road, and brownouts on North Summer Hill.

Guilford First Selectman Matthew Hoey said his town, which neighbors Madison, wasn’t hit too hard.

“I don’t think it was extensive here,” Guilford First Selectman Matthew Hoey said, “but we got hit pretty good relative to our beaches with debris…that kind of stuff. I haven’t heard anything substantial. If there’s significant outages, our emergency management team will alert me. We did not have to open up the emergency operations center. My suspicion was it was a non-event relative to some of the previous storms.”

MADISON – The Board of Education unanimously approved moving three items that were budgeted in the construction of a new elementary school to “add alternate” items to reduce the $2.4 million in overages on the new school project.

The authorized project cost for the new elementary school is $61.15 million and is part of a larger Madison School Renewal Plan totalling $89.2 million, which includes improvements to Polson Middle School and Brown Intermediate School.

The shortfall for funding the new elementary school initially totaled $5.9 million.

Because the costs toward Polson Middle School ended up lower than projected, nearly $3.5 million that funding was approved by the Board of Selectmen in June to offset the $5.9 million shortfall. Because all three school projects were approved in a single bonding package, the funds can be used interchangeably if necessary.

The Board of Selectmen and the Board of Finance also approved the transfer of $2.4 million from the town’s undesignated fund balance to cover the remainder of the shortfall, but in a town meeting on July 24, residents of the town voted down that transfer.

With the new elementary school project still $2.4 million short of funding, the Board of Education considered what they could do to cut costs for the project.

Adam Levitus, a senior project manager at Colliers, the company contracted for the project, said at the meeting Tuesday that when the original $89.2 million bond proposal went to referendum, the education specifications were based on a projected enrollment of about 600 students. Those projections changed.

“Subsequent to the establishment of the budget, enrollment projections were updated with an additional 40 students who were likely to attend,” Levitus said, which resulted in an additional four classrooms.”

“The additional $5.8 million in development no one foresaw,” he said. “What can be taken out while still fitting in responsible budgetary items?”

Superintendent Craig Cooke said that the town meeting vote was not about whether the school project needed four more classrooms, but was whether the town could allocate the $2.4 million to the project.

“There was no vote on the size of the classrooms or how many classrooms,” he said.

He also said that simply removing the four classrooms wouldn’t save the project $2.4 million, given that the current design included the classrooms and there were other costs to be accounted for, like utilities that feed into that area.

“A plan that is submitted to the state and approved for referendum purposes, it’s an incomplete plan,” said Board Chair Seth Klaskin. “The voters went to referendum based on an incomplete plan, because this is how it works in Connecticut. As we got information on increased student enrollment, we had to reconfigure the plan to make sure we can accommodate the kids in classrooms. We had to redesign, within the footprint, the four classrooms.”

Klaskin said it was incumbent on them to look at items that the board is willing to sacrifice as bid alternates, or items that a company can add onto the project, but aren’t required.

The bid alternates the board considered are items within the board’s purview as part of the building’s education specifications.

“I would submit that we should eliminate as a bid alternate the radiant flooring in the new school,” he said. “I would suggest we could really show good faith to the community and be true to the spirit of trying to build the school we need. Radiant flooring would be great, but to me it’s a luxury item that I think is a bad look to move forward with.”

Levitus said the radiant flooring would be an item that can become a bid alternate.

He also said the school’s fire protection system is pretty advanced for an elementary school and suggested downgrading the system. He also suggested eliminating some dishwashing equipment in the school kitchen that isn’t required.

The total savings of the three items are estimated to be about $225,000 for the fire protection system, $72,000 for the kitchen equipment, and $356,000 for the radiant flooring, totaling $653,000, leaving $1,747,000 remaining in the shortfall.

Klaskin reminded the board that though the new school budget has a shortfall, in the long run, the town will be reimbursed over $18 million by the state and for the installation of geothermal energy.

“What it can be used for, once we bond out all the money, we can consolidate all those loans, pay them down… and save a lot of tax dollars,” he said.

The board unanimously approved the moving of the three budget items to become bid alternates.

The board also unanimously voted to send a letter to the School Building Committee stating that the Board of Education is intent on keeping the four additional classrooms as part of the project.

First Selectwoman Peggy Lyons said today that the Board of Selectmen will bed updated on Monday by the building committee and the Board of Education on how they will proceed with the new school project.

As for Jeffrey Elementary, Ryerson Elementary, and the Town Campus Learning Center — all slated to close — Lyons said, “the town will be going through a process with the new facility committee to determine what to do with those buildings.”