CT bill would transfer Hartford’s South Meadows site, $5M to CRDA to oversee development
An overhead shot of the Materials Innovation and Recycling Authority’s 80-acre South Meadows site.
State legislators are considering a bill that would transfer Hartford’s 80-acre South Meadows property and $5 million to the Capital Region Development Authority.
The site along the Connecticut River formerly was home to a garbage-to-energy plant operated by the quasi-public Materials Innovation and Recycling Authority. MIRA shut down the faltering plant in 2022 and local officials have been pushing to prep the site in Hartford’s industrial South Meadows neighborhood for redevelopment.
House Bill 1559 has been raised by the state legislature’s Finance, Revenue and Bonding Committee and will be discussed during a public hearing Monday.
The bill proposes transferring the South Meadows property to the CRDA, which would be charged with establishing “provisions for the development, redevelopment or remediation of such site.” The bill would also create and establish the boundaries for the South Meadows development district.
In 2023, the state created the MIRA Dissolution Authority to oversee the winding down of MIRA operations and the disposition of its transfer stations and the South Meadows site. The authority has since sold off some properties.
Lamont administration officials have subsequently asked the CRDA to consider whether it could organize the South Meadows site’s redevelopment preparations, CRDA Executive Director Michael Freimuth said recently.
Freimuth said his 13-staff agency, a quasi-public entity responsible for economic development efforts in Greater Hartford, already has a large workload and would need additional manpower and money to take on the project.
To help fund those efforts, the bill proposes that on June 30, $5 million would be transferred from the MIRA Dissolution Authority to CRDA and deposited into an account created specifically for work related to the South Meadows site.
The bill would also transfer $2 million from the dissolution authority and deposit it into “a nonlapsing account of the General Fund established by the secretary of the Office of Policy and Management.”
The money would be administered by the OPM secretary “for the purposes of operating, maintaining, remediating or taking any other action associated with the activities formerly conducted by or properties formerly owned” by the MIRA Dissolution Authority, though that would exclude the “activities associated with and the properties comprising the South Meadows site.”
A study released in March reported that redeveloping the site will take years and cost anywhere from $27.87 million to $333.87 million, depending on how many of the existing buildings are demolished and what sort of future development is pursued.
The bill also would create a South Meadows Development District and establish its borders. The boundaries as described in the bill have raised an objection from the Connecticut Airport Authority, which operates Hartford-Brainard Airport, which borders the MIRA property to the south.
CAA Executive Director Michael Shea submitted testimony in advance of Monday’s hearing, asking the Finance, Revenue and Bonding Committee to consider removing the airport from within the development district’s boundaries.
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