Council OKs advisory committee for Four Corners project [update]

Koehn objects – says council should not ‘pre-empt’ town’s new strategic plan.

A new advisory committee is expected to help the town make progress with plans that could boost development at the Four Corners section of town.

The Town Council at its Oct. 14 meeting passed a resolution that creates a 9-member Four Corners Sewer Study Advisory Committee.

The vote passed, with council members Helen Koehn opposed and Bruce Clouette abstaining. Councilman Carl Schaefer was absent.

Voting in favor: Mayor Betsy Paterson, Deputy Major Gregory Haddad, and council members Alison Whitham Blair, Leigh Duffy, Gene Nesbitt and Christopher Paulhus.

Koehn said today [Oct. 16] that she voted against the resolution because, “I think that the Town Council needs to think strategically.”

“Mansfield has 23 committees with 200 citizens using their limited and valuable time to volunteer on behalf of the town,” she said. “The Council needs to organize committees in a way that coordinates efforts within the goals of the Mansfield Unified Vision: 2020 [strategic plan]. The town paid a lot of money and citizens put in a lot of time to develop the strategic plan. Council needs use it; not preempt the plan.

“Councilman Nesbitt did not convince me that waiting a few weeks would cause delay to the Four Corners Sewer project,” Koehn said, referring to the Town Council’s review of the strategic plan and what committees might be needed to carry out objectives.

“I thought the charge was too broad and overlapped with other existing and recently established committees,” Koehn said.

Clouette said he abstained because of a potential conflict of interest; he serves on the board of directors of the Public Archaeology Survey Team, Inc., which occupies a building in the Four Corners area.

In addition to members of the town’s governing bodies, this new ad hoc committee will need three citizens (including one from the town’s business community), as well as a representative from the University of Connecticut, and a representative from the Mansfield Downtown Partnership.

Committee vacancies are listed on the town’s Web site, along with an application form. Town Clerk Mary Stanton said the Four Corners Sewer Study Advisory Council should be posted soon. Recommendations by the Committee on Committees will then be put before the Town Council.

The advisory committee will be charged with a number of tasks connected with extending UConn’s water/sewer system to the commercial areas located at the intersection of Routes 195 and 44, otherwise known as the village of Four Corners.

The committee will be responsible for discussing water supply issues with UConn, gathering information about the potential costs of extending the water/sewer system, and otherwise preparing information that would be brought to the public for a referendum on funding the design and construction of the project.

The committee also will work with town agencies and elected officials when it comes time to adopt a special design district for Four Corners.

For More Information

http://mansfield.htnp.com/news/council_oks_four_corners_committee.html

'Workforce Housing' = economic development

Young professionals often make too much money to qualify for home-ownership assistance programs but don’t make enough to afford market-rate homes.

Browsing the real estate listings for Mansfield,  the cost of a single-family home ranges from about $274,900 at the lower end (i.e., a 4-bedroom/2 bath home on Costello Circle) to as high as $627,000 (i.e., a 4-bedroom/2-1/2 bath home on Beacon Hill Road).

Even homes at the lower end of this range are out of reach for many moderate-income families, including those where the breadwinners are teachers, retail workers, police officers and nurses.

At the same time, their incomes often do not meet the guidelines for low- or moderate-income housing. Most federal and state government funding programs are aimed at families whose income is 30 to 80 percent of the area median.

This is not a problem exclusive to Mansfield. According to www.HomeConnecticut.org – a statewide campaign aimed at increasing the stock of affordable housing – there are 257,000 households (1 in 5) in Connecticut that earn less than 80 percent of median income. At the same time, they are paying 30 percent or more of their income for housing.

Mansfield’s recently completed strategic plan “Mansfield 2020: A Unified Vision,” acknowledges changing housing needs, noted Town Manager Matt Hart. “It does speak to the need for workforce and affordable housing, to make sure there are housing opportunities in our town.”

He added, “Workforce housing is a little different from what we normally refer to as affordable housing. It’s more of a niche, to provide housing for those who fall into the gap between low-income and the ‘middle class.’ This can be young professionals, skilled trades workers, and particularly folks who rely on one income,” Hart said.

“Studies have indicated that we’re losing our young people and our professionals, in part due to the lack of good and affordable housing,” he said.

Mansfield’s Housing Authority has begun to explore ways the town could provide more “workforce housing” as well as Section 8 subsidized (low-income) housing.

“We are in the very, very early stages of talking about it,” Executive Director Rebecca Fields said in an interview today. “We’re trying to figure out how to go about it – what do we need to put together to get something moving.”

The Mansfield Housing Authority currently owns 35 units of moderate income housing, 40 units of senior housing, and runs the federal HUD Section 8 program (low-income housing) for five towns: Mansfield, Coventry, Willington, Ashford and Chaplin. It administers Section 8 for about 140 participants.

“We’ve been wanting to build more moderate income housing for some time,” Fields said. “Our current moderate-income housing has a lot of graduate student families from UConn. Their income is fairly low. Hopefully, they will do better in the long term, but the are struggling now.”

She noted that representatives from the University of Connecticut have been, and will continue to be, a part of these discussions – both because the university has its own housing crunch, and because land where new moderate-income housing would be built needs to be connected to water and sewer.

“The town would like more housing for its workforce and we’ve been talking about how we might accomplish this – it could be some rental, some ownership,” Fields said.

“Most single-family homes in Mansfield – 3- or 4-bedroom homes – are out of reach for moderate income families. And even the rents are very high because of the university; they are priced as if it is coming out of three or four pockets, which is the case when you have a group of students sharing an apartment. But when it’s coming out of one pocket, it’s not affordable.”

To get a better picture of what kinds of funding might be available to pay for new construction, the Housing Authority will be meeting with staff at the Hartford offices of the Local Initiatives Support Corporation . “This is a group that helps people put projects like this together,” Fields said.

The question of funding can be complicated, she said, because “when you’re looking for funding for moderate-income housing and low-income housing, it doesn’t always come from the same place and there may be different strings attached.”

For More Information

http://mansfield.htnp.com/news/workforce_housing_and_economic_development.html