BY ANDREAS YILMA
CITIZENS NEWS
NAUGATUCK — Infrastructure upgrades to the borough’s main downtown strip continue to move forward and are expected to be finished by next year.
Construction work on Church Street, a key part of the downtown revitalization project and which has been going on for over a year is making progress, Mayor N. Warren “Pete” Hess said. The work includes complete new streets and utility work such as storm water pipes and sanitary sewer.
The Board of Mayor and Burgesses chose in 2022 Kleinfelder Northeast, a national engineering firm with an office in Rocky Hill, for the final design of storm water and sanitary sewer upgrades and streetscape designs for Church and Maple streets.
The engineering firm is collaborating with Richter & Cegan Inc., a landscape architecture and planning firm from Avon for the for the streetscape portion of the project.
Some of the upgrades include all new city water lines to be installed and Eversource building above ground transformers to replace the underground vaults.
“The new pipes are four times the size of the existing pipes and the existing pipes are 17 feet down. So when you see, if you look at the holes there, they’re deep,” Hess said. “The storm water/storm-water pipes go on the bottom and they’re going in now. Also going along with the storm water pipes, the new fiber lines that are encased in stone and concrete and are such that they can be repaired, replaced, upgraded, expanded without ever cutting the road again through a new manhole system.”
Milling and paving was expected to be finished by the last week of October on Church Street north of Division, Cedar and Water streets. The construction on lower Church Street is expected to finish by August 2025, Public Works Director Jim Stewart said.
Northern Church Street near Division Street is also being prepared for final paving by November.
The whole revitalization endeavor on Church Street is part of a larger downtown initiative which includes a transit oriented development projects with residential and commercial buildings on Parcels A and B for an overall effort to bring vibrancy to downtown.
“This is real big time construction,” Hess said.