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The Silver City
Polishes Its Image
Meriden gets moving once again
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Business New Haven
7/13/1998
By: Linda Mele
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Mayor Joseph Marinan Jr.'s arrest last year on charges that he forged a landlord's signature on a sublease and his subsequent plea bargain (which didn't affect his re-election) probably wasn't the best thing that ever happened to the city of Meriden. But neither did it keep the city from forging ahead and polishing its image.
Indeed, plenty of positive things have been set in motion since Marinan took office, including a fiscal turnaround, infrastructure improvements, increased spending for education, declining crime and neighborhood revitalization.
The city's annual Daffodil Festival and Christmas Festival of Lights each draw more than 100,000 people every year, and a Barbershop Museum is in the works for the downtown area.
The Greater Meriden Chamber of Commerce recently relocated its offices from the Meriden Enterprise Center on Pratt Street to 5 Colony Street downtown. The City Council would like the group to help promote the city center as a viable place to locate businesses.
In the late 1980s, the city spent more than $24 million refurbishing the downtown area, but growth and occupancy has been slow and some have questioned whether the city even has a “downtown,” per se, because its office/retail strip is split by a rail line and lacks a true “downtown” identity.
Downtown merchants also want a return to two-way traffic on Hanover and West Main streets, which they say will stimulate business, but a $520,000 plan was recently rejected by the City Council's finance committee and the engineers have returned to the drawing board.
The city's 1997 gross grand list grew by more than $36 million over 1996, and taxpayers got a fourth consecutive tax freeze. This year's housing starts to date (15) are close to all of last year's (17); unemployment is down 0.7 percent; the population increase from 1995 to 1996 was 0.21 percent; and the median income increased by 6.1 percent, according to the state's Department of Economic & Community Development.
Fourth-quarter crime rates in 1997 showed an overall 32-percent decrease over the same period in 1996 and a 10-percent reduction in the incidence of violent crime.
The city approved $56 million for elementary school improvements, which have now been completed, and the construction of a new magnet middle school, which is expected to begin this fall.
Road improvements throughout the city totaling $13 million continue, including the widening of West Main Street, and 15 blighted houses are scheduled for demolition this summer.
New building projects completed and in the works will generate taxes and jobs. They include:
• A proposed new 10,000-square-foot post office would be built at the old Jefferson School site after it's demolished;
• Cablewave's new 370,000-square-foot facility in Research Park would generate about 400 jobs, many of them new;
• A 180,166-square-foot addition to the 750,000-square-foot Meriden Square Mall should be completed by next summer and will add 41 new stores to the center's 115 current shops, including a Lord & Taylor;
• The New Britain Transportation Co. wants to move from its Golden Street location to a new seven-acre site on North Broad Street;
• Texas-based El Paso Energy Corp. and Boston-based Power Development Corp. has started the approval process to build an independent electric generating plant in the city's North End, which is expected to generate as much as $4 million in taxes and up to 40 new jobs; and
• The city, the EPA and the state DEP are working to clean up the abandoned and contaminated International Silver Co. Factory H site on Cooper Street and turn it into usable property, as they did with a 10.75-acre parcel on North Colony Street, formerly occupied by MRM Industries, where the Michigan-based Walbro Automotive Corp. completed a 150,000-square-foot, $21 million plant last year.
Under Marinan's administration to date, the city reduced its workforce by 12 percent and privatized a number of city services, including street sweeping and waste collection. Other services are likewise being studied for potential privatization.
Healthy Meriden 2000, begun in 1994, continues to make inroads in health education, program development and prevention and public safety initiatives.
On the debit side, the Meriden Soup Kitchen recently closed its doors after losing its home at the Salvation Army complex, and a new home has yet to be found. It served as many as 150 hot lunches four days a week for 12 years, primarily to elderly and disabled tenants of the Willow Street Community Towers and the St. Vincent DePaul Society homeless shelter.
Some say the city's image could be further polished if somebody within the Meriden business community or the city administration came up with a new site.
It certainly couldn't hurt.
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