by Paul Bass | Jan 25, 2017 4:11 pm

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Posted to: Environment, Transportation, Downtown, Long Wharf, Wooster Square

The $9 million final leg of the Farmington Canal Trail is closer to construction thanks to a deal struck with neighboring property owners.

The city has been working for years to obtain easements from nine property owners to continue converting the former rail line from where it currently ends—at Temple Street — another two miles through Wooster Square to the Long Wharf pier.

In recent weeks the city has reached verbal agreements with the final two property owners, the three-office condo in the old Foundry building at Whitney and Audubon and the Grove Street parking garage, according to City Plan Director Karyn Gilvarg. Architect Paul Bailey of the Foundry condos confirmed the verbal agreement. Konover Commercial Corporation President Beth Judd, who’s in charge of the garage, confirmed that documents are already drawn up ready to be signed. “We can’t await to see the Farmington canal all organized, planned and activated,” she said.

Gilvarg said she anticipates signing the easement deals in coming weeks. Then the city will complete the last 10 percent of the design, submit it to state and federal funders for approval. She said she anticipates putting the project out to bid in the summer; she anticipates construction beginning in the fall and lasting two cycles. The feds and the state have agreed to pay 80 percent of the cost; the city is bonding for the rest.

The city had been negotiating for the easements since 2013.

“We didn’t think it would take so long,” Gilvarg said. “We thought it would take nine months, not three years.”

But, she added, “when you’re asking people for easements—we were motivated. They are not [necessarily] so motivated.”

Bailey said his group had favored the idea all along. It was just a matter of ironing out the details. His group is giving the city land about eight feet from the south end of the building to the canal so the city can install a handicapped entrance to the trail. The condo owners needed the city put in an underground connection to their roof drainage downspout.

The Farmington Canal opened in 1828, then became a rail line a dozen years later. It remained in use until the 1980s.

In the 1990s, a civic association formed to advocate converting the entire 84-mile canal from New Haven to Northampton, Mass., into a paved trail for hikers and cyclists. So far about half of the trail has come to fruition, including a 12-foot-wide paved stretch with stone columns at street crossings from the Hamden border to Hillhouse Avenue in New Haven that opened in segments between 2002 and 2010.

Accumulating the segments in a city is complicated and takes years. It took three phases to get that part of the city’s stretch of the trail built.

Now this final fourth phase would complete the trail from Hillhouse to Canal Dock Road on Long Wharf. The plan is to convert the tunnel under Whitney Avenue into a lit space with an exhibit about the canal’s history. It would also include gates so it can be closed off overnight.

It will continue running below ground until a half block past Whitney Avenue. It can’t continue underground there because it would proceed beneath the FBI building, which the federal government won’t allow for fear of bombings. So the trail will run up a slope by the Audubon garage to Grove Street, by Sitar Indian restaurant at the corner of Orange.

It would continue on Grove over to Olive Street. At that point, planners have some more work to do in conjunction with the public. The original idea was to paint “sharrows” —markings that are supposed to mean “cyclists ride here” — on the road. In recent years those have fallen out of favor among bike advocates, because they’re confusing and don’t really set aside space for cyclists. The next option under consideration is to have single painted bike lanes in each direction running with traffic. Another idea on the table is for a two-way “cycletrack” separated from the rest of traffic.

The subject of how, or whether, to accommodate bikes on narrow Olive street has proved controversial in the neighborhood. (Read more about that here; click here for one particularly passionate reader debate on the subject.)

The trail will continue on Water Street, to Brewery Street, over to Long Wharf Drive. The state Department of Transportation has begun creating some of that trail as part of concessions it made to New Haven for the I-95 widening project.