Hartford Business Journal

12 Hartford Business Journal • December 19, 2016 www.HartfordBusiness.com Robert A. Landino, founder/ CEO, Centerplan Cos., Middletown. H ere is a look back at the five business, nonprofit and higher education leaders we watched in 2016. A year to forget for Landino By Gregory Seay gseay@HartfordBusiness.com D eveloper Robert Landino asserted that one of his 2016 goals was to inject a positive tone into conversations about Hartford. It turned out that 2016 was anything but uplifting for the Capital City, especially after Landino's DoNo Hartford LLC development partnership failed to deliver a usable minor- league baseball park downtown in time for the 2016 Double A minor-league baseball season, forcing the Yard Goats to play their inaugural season entirely on the road. Instead, talk around the 6,000-seat Dunkin' Donuts stadium devolved into recriminations between Landino's development partnership, the city, ownership of the Yard Goats ballclub and the team's Eastern League parent. That eventually led to Landino's compa- nies, Middletown-based Centerplan Con- struction Co. and DoNo Hartford LLC, being fired from the project in June. Since then, Arch Insurance Co., the insurer of Centerplan's performance bond, signed an agreement with the city of Hartford to com- plete the stadium, and hired Baltimore-based Whiting-Turner Contracting Co. to finish the job. The goal now is to complete the ballpark for the start of the April 2017 season, a dead- line Arch recently said it is on pace to meet. Project delays and incomplete or unsatis- factory work, however, have added millions of dollars to the project's pricetag, now esti- mated at $71 million. Meantime, Landino's troubles didn't stop there. He and his companies are now engaged in several lawsuits related to the sta- dium development. Centerplan sued the city, claiming it was wrongfully terminated from the project and that 100 change orders from the city and team led to the delays and missed deadlines. The city and Centerplan have since agreed to mediate their ballpark dispute. At the same time, Centerplan has been sued by Arch Insurance, which alleges the developer owes it $8.4 million for claims it had paid out. Landino is a former Old Saybrook select- man and three-term state lawmaker, who grew up in New Haven. Now reportedly engaged in trying to revive a once-bankrupt Atlantic City, N.J., casino as chief executive officer, Landino did not respond to repeated calls for comment. Aside from the ballpark, the fate of Center- plan's proposal for more downtown Hartford development, including a Hard Rock Hotel, parking garage, condos and a supermarket, remain in limbo. n P H O T O | S T E V E L A S C H E V E R Zupkus' Colebrook wind farm poised to grow By Matt Pilon mpilon@HartfordBusiness.com F or Gregory Zupkus, president and CEO of West Hartford wind-power devel- oper BNE Energy, 2016 proved to be a mixed bag. Though a massive wind project the com- pany planned in Goshen doesn't appear to have a viable path forward, Zupkus and his business partner, BNE Chairman Paul Corey — owners of the state's sole commer- cial wind farm in Colebrook — could start construction on a third 3.5-megawatt tur- bine in Colebrook next year, following a suc- cessful bid into a state-run energy program. "We're excited that we're growing in Connecticut," Zupkus said in a November telephone interview, several weeks after the state notified BNE that its project was among the 24 selected from 100 proposals to enter into power-purchase contracts with utility companies. The third turbine would push the Cole- brook South wind farm's annual generating capacity to approximately 9 megawatts. Zupkus and Corey had been looking ahead to the state's request for proposals (RFP) for some time as an avenue to make a third turbine financially viable. While the results of the RFP were a victory for BNE, the company didn't get everything it wanted. BNE also planned a much larger project in nearby Goshen, which included building a six-turbine, 20-megawatt wind farm on an isolated, wooded ridge owned by Torrington Water Co. Though the Depart- ment of Energy and Environmental Protec- tion selected several similarly sized wind projects in New York and Vermont, it did not BNE Energy CEO Gregory Zupkus stands in front of a BNE wind turbine in Colebrook. H B J P H O T O | M A T T P I L O N 5 We Watched in 2016 Continued on page 14 Recap:

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