To the Editor:

It is sometimes easy to go about our days without much involvement in our town politics or attend town meetings after a long day at work or caring for our families. Further, it is easy to assume that elected officials, town staff and volunteers of our town commissions fully represent the resident’s wishes of our beautiful town without our involvement. We only hope that all of the right decisions will be made on our behalf. Yet, when things happen in our own backyard or to our families, suddenly the issues are worth fighting for. From proposed book bannings in our schools to Hawley school closing threat or speaking out about a multi-acre trucking facility near Exit 9, things change and even busy people show up to voice concerns.

It is happening once again. The proposed housing developments (one adjacent to the Hubbard Animal Sanctuary, the other off Mount Pleasant road) have ignited nearly 100 town residents to show up to several meetings: Inland Wetlands, Economic Development, and the Fairfield Hills Authority among others to voice their concerns, write letters to elected officials, and even dig into their own pockets to hire a third party engineer to review the plans to assess the impacts and suggest design changes to lessen the impacts of these developments. Unfortunately, not surprisingly, the developer’s engineers disregarded the newer, low-impact design suggestions. People are speaking up for the salamanders, box turtles, bald eagles, trout, aquatic insects, and threatened native plant species among others. People are also voicing concerns over soil erosion and loss, an increase of invasive plants, and the flushed harmful solvents and pharmaceuticals that are not processed out at the waste water treatment plant. These same materials are discharged back into our Class One trout stream leading directly to our Stratified Drift Sole Source aquifer. The same aquifer which, in places, is as little as 6 feet beneath our feet.

Further, we can’t disregard the loss of Native American history and hundreds of years of agricultural history that these lands represent. I urge our board members, elected officials and town residents to once again stand up and not be bullied into believing that these developers have the best interest of us all in mind. The proposed developers of these two land parcels are, I’m sure, good people with very similar desires as us for clean water, open spaces where we live, and intact local ecology, but then vocal people in town will continue to show up at meetings, write letters, and send a clear message to these well-intentioned developers: Don’t meddle with these parcels. There are plenty of other areas in our beloved town that are better suited for housing and commercial enterprises than these pastoral and culturally rich ones.

When we succeed in preserving these spaces, we all win and can look our future generations in the eyes, knowing that we did all that we could in our power to preserve the land.

Dan Holmes

Newtown