When the town finally takes ownership of the 189-acre Fairfield Hills campus this summer, it will be taking on a complex bundle of assets and liabilities. The first and most pressing priority for the town’s new Fairfield Hills Management Committee will be to identify and limit the liabilities as best it can through better campus security and the implementation of a remediation plan for known environmental problems at the site. The town, however, needs to be equally aggressive in securing and managing the assets coming its way in the Fairfield Hills deal.

One important asset, which is often overlooked in all the discussions over which facilities should stay, or go, or be leased to third parties, is not a physical asset at all. At this point, it exists only on paper. As part of its $3.9 million deal with the state, Newtown is securing for its use an additional 100,000 gallons of the total million-gallon capacity of the wastewater treatment plant off Commerce Road. The ability to turn that much wastewater into clean water is like money in the bank.

When the wastewater treatment plant was constructed in 1997, the state paid two thirds of the construction cost, and the town paid one third of the cost. Consequently the state reserved for its own use at Fairfield Hills and the Garner Correctional Institution about 666,000 gallons of capacity, and the town got about 333,000 gallons of capacity.

The town has used up most of its share of that capacity serving the homes and businesses in its limited sewer districts. The extra 100,000 gallons will give the town some welcome flexibility in its future development options. But the state is holding on to about 57 percent of the total capacity of the plant to meet its needs at Garner and as an asset held in reserve to generate future revenues for the state. The state requires between 200,000 and 250,000 gallons of its reserved capacity to serve Garner and other smaller state facilities it still maintains in the area — less than half of the 567,000 gallons of capacity it will control after the deal with the town goes through. Clearly, the state still has something to sell at Fairfield Hills.

Newtown’s administrators, in coordination with the Water Pollution Control Authority (WPCA), need to carefully review and restrict how their share of this asset is managed and allocated in the future. Already, a private developer interested in constructing condominiums off Oakview Road near Fairfield Hills has expressed interest in securing some of that capacity for its development plans, which the WPCA wisely resisted. The developer then raised the possibility of buying excess capacity from the state — a possibility that was forestalled when the project was rejected by the Planning and Zoning Commission over concerns about traffic.

The selectmen and the WPCA took an important step last week when they settled on a new management firm for the wastewater treatment plant, negotiating a contract that should save the town $500,000 over the term of the ten-year pact. They now need to follow up with an equally efficient approach to the allocation of the town’s limited wastewater treatment capacity. The WPCA needs to stick to its policy of limiting new allocations to areas within existing sewer districts and giving priority to projects that directly address existing environmental problems or that benefit the town as a whole in some equally essential way. All others clamoring for wastewater treatment capacity should take their entreaties to the state.