The Long And Shifting Story

Of Fairfield Hills

To the Editor:

I would love to see The Newtown Bee publish a timeline of events and decisions regarding Fairfield Hills since its closing. I have been following the debate in the Letter Hive and it seems that many writers have either forgotten or don’t know how the town has arrived at its current position.

 To my fellow letter writers, this is meant as a broad overview. I hope that The Bee will follow up with an exact timeline. When Fairfield Hills closed, the town was offered the right of first refusal. If my memory is correct, we chose to pass on the opportunity. The state then marketed the property and requested proposals. This was back when the economy was strong, and although townspeople have said for years that Fairfield Hills would make a perfect college or corporate campus, no proposals for those uses came through.

 The three proposals that were presented to the public in a meeting at the high school were from residential developers: housing, housing, and more housing; some apartments, some condos, some elderly housing, some luxury housing, and some affordable housing. Most had some sort of elderly housing component to appease those worried about higher taxes and more schools. One proposal centered around a golf course. One had some commercial development. There was a village green concept. One proposed using Canaan House as the new 5/6 school, which delayed the start of the 5/6 school by about a year while the town explored that option.

I’m being deliberately vague about which proposal had what, but my point is that they all had a tremendous amount of residential development with a little commercial development and some other niceties thrown in. Each did have some merits, but I wonder if all those bells and whistles offered during a strong economy would still be economically feasible for those developers today. Given the scope of those proposals, I doubt if those projects would have been completed before the economy tanked in 2001.

I have yet to see Newtowners clamoring for more residential development. I feel it was this reason that led the town to once again explore the option of buying Fairfield Hills. It was to give the town control over what would happen in the center of our community. If the town does not purchase Fairfield Hills and the state once again puts out a request for proposals, I would venture a guess that the proposals would not be from a college or major corporation, but from residential developers. Simply put, more housing equals more taxes plus more schools.

In closing, I hope The Newtown Bee will publish a chronology of the Fairfield Hills saga, and include a synopsis of the developer’s proposals. I, too, was hoping that some white knight would ride into town, preserve all the architecturally significant buildings, rehab the existing houses, attract a high tech or Fortune 500 corporate taxpayer, and donate all the open space to a land trust. It didn’t happen, and I doubt it will.

Sincerely,

Kim Connolly

6 Elizabeth Street, Newtown                                          July 13, 2003