Don’t Fight Growth,

Plan For It

To the Editor:

For quite some time the Town of Newtown has demonstrated its dislike of change. Some elected officials, both selectmen and zoning, have viewed change of the town as a something to be discouraged or slowed to a snail’s pace.

The growth of Newtown is not something that the selectmen or the zoning commission can change. Infrastructure to support a growing population and protect the environment has been resisted at all costs to avoid what elected officials feared would bring huge change and growth to Newtown. 

This thinking has continuously kept the town unprepared to meet the future needs of a growing community.

Because of the political positions of the selectman’s office and the zoning commissions through the years, which has been growth phobic, proper planning opportunities of the community have been lost.

When the Housatonic Valley Economic Council gives projections of population growth the town should plan accordingly.

Consequently, our P&Z, once again captured by antigrowth extremists, concentrates on eliminating building lots (and these lots are found where?). The wind up of this action inevitably fails to protect the environment or stop growth (the spread of nonconformity does not protect the environment).

This time period is another unfortunate chapter in the history of Newtown P&Z.

For the last several years, instead of taking the opportunity to plan for growth, the P&Z has wasted its time thinking up ways to relieve people of their property rights. They have actually spent years thinking of ways to stop the inevitable. Not a way I would encourage people to spend their time.

Opportunities such as sewer installation twenty-odd years ago, the costs of which would have mainly been borne out by the state, were greeted with the same fear of growth. Escape measures included everybody’s favorite (sewer avoidance), the shortsighted policy of yesteryear and today.

  The entire town could have been served by a public water supply if the P&Z would have required new development for the past 30 years to extend the water main with each new development. Consequently, the thinking was and still is “we better not do that it will encourage more growth,” so thousands of wells have been dug into the aquifer and surrounding areas at the risk of the entire community.

Water mains don’t encourage growth, good economies do.

The Walnut Tree Condominium Development has, despite its opposition, delivered to the town a water main extension across the I-84 bridge which will serve to protect the aquifer and the entire Sandy Hook community far more than any P&Z action in the last 40 years. Can P&Z find ways to get the water main to needy residents or would they rather not do that?

The fact is that only through cooperation with inevitable development will the community be best served, not total opposition of it. Elected officials have a fiduciary responsibility to the entire community, not only the views of one political segment of it.

Rick Haight

Newtown Property Owners Association

99 Church Hill Road, Sandy Hook September 25, 2000