Planning A Better Community

There are times when Newtown is a busy and chaotic place, like this past week when a gasoline tanker truck crashed and burned on South Main Street, and when the town seemed to be cut in pieces by road construction, and when yet another truck found yet another railroad bridge to ram (in Botsford, this time). Everyone was bogged down in traffic jams waiting for things to clear. Few of us love Newtown for its chaos. We choose to live here because of the town’s character, its beautiful natural resources, its open spaces, and its friendly neighborhoods. Fortunately, while the rest of us have been waiting in traffic, the Planning and Zoning Commission has been working on a plan to ensure that Newtown’s future has more of what we like most about the town and less of what we don’t like.

The P&Z will be presenting the draft plan to the Legislative Council on October 15 and to the public at a hearing tentatively planned for December 18. Those who want to know more about what the town’s primary land use agency intends for Newtown’s future can find copies of the plan at the P&Z offices in Canaan House at Fairfield Hills, at the Booth Library, the town clerk’s office and the selectmen’s office at Edmond Town Hall, and online soon at www.newtownct.org.

It has always been the intention of Newtown’s land use planners to maintain the town’s character, by which we mean the beauty of its rural landscapes, its historic architecture, and its overall look and feel as a community, particularly in the center of town. As all of us discover daily in our personal lives, what we intend is not always what comes to be, but this particular statement of intention in the Town Plan of Conservation and Development carries particular weight because it directly affects land use policy through zoning and subdivision regulations.

For the most part, the draft conservation and development plan is a strong statement of important local priorities: a more balanced supply of housing options for residents of varied economic means; the acquisition of more open space; a more efficient use of municipal facilities; maintenance of the town’s infrastructure; the reduction of traffic congestion; and the protection of the environment. In fact, we have only one complaint about the goals of the plan and that is the goal to “Grow the commercial property tax base at a rate at least equal to the Town’s growth in its residential tax base.” Given what we know about the rate of residential growth in Newtown, that is a bold statement.

As we have argued here in the past, this view of economic development as a cash cow for the town’s tax coffers is a delusion. When it takes $80 million of economic development to generate a mill of tax relief, the attendant costs of the commercialization of a town –– increased traffic congestion and increased pressures for more houses, more classrooms, and more police protection –– quickly eat up those benefits while transforming the face of the community so its so-called character is hard to discern from the scores of other commercialized towns across the American landscape.

Many of the recommended actions pertaining to economic development in the draft town plan, however, are sound and prudent in that they encourage the growth and enhancement of businesses and services provided for and by Newtown residents. This means fostering the “village centers” of Sandy Hook and Dodgingtown so that small businesses in those locations can offer residents in the area the kinds of goods, services, and even jobs they want and need closer to their homes. It means making the most of existing commercial areas and business parks by filling vacancies and encouraging new investment. It means working with local business men and women to help their businesses grow in a way that benefits them and their clients and customers.

Any plan for conservation and development in Newtown has to address, first and foremost, the quality of life in our community. Economic development has the potential to ruin the quality of life here, or to enhance it. The trick is to think about it in terms of improving the lives of people and not simply as an economic formula for tax relief. The former brings us more of what we like about Newtown and the latter, more of what we don’t like. It is something to think about while you sit in traffic.