The Newtown Hook & Ladder Company failed this week to win a required wetlands permit for its plans to construct a new firehouse at 12 Sugar Street on land west of The Pleasance currently owned by the R. Scudder Smith Family Partnership. (Mr Smith is the owner/publisher of this newspaper.) The fire company’s plans to abandon its crumbling firehouse behind Edmond Town Hall and locate a new facility on the Sugar Street site has survived many small setbacks along the way. But the Inland Wetlands Commission may have struck a final fatal blow to the effort in concluding the negative environmental impact of the proposed facility would far outweigh whatever benefits might accrue to the town from its construction.  So add one more group to the list of local refugees seeking a place to hang their respective hats in the coming decade. For one of Connecticut’s biggest towns in terms of area, Newtown seems to have a lot of “space needs” right now.

Everyone from kindergarteners and senior citizens to Parks and Rec and the Newtown Police Department is jockeying for space at Fairfield Hills, school district facilities, and in other corners of Newtown’s inventory of properties. For town and school administrators, getting everything to land in its proper place with financing intact is a mind-bending challenge. Consequently, town and school officials have now resolved to quantify exactly how much space is needed and by whom so the planning and financing process can begin. The Board of Education is already engaged in a space needs study, and the town plans to begin its own study once the school district review is complete.

One likely result in the not-to-distant future is that Town Hall South at 3 Main Street will begin to lose all its current tenants. Both the police department and Parks and Rec are vying for more space and a better location at Fairfield Hills. The Social Services Department along with its food pantry, which currently occupies the lower level of Town Hall South, is a candidate for office space in the nearly vacant Edmond Town Hall. One logical move in this slow-motion version of musical chairs may be to offer the now-dispossessed Hook & Ladder fire company the bunkerlike building at 3 Main Street. The building, originally built to accommodate a farm equipment retailer, would have to be assessed for its suitability for housing heavy equipment, and some of the traffic concerns raised by neighbors of the Sugar Street site may still apply in this location. But that option looks better than most right now for Hook & Ladder.

As much sense as such a move might make, it cannot be rushed. Those charged with solving Newtown’s space needs puzzle are looking at a rather complicated chessboard of possibilities, and by necessity they need to think three, four, and five moves ahead if every department is to settle into its proper place with the least disruption to service and the most deference to the financial imperatives of the average taxpayer. Move the wrong piece at the wrong time, and the game is lost. We need to remember that when there is so much at stake, expediency can be expensive.