Separate Votes Needed For

School And Fairfield Hills Funding

Last week, the Legislative Council’s finance committee reported on a plan to finance two major capital projects: the construction of a new school for grades five and six and the purchase of Fairfield Hills along with its associated municipal projects. The plan is remarkable in the degree to which it limits voter participation in deciding key issues associated with the expenditure of $43 million over the next 20 years.

First, there is the packaging of the spending plan. The council and the selectmen have decided to bundle the funding for both the school project ($22 million) and the acquisition of Fairfield Hills and related town projects ($21 million). There will be one town vote – yes or no – on funding for both the school and town projects. So, if you are a voter who strongly favors the construction of the new school but has reservations about spending $21 million for Fairfield Hills and other associated municipal projects, you must forfeit your choice on the latter to support the former. Those favoring the Fairfield Hills expenditures but not the new school will have their ability to choose constrained as well.

Our town leaders have enthusiastically embraced the brazen pork barrel tactic that we see in Washington, D.C., all the time: take a popular spending initiative and throw some questionable and not-so-popular projects in with it so they will escape the opposition they would face if considered on their own. The 5/6 school seems to have a broad constituency in town; support for the Fairfield Hills purchase is less certain since plans for the property are still so vague. The council and the selectmen are forcing the two together – all or nothing, take it or leave it.

We supported the combined financing of renovations and additions at Hawley School and Newtown High School three years ago because they were both school projects and problems in any part of the school system affect the system as a whole. But we don’t get the connection between the 5/6 school and Fairfield Hills. Combining the two is clearly a political ploy to get the town to go along with allocating $21 million on a yet-to-be-formulated plan for Fairfield Hills and other town facilities.

The council’s finance committee also seems to have created a single spending initiative that employs a double standard for school and town spending. The 5/6 school spending proposal has followed the path of all major spending projects in town in recent years. Money was spent up front on detailed architectural plans and engineering studies so the town knows with a high degree of certainty what the ultimate cost of the project will be. The council, we are sure, would never have entertained funding the school project without this kind of detailed information.

The development of Fairfield Hills, which is tied in with plans to renovate Edmond Town Hall, Town Hall South, and the development of local playing fields, is only vaguely understood at this point. The town has sent out a request for proposals for the development of the property that are not due back until April 15, and yet townspeople will be asked to spend $21 million in May, when the local review of those plans is only just beginning. Because the negotiations with the state over the purchase of Fairfield Hills have taken so long and the preparatory work that the town normally does before it funds projects of this magnitude remains unfinished, the council has decided that the standards it held the Board of Education to in preparing the school project will not apply to the Fairfield Hills plan.

The Legislative Council wants Newtown taxpayers to put $21 million in a pot ahead of time and trust that they will spend it wisely once they figure out what’s going on at Fairfield Hills. Already, the council and selectmen are defending this tactic by saying that other towns do it. Parents hear this argument all the time from their kids; it is always the last refuge of a weak argument.

Financing for the school and for Fairfield Hills should be presented to the voters separately. Taxpayers need to be able to decide on each project based on its merits. This week, First Selectman Herb Rosenthal dismissed separate votes saying, “We’re all one, and we’re not going to have factions in town voting for one over the other.” We are surprised that in this day and age we still have to remind our leaders that choosing one thing over another is the reason why we vote in the first place. Take that away, and there is no reason whatsoever to go to the polls.