The state Legislature this week enacted Public Act 05-33, an Act Authorizing Municipalities to Establish Municipal Development Agencies. What luck! Statewide enabling legislation comes along in the nick of time as Newtown prepares to create an oversight agency for Fairfield Hills.

A quick reading of the first sentence of the new law, however, reveals that serendipity had nothing to do with Newtown’s good fortune: the provisions of the new legislation are limited to any municipality that “has a population between 25,000 and 30,000 persons… occupies a total area of not less that 59 square miles… and is the site of a correctional institution operated by the Department of Correction…” Sound familiar? There is only one town in the state that fits that description — Newtown.

Newtown’s State Representative Julia Wasserman and State Senator John McKinney have been busy over the past three months shepherding Public Act 05-33 through the state House and Senate. Their work has laid the legal groundwork for the hybrid development authority the town needs to implement the master plan for Fairfield Hills development that was approved by Newtown’s Planning and Zoning Commission last March.

State law already provided towns and cities with the means to create powerful and autonomous development authorities with little or no direct accountability to the public, and the town nearly went that route in 2003. Fortunately, when a budget stalemate in Hartford thwarted that effort, local officials decided that the town’s interests in the development of Fairfield Hills would be best served by a different approach: creating an authority to manage affairs at Fairfield Hills but without the power to create policy or shape the terms under which Fairfield Hills would evolve in the future. Those powers need to continue to reside with local elected officials, who are accessible and accountable to the people of Newtown. This specialized kind of agency should be created locally by ordinance. But there was a catch.

One of the prime responsibilities of a Fairfield Hills authority over time will be to negotiate and execute leases for the scores of spaces, little and large, in up to 18 buildings identified for private commercial uses in the master plan. Under the provisions of the town charter, leasing town property is a cumbersome process involving sealed bids or public auctions and town meeting approvals for each separate lease arrangement. It is a great process for a town that never, or rarely, has anything to lease. But for the management of a property the size of Fairfield Hills, the existing charter provisions are wholly inadequate. Public Act 05-33 is the town’s gateway through this particular roadblock in the charter.

The enabling legislation passed by lawmakers in Hartford this week is not a subterfuge to undermine home rule as spelled out in Newtown’s charter, as its critics claim. They have got it backwards. Archaic provisions in the town’s charter were preventing the realization of a townwide consensus as spelled out in the Fairfield Hills master plan — a plan that is the keystone of an overall strategy and vision to ensure that all critical decisions and policies regarding the future of Fairfield Hills remain with the local elected representatives of the people of Newtown on the Board of Selectmen, the Legislative Council, and the Planning and Zoning Commission. If that’s not home rule, we don’t know what is.

Thanks to the efforts of Newtown’s state legislators, the town will not have to wait a year or more for inevitable charter revisions. The need is now, and fortunately the people of Newtown and their elected representatives are now legally empowered to address that need.