Thunderhead Thinking

Some economists are suggesting that we may be in the late afternoon of the current economic downturn, which we will take as hopeful speculation. But it is summer, and we know that late afternoon on a hot July day is a most unstable time, thick with thunderheads and associated sudden threats. We have taken a real buffeting from this recession, and it has skewed our perceptions of the promise of summer afternoons and other ideal notions. Evidence of that shift is now clearly visible in the aftermath of Newtown’s spring budget battles and in the informal prologue to the impending discussions of the Fairfield Hills Master Plan Review Committee.

Overshadowed by the contentious tug-of-war on the issue of school funding that dominated this year’s multiple budget referendum votes was a preemptory money-saving change in the town’s capital improvement plan (CIP) early this year that gutted Newtown’s five-year, $10 million program of open space acquisition. Planned appropriations for this purpose were cut in half and delayed to the fourth and fifth years of the five-year CIP. And now, for the first time since the original Fairfield Hills Master Plan specifically ruled it out, people are talking seriously about the possibility of developing housing on the town-owned campus. Fairfield Hills, once a looming refuge for local aspirations to preserve and protect open land for the enjoyment of future Newtowners, may be transformed by the exigencies of a cash-strapped town to an asset to be leveraged for immediate advantage.

Eight years ago, Newtown’s now-defunct Open Space Task Force set ambitious goals for open space acquisition for the ensuing decade, recommending that Newtown increase its protected open space by more than 2,300 acres by the year 2012, which would have put 20 percent of the town beyond the reach of residential and commercial development, reflecting a similar goal by conservationists statewide. That 2002 initiative was grossly underfunded and has, consequently, fallen far short of its goal. But that “ideal notion” of aggressive open space acquisition remains valid not only as a way to preserve that ineffable and quite valuable “character” of Newtown, but also as an effective form of tax relief.

Over the past 20 years, multiple land use studies in housing markets across the nation have shown that for every dollar collected in taxes and nontax revenue from residential property, municipalities pay between $1.15 and $1.50 in services to those residents from town departments and school districts. And that net loss continues in perpetuity for every residential property, slowly but surely raising the tax rate in good years and bad.

So in an economic downturn — precisely the time when Newtown should be increasing its appetite for open space and reforming its cyclical inclination to binge on residential development — the town appears to be having other thoughts.

We should not allow the instability in the late afternoon of our economic recovery to cloud our thinking on the relative merits of open space and residential housing. Let us not fool ourselves into thinking that impulsive juggling of open space costs and housing revenues has much to do with the public interest or the future of Newtown. It is, at best, an exercise in expedience.