The Fairfield Hills Kabuki Dance

Anyone paying attention to the various players moving into position for the next act of the Fairfield Hills development saga may have noticed that the production is taking on the characteristics of a Kabuki dance, a highly stylized narrative with an entirely predictable outcome. The outcome? There will be housing at Fairfield Hills.

It may be apartments at Cochran House, or a residential facility for Alzheimer’s or hospice patients, or maybe “a very small prep school.” The Fairfield Hills Authority, with the help of its development broker and consultant, has been tantalizing itself with these possibilities — so exciting and so lacking in detail — while other players, including the Legislative Council, the Planning and Zoning Commission, and the Fairfield Hills Master Plan Review Committee prepare to play their respective roles. To date, one glaring absentee from the dramatis personae is the one we hoped would be playing a starring role: John Q. Public.

For its part, the Legislative Council pushed the prospect of housing at Fairfield Hills forward with a resolution last month urging the Fairfield Hills Authority to bring a little light and substance to the second- and third-hand accounts of the glittering opportunities that lie just over the horizon of the town’s long-established resistance to residential development on the campus. The resolution said the council “supports reviewing and vetting all projects that may bring economic stability to the Fairfield Hills campus, and encourages the authority to invite parties to present their offer at a public meeting where residents can learn all facts prior to discounting a potential municipal revenue resource.” Initially, the members of the authority decided to follow through on the council’s request, with one proviso: that the “public meeting” be conducted out of public view in an executive session. They did not explain at the time how this would help residents to “learn all the facts” about these important plans. This week, however, the authority backed off its insistence on secrecy and agreed that any developer’s presentations it hosts will be in public.

At this critical time in the nascent housing boom at Fairfield Hills, the temptation is for all the key components and understandings be shuffled into place backstage before the curtain is raised on the full artifice of a public debate. We learned this week from the chairman of the Planning and Zoning Commission that P&Z will take steps to add housing as a permitted use in the Fairfield Hills Adaptive Reuse (FHAR) zone. The change will legally require a public hearing, now tentatively set for April 7. The hearing, according to the P&Z chairman, “is just a way to open the discussion.”

Clearly, however, the discussion has been going on for a long time. The Fairfield Hills Master Plan Review Committee is considering what changes, if any, need to be made in the document that is supposed to underpin P&Z’s regulation of development on the campus. (To its credit, the committee has tried, without much success, to get the public involved in the process.) The current master plan bans housing on the site and requires that property subject to development at Fairfield Hills be leased and not sold. These are two principles of the plan that were supposed to safeguard the municipal needs and prerogatives of future generations of Newtowners. While the committee’s recommendations are not likely to surface in public until sometime this spring, both those principles now seem to be up for revision.

In late November 2010, a subcommittee of the Fairfield Hills Master Plan Review Committee discussed both housing and the leasing structure for development on the campus. They concluded that the existing policy of requiring up-front payment on 30-year leases (to raise money quickly for immediate demolition and remediation expenses) would not work for most developers and suggested that selling property outright would be more lucrative for the town. Apparently, this was not merely conceptual talk. Again at last week’s meeting of the Fairfield Hills Authority, one member cautioned the authority’s broker not to mention up-front lease payments to prospective developers. “I want to be sure it’s not a part of the discussion.” It has not been mentioned, he was assured. Another policy shifts in the scenery backstage.

What ultimately happens at Fairfield Hills is supposed to be the result of long-range planning — a planning process that is supposedly still in progress. From what we have seen lately, however, the execution of this plan may just predate its unveiling to the public. In the end, there may be nothing left for the public to do except decide on its response to this elaborate dance once the curtain is raised. Will is be applause or catcalls?