Fairfield Hills: Trading Facts For Concepts

Newtown’s leaders have a problem: How do you argue persuasively for something about which you know very little?

Newtown’s selectmen and Legislative Council have decided that it is so important to present the proposed 5/6 school and the proposed purchase of Fairfield Hills to the voters in tandem, that they are willing to abandon the normal process of presenting all the facts and figures associated with their plans up front, before the vote.

The Board of Education has done all its homework on the 5/6 school plan. From foundation to roof, the architects and engineers for the school can tell you what it’s going to be and what it’s going to cost. By contrast, the selectmen and the council have only vague notions about how they want the development of Fairfield Hills to unfold and even less of an idea about the eventual costs associated with that development – they’re guessing about $21 million. The problem is they know that the public knows that they don’t know what they should know about Fairfield Hills. So they need to finesse the voters a bit by packaging Fairfield Hills with the popular 5/6 school plan.

Having finally come to understand that further delay of the 5/6 school would be both financially and fiscally irresponsible, the Legislative Council has found that in order to stick to its strategy of bringing the two projects to the voters at the same time, it must push for a Fairfield Hills vote for June. Having a real plan for Fairfield Hills by that time would be impossible, given the town’s recent failure to get even one developer to respond to a request for proposals to develop the campus and the continuing negotiations with the state over the sale. So the council and the selectmen are prepared to substitute a conceptual plan for the voters’ consideration.

The conceptual plan would evidently be implemented at some point by a yet-to-be created development authority, which under state law would operate outside the auspices of local government, similar to the authority that operates Richter Park in Danbury. The state empowers development authorities to make contracts, issue bonds, own public facilities – all at public expense. The impetus for even considering the purchase of Fairfield Hills in the first place was to allow the town to have more control over what happens there. Under the current plan, however, the people of Newtown will have little or no control over what happens at Fairfield Hills, and will be asked to agree to foot the bill in a month and a half based on a conceptual plan.

At this point we would recommend that the townspeople respond with only a conceptual approval and agree to spend only conceptual money until they have the facts and figures they need to make an informed decision. In other words, a vote in June on Fairfield Hills should be tied not to the 5/6 school, but to a commitment by town officials to come up with a detailed master plan for the development of Fairfield Hills that would be presented to the voters for approval. A Fairfield Hills development authority should then be required to adhere to that plan, exercising the will of the people of Newtown rather than its own prerogatives or the conceptual musings of town officials in too much of a hurry to get all the facts.