Who Pays For Development’s Profits?

To the Editor:

I’ve met Chuck Tilson, and liked him, but his defense of private property rights in last week’s letters column demands an answer.

It sounds as American as apple pie: your family lives in a town for 200 years and sells off their acres by right. But who’s paying for this? In reality, every time Mr Tilson sells land for development, he is cashing a kind of welfare check signed by his neighbors. Because when he crowds 40 homes into 65 acres his fellow citizens will pay for his profit, year after year, after year in the form of higher taxes.

The children romping on his soccer field will eventually go indoors to get an education, which must be paid for by our school taxes. When their parents stop walking around his walking trail, they’ll hop into cars – two to a family, three or four when the kids reach driving age. We’ll pay for them directly in road maintenance, and indirectly in crowded town roads.

I am aware that Mr Tilson isn’t the only guy in town running these deals. He at least makes a public defense of the practice unlike those who lurk in the Town Hall parking lot while their engineers diddle the overworked Zoning Board.

Of course, he’s concerned for his family. But by “selling the farm” he’s only taking care of them in the very short term. Two hundred years ago when Tilsons started accumulating land in Newtown, the land itself worked, providing the energetic farmer with milk, fruit, meat, vegetables, grain, timber, firewood, game and water, year after year. These days, unless people farm, land has only one paying job left in it – development. But once it’s sold, it’s gone forever. While Mr Tilson’s neighbors pay higher taxes, forever, to support the deal, he’ll only be able to cash his check once. True, family members can drive home in new diesel pickups that year, but a short decade down the line the trucks will be rusting out and then where will they be? As the oldest Tilson male, he would do better to counsel the young’uns to get a good education so they can find employment they can count on.

“As long as there is demand there will be development,” Mr Tilson concludes.

That is simply not true. Look around at all the undeveloped Newtown Forest land donated by people who could have sold it for profit, but chose a wiser, more generous way. Their land – which they gave without strings attached – appears to be at rest, yet it’s still working hard, providing their neighbors with tranquility, a living memory of rural life, and regular glimpses of wild animals. This, I maintain, is better than “country flair,” which sounds an awful lot like something you buy at a mall. Next time you see people stopped to let turkeys or turtles cross the road, look at the delight on their faces. It can’t only be because turkeys and turtles don’t go to school, don’t drive cars, and don’t raise taxes.

Justin Scott

Parmalee Hill Road, Newtown                                    August 7, 2001