The evening of June 6, 2001, was a night to remember. It was the night of the last great town meeting in Newtown. About 1,000 voters turned out at the Newtown High School auditorium to approve two appropriations totaling nearly $50 million: $21.8 million for the purchase of Fairfield Hills, and $27 million for the construction of a school for grades five and six. When both appropriations passed by wide margins, there were high-fives and congratulations all around. The town had planted the seeds for a great new educational institution in town. It had also planted the seeds for today’s controversy over the development of Fairfield Hills.

Not everyone favored the Fairfield Hills purchase plan that was resoundingly approved that night. The biggest critic of the plan, Barry Piesner, tried to limit the appropriation to just $9.5 million — enough to cover the purchase of the property, the creation of some ball fields, and to initiate work on a master plan. That would enable the town to reserve judgment on the bulk of the expenses until more details were known about how the property would be reused. “Bonding for money should be based on what we need within a reasonable time period,” he said, reminding residents that much of the money would not likely be spent for at least two to three years. As it turns out, much of that money is still unspent nearly seven years later. But there was urgency that night. The state had offered Fairfield Hills to the town and was not going to wait forever for an answer.

Debate on Mr Piesner’s suggestion was cut off when resident Po Murray called for an immediate vote on the full appropriation. “Let’s vote, we don’t want to be here until midnight,” she said, and most people agreed. One of the elated ones that night was Ruby Johnson, a council member at the time, who had rallied the council’s support for the measure. “Now we need the people of Newtown to share the vision with us,” she told the council. “They need to buy into the vision that it’s a work in progress and when we finish it will be a unique asset for a New England town.” That vision was presented in very broad strokes, which included $6 million for the renovation of Shelton House for town and school offices.

Now, both Ms Murray and Ms Johnson have become leading voices in a growing band of critics of the town’s plans at Fairfield Hills that evolved as a direct result of that fateful night in 2001. The “work in progress” has not progressed as they had hoped. They are among those who now hope to find the political means to influence the development details that were so conspicuously absent at that memorable town meeting.

For his part, First Selectman Herb Rosenthal had quelled voter concerns in 2001 about writing a “blank check” for Fairfield Hills by promising a town vote on the master plan that would guide its development. Such a vote was not required either by statute or by the town’s charter, but Mr Rosenthal, who was about to embark on a reelection campaign, made the promise as a political expedient to win support for the purchase of Fairfield Hills. When the master plan finally did evolve and was rejected in a referendum vote, that expedient became an impediment to the evolving development process at Fairfield Hills. The first selectman then took refuge in the letter of the law as spelled out in the charter and state statutes and relied instead on polling to assess the town’s consensus on a plan. Now, even the legal underpinnings of that process are under challenge in a civil suit in federal court.

There are those who would like to see Mr Rosenthal take the fall for persistent discontent with the way things are unfolding at Fairfield Hills. He does bear a measure of responsibility for continuing questions over the legitimacy of the master plan because of his initial promise to conduct a public vote on the plan as a way to win support for the purchase of Fairfield Hills. The town was and still is closely divided on the issue of what to do at Fairfield Hills, with advocates actively supporting everything from intensive economic development at the campus to tearing down most of the buildings and preserving the site as open space. The first selectman clearly underestimated the challenge of finding consensus.

The plan is still a work in progress, which does not help. A proposal to replace Shelton House with Bridgeport Hall as the site of town offices in the master plan was raised by Mr Rosenthal just this week. But it was that memorable town meeting in 2001 that is responsible for the fuzzy early roadmap for developing Fairfield Hills that has led the first selectman and the town’s Fairfield Hills Development Authority to the rocky political road they must now follow to implement a master plan.

Mr Rosenthal’s dilemma is this: does he honor the mandate of that eventful town meeting in June 2001 to implement the first phase of Fairfield Hill’s development, filling in the details along the way as the town meeting was so eager to do, or does he disenfranchise those voters by yielding to political pressures today, halting the process, and somehow redeciding the issue with the benefit of details. It is a legal and a political tangle. But such are the perils of leading a town that changes its mind.