Plotting New Coordinates For Fairfield Hills

In the tightly spinning universe of local politics, there are, occasionally, rare alignments of ideology. Bodies of opinion claiming some measure of critical mass suddenly fall out of their ordinary orientation of mutual opposition to start pulling in the same direction, and out of seeming chaos comes consensus. Such an alignment started to take shape during the election campaign last fall, after years of contention over the town’s administration and development of Fairfield Hills, most candidates for election to the town’s top offices agreed that the time had come to take another look at the Fairfield Hills Master Plan and the local ordinance that created and empowered the Fairfield Hills Authority (FHA).

Now that an entirely new Board of Selectmen has taken office and assembled a proposed 2010-11 town budget, it is just about ready to turn its attention to Fairfield Hills. The board indicated this week that it will appoint a committee next month to review the master plan and its administration by the FHA. Early last month, the Legislative Council had its own issues with the status quo at Fairfield Hills. It reacted strongly to a “operational lease” arrangement approved by the previous administration to finance a parking area at Fairfield Hills to be shared by the privately owned Newtown Youth Academy and town facilities. The council unanimously endorsed a plan to refinance the debt through the town’s normal bonding process, which was ultimately approved last week in a town meeting.

The original financing strategy was roundly criticized when it was initiated by opponents of the development of the new Municipal Center in the former Bridgeport Hall because it created a $3.5 million obligation for the town without the usual review of expenditures prescribed by the town charter. The financing scheme was legal and expedient, though, as it turned out, politically obtuse. The deal became an emblem for the lack of “transparency” in the town’s dealings at Fairfield Hills for the Independent Party of Newtown and other critics of previous administrations, who want not only to review the priorities of the Fairfield Hills Master Plan, but also to recast or completely dismantle the ordinance that empowers the FHA.

This rare alignment of opinion, we suspect, will start to pitch and yaw into more familiar angles of deviation once a new committee is convened and the precise coordinates of Fairfield Hills’ future are plotted. That panel will quickly be pushed to address whether the FHA needs to be reinvented or left intact. It will not be a discussion about development at Fairfield Hills so much as it will be a discussion about power.

The Fairfield Hills Authority is itself a rare thing. It was created by a state act in 2005 that allowed municipal development agencies in towns that met a peculiar set of criteria — criteria that could be met by just one town in the state: Newtown. The municipal development agency that became FHA was designed to have the administrative flexibility of the many housing authorities around the state, empowered to negotiate and administer leases outside of the protracted process of leasing procedures approvals commonly required by municipal charters. The idea was to empower the FHA to act quickly in a competitive private development market to seize the most desirable development opportunities before others did without overloading the normal municipal apparatus for reviewing and executing leases prescribed by the charter. Unfortunately, the economy didn’t cooperate, and speed and flexibility seemed useless in a market that slowed to a halt. So now there is a temptation to take the limited powers of the FHA, which works under the aegis of the Board of Selectmen, and return them to the selectmen, Legislative Council, and town meeting.

Each method of administering development at Fairfield Hills has its advantages and drawbacks. Even though state law now requires public hearings on municipal commercial leases, the current way of doing business does bypass the town’s finance authorities and the town meeting. Yet as the economy rebounds, a protracted review and approval of every potential lease agreement may impede Newtown’s ability to capitalize on the best development opportunities. Making a good choice on how to proceed will require a reasoned assessment. So we urge the selectmen to appoint a committee that will not approach its review of Fairfield Hills with preconceived ideas or agendas. Let those with a passionate point of view on these issues show up at hearings to make their case. The committee itself should have a deep interest in the outcome, but not a vested interest.