A Public Plan For Fairfield Hills

It is easy to scoff at campaign promises as something more closely related to good intentions or wishful thinking than to solid commitment. But a promise made by each of the candidates for first selectman in the 2009 local elections to conduct a thorough review of the Fairfield Hills Master Plan is coming to fruition just three months into the inaugural term of First Selectman Pat Llodra’s administration.

On Monday night, the Board of Selectmen convened the review process around “core themes” established by a town meeting more than eight years ago, when voters approved a $21.8 million bonding package to purchase the Fairfield Hills campus and to finance a vague list of “associated projects.” The voters at that town meeting, over the objections of a handful of vocal opponents who were demanding more details and specificity about where the money was going, were eager to get on with the town’s acquisition and development of Fairfield Hills. As one supporter, Po Murray, famously exhorted the 750 voters in attendance that night, “Let’s vote! We don’t want to be here until midnight.”

The master plan and the development realities that grew out of that lively evening in 2001 have soured a lot of those original Fairfield Hills supporters on the process they launched. Ms Murray, now vice chairman of the Independent Party of Newtown, was among critics in attendance Monday night who came to caution the selectmen against acting too quickly to revalidate the current Fairfield Hills Master Plan and, by extension, the actions of previous administrations in implementing it.

The core themes carried forward from 2001 for the current review — open space for active and passive recreation; town offices and educational uses; economic development; and adherence to a master plan that protects the environment and the town’s overall control of the campus — still leave plenty of room for interpretation. And some of these “themes” might even get left behind. Once the public has had the opportunity to express its preferences for the future of Fairfield Hills, Ms Llodra conceded that one outcome might be “no commercial development” on the campus.

Before we act to correct past mistakes at Fairfield Hills, we need to understand exactly what those mistakes were. For one, the biggest misstep of the June 2001 town meeting was not that it authorized the purchase of Fairfield Hills with only a vague idea of what would evolve there. The purchase of the land and buildings for $3.9 million was a great move for the town. The problems arose out of the town’s insistence on bonding an additional $17 million for an ill-defined list of projects several years before those projects would commence. By the time the money was spent, few people could agree on, or even remember, what the consensus had been in that meeting room so many years before. Many ended up feeling disengaged and frustrated.

The real value of this review of the Fairfield Hills Master Plan will likely lie in the process rather than the product. If the review can reconnect the people of Newtown to the planning process through hearings and public information sessions, then the final product can be more specific and focused with the added advantage of having the sense of the community in its DNA. Follow that up with timely votes on related bonding initiatives that come loaded with details, and the public will once again be fully vested in the future of Fairfield Hills.