Members of the Economic Development Commission have been making the rounds of Newtown’s land use agencies with the latest iteration of their technology park proposal. The EDC is eager to counter the perception of some local environmental advocates that the commission is acting with many of the same shortsighted, money-driven objectives that they see in some private developers. “Developers are almost always seen as adversarial,” EDC chairman Chet Hopper observed recently. “The EDC wants to change that perception with this project.”

The Economic Development Commission has a lot of work to do. The total area of the town-owned site off Commerce Road where the tech park is proposed is 76.8 acres, of which 42.2 acres would be developed and 34.6 acres would be left as open space. Originally, the land that was to be developed and the land that was to be left open were configured to protect the environmentally sensitive trout stream Deep Brook. Last year, the EDC successfully petitioned the legislature to redefine the parcels it had given to the town, allowing it to secure “maximum utilization of the lot.” The only problem was that this reconfiguration pushed the development closer to Deep Brook, placing it in peril of contamination.

In what it says is a spirit of “compromise,” the EDC has redrawn its plans, eliminating two lots and creating “controlled overflow” with the help of a lengthy swale as a line of defense for Deep Brook. The compromise, however, still places the largest component of the tech park — a two-story, 80,000-square-foot building with the site’s largest parking lot — just upslope from the brook.

Because this is a town project on town land under review by town land use agencies, the service of this enterprise to the public interest should be absolute. The last time we read the town’s Plan of Conservation and Development, the community’s formal declaration of the public interest, we failed to find any grounds for the compromise of Newtown’s environment and natural resources. To negotiate any of it away for better leverage in a real estate deal would be an unfortunate departure from the plan’s overarching goals for the town and its people.

The tech park presents Newtown with both a challenge and an opportunity. The challenges, as articulated by the proposal’s critics, are many and well known. The opportunity may be less obvious and more elusive, but it is worth pursuing. If Newtown, through all of its offices and agencies, can create a successful technology park, proportionate to its purpose, that absolutely protects and respects the integrity of its environment through innovation and design, it will then have a model to show future developers who would be eager to negotiate away, bit by bit, those natural resources that make our community such an extraordinary place. If Newtown misses this opportunity and cuts corners, every developer will know that this “compromised” park will be the exemplar and starting point for all future negotiations over commercial development in town.

As we said, the Economic Development Commission still has a lot of work to do.