CFE Honors Towns For Helping Save The Kelda Lands

Special environmental protection awards were presented to Newtown and 14 other Fairfield County towns for leading the fight to protect more than 18,700 acres of watershed land that the state and The Nature Conservancy will buy from the British-based Kelda Corporation. The towns were honored during the Connecticut Fund for the Environment’s Annual Meeting September 8 at the Weir Farm National Historic Site in Wilton before a crowd of 120 people.

“To put this in perspective,” CFE Executive Director Don Strait said, “a year and a half ago when we faced Kelda’s purchase of Connecticut’s largest private water company along with all of this open watershed land, few thought we had a chance to win this one.

“They were right – we didn’t have a chance – if we tried to do it alone,” he added. “But what started as a long-shot legal effort to delay Kelda’s purchase soon became a well-organized, powerful coalition of more than 100 elected officials, community leaders, and organizations.”

CFE provided the legal expertise and public outreach experts. Donors came forward to an extraordinary degree and at a moment’s notice. People responded with letters and phone calls to their elected officials – growing CFE’s activist network to more than 5,000 members.

“Thanks to their work and the leadership of these 15 municipalities, we won state approval of a deal that saves more land than all that has been saved in the past 10 years. Our challenge now is to protect all utility watershed lands in Connecticut,” he added.

“These towns were awesome. They were unstinting in their efforts,” CFE Board member and Kelda coalition co-chair Julie Belaga said. “They raised $75,000 for a feasibility study that laid out three options for preserving the Kelda lands. That study gave weight to the issue and played a pivotal role in the struggle and the successful outcome. This was a feisty crowd, a bipartisan group, from small towns and cities in western Connecticut. To get representatives of 15 towns in Connecticut to agree on anything is remarkable.”

Towns honored by CFE were Bridgeport, Danbury, Easton, Fairfield, Greenwich, Monroe, New Canaan, Newtown, Redding, Shelton, Stratford, Trumbull, Weston, Westport, and Wilton.

CFE Board President Campbell Hudson also presented awards to the Shepaug River Association for its role in stopping the city of Waterbury from draining the Shepaug River and to The Nature Conservancy for its part in preserving the Kelda lands.

Robin Winks, history professor at Yale University and a leading expert on the national park system, presented the meeting’s keynote address. He described America’s national park system as “the most elegant and best managed” in the world and warned of potential damage if America’s parks are not funded adequately.

For more information on CFE’s programs and priorities, visit CFE’s web site at http://www.cfenv.org.