To the Editor:

I am strongly opposed to apartment buildings on the Fairfield Hills campus.

Will Rodgers’ Bee letter [The Newtown Bee, October 16, 2020, “Consider Town’s Future Options When Considering Fairfield Hills Vote”] speaks to ‘moving to the nuisance.’ Rightly, we could expect that resident pressures and complaints about parking availability, lighting on fields and walkways, noise of community events, and more would ultimately create conflict and compromise public uses.

Additionally, parking for residents of at least 170 apartments and businesses, right in the center of our campus will push our capacity beyond its limits. We would be viewing a virtual sea of cars replacing green spaces and open vistas.

Further, the economic argument is just not persuasive. The savings that would accrue to each taxpayer will be gobbled up by some other community need. Even if applied to individual taxes, it does not warrant selling off’ a bit of our common space — space that makes Newtown special in ways that other communities cannot claim: a wonderful park in the geographic center of our town. Space that each of us own together — that we claim as our own, that we enjoy for civic, social, recreational purposes. It is special in a way that cannot be captured by money alone.

Kelley Johnson speaks well in her Bee letter [The Newtown Bee, October 16, 2020, “A ‘No’ Vote On Fairfield Hills Housing: A Campus For All”] to the idea of delayed gratification. Yes, our struggles to define, support, and fund Fairfield Hills have been a pressure for many years. But we have made great progress! Just since 2009, 16 buildings have been demolished or rehabbed. Infrastructure improvements include an underground power loop, new streetscaping and landscaping, trails and ballfields created. Significant facilities have been added: community center, senior center, ambulance garage, Parent Connection, EMS building. The pub adds a new social dimension. Let’s not give up now! The 2010 Master Plan Review Committee got it right: The Fairfield Hills campus should serve as the civic, social, recreational, and cultural center of our community, with some commerce, and no housing.

Finally, campus apartments will forever alter the space we now enjoy and share mutually. The campus can define and distinguish us; be a value and benefit to future generations if its potential can be fully realized as the social, civic, recreational and cultural center for the Newtown community. Let’s not abandon that vision.

As journalist George Lorimer said, “It’s good to have money and the things that money can buy, but its good, too, to check that you haven’t lost the things money can’t buy.”

E. Patricia Llodra

Riverside Road, Sandy Hook October 19, 2020