Fairfield Hills:

Reclaiming Our Stewardship Of The Land

The Town of Newtown sent a $390,000 deposit to the State of Connecticut this week along with a signed contract to purchase the 189-acre Fairfield Hills core campus for $3.9 million by the end of the year. The closing of this deal, ten years in the making, represents for many the beginning of an exciting new chapter for the property and buildings of the former state mental hospital. Much of the debate over the future of Fairfield Hills in the past decade was centered on the opportunities awaiting the town there. The fine print in the contract signed this week, however, details the many responsibilities Newtown must assume before it even starts to realize those opportunities.

Newtown is inheriting from the state a legacy of environmental abuse at Fairfield Hills. Granted, that abuse was not willful; it came as a result of our cultural naivety in the 40s, 50s, and 60s about the consequences of using toxic substances in uncontrolled ways. Insecticide saturates the soils around the buildings, lead paint is peeling from the faded stately facades and interiors of the buildings, and at least one underground oil line and tank is leaking.

The experts estimate it will cost about $3 million to cleanup the known contamination. The state tried to compensate the town for those costs by knocking $1.6 million off the original asking price, adding another 100,000 gallons per day to the town’s sewer capacity at no cost to the town, and by adding five houses along Mile Hill South into the deal at the last minute. Town officials are making a calculated bet that whatever unknown contamination is found at the site in the future will be covered by an environmental insurance policy they are purchasing for $500,000. And by agreeing to work out a remedial action plan with the state Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) addressing the contamination at Fairfield Hills, the town has secured a state promise to support a covenant in which the DEP agrees not to sue the town under applicable state environmental laws.

In strictly legal terms, the existing environmental problems at Fairfield Hills are viewed as liabilities that are to be transferred from the state to the town. This legal cloud over the property does have a silver lining, however, when viewed from another perspective. Another name for environmental liability is environmental stewardship. The state’s stewardship of the farmland where it built a mental health community failed in every known and unknown place where contamination exists at Fairfield Hills today. Those farms, once part of Newtown, are now returning to the fold where local people may once again watch over them and protect them. In legal terms, local liability may be a negative. But when we talk about the legacy of the land, local stewardship is definitely a plus.

Whatever wonderful opportunities lie ahead for Newtown at Fairfield Hills, Newtown must first realize its responsibility to the land itself. Fairfield Hills lies at the heart of Newtown, and its air is our air, its soil is our soil, and its groundwater is our groundwater. Thank goodness that we are taking control of it once again.