Enjoy This Precious Place

To the Editor:

Mr Mitch Bolinsky complains of being “hustled and confused” shortly after relocating to Wiley Lane from Ohio. He likes Newtown’s schools, wants to build another, and is mad as heck about Fairfield Hills. I think I can help him with both his problems, even while cutting him a little more slack than he cuts First Selectman Rosenthal. Confusion first – the hustled part is easy.

 You’ve brought your children to a remarkably diverse town. Your new neighbors run a gamut of ages, incomes, backgrounds and employment. The school mom in her three-ton SUV shares the roads with the retired factory worker in his ten-year-old Chevy, the high earner in his BMW, the middle earner in her VW, the teacher in his middle-aged Oldsmobile, the doctor in his Lexus, and the working guys and gals who drive the pickup and panel trucks that keep the town running. Your neighbors’ homes range from vast old estates, to considerably less vast but no less costly new estates, to cul-de-sac mansions, mega-mansions, and McMansions, to modest cottages, ranches, and raised-ranches, Colonials old and new, Cape Cods, converted barns, split levels and mobile homes and condos.

I applaud your decision to enroll your children in a public school where they will encounter classmates from many levels of American society. They will be better citizens for it and better fellow-citizens, able to appreciate different points of view.

For variety comes at a price. If you want variety in your neighbors, you must accept your neighbors’ fears and hopes and dreams as being as important as yours.

Your neighbors know that the Fairfield Hills opportunity and the need for a new 5/6 school will both affect taxes in Newtown, one way or another. They have seen new homes drive taxes up to pay for more children in school, so a big fear from the moment that Fairfield Hills came on the market was the real possibility of ending up with the worst of new worlds: a gigantic housing development which would simultaneously raise taxes and destroy open space.

That left them entertaining many proposals for use of the land, some sound, some strange, in hopes of finding a happier medium. I must say that from the limited perspective of my particular hermitage down here in the swamp it appears that so far the selectmen have done a pretty good job of not allowing themselves to be stampeded into a short term decision. Considering the pressures, I call that leadership.

How these two decisions are handled will have a forceful impact on many Newtowners’ finances. I have no idea what resources you’ve gathered at Wiley Lane, but whether you haul the kids around in a Volvo or a Yugo you can imagine the situation of others who are either more or less fortunate than you. If you’re in the full tide of career and taking down a comfortable middle-six figures, then the occasional thousand dollar increase in your property taxes will be more annoyance than problem. Similarly, if planning for retirement involves lunch at the club once a year with your money person, your main worry about your future in Newtown is whether we will protect enough open space so the town will remain a pleasant place to live. But if you’ve worked your whole life to retire in your modest home with the second mortgage you took out for pay for the kids’ college, another grand a year will hurt; while the prospect of future increases gets positively scary.

Similarly, if retirement from a satisfying job in the mid-five figures will hinge on social security and a small pension (provided your employer doesn’t go under in the interim) you know that steadily increasing property taxes will drive you out.

Now you can tell these people to just go away because your children’s education is more important. The well-off will flee crowding and deadening homogenization and the less well-off will be taxed out of their homes. But you will do it at a terrible cost. And when it will turn around and bite you on the behind is when your children – having gone on to excellent universities and discovered spouses to make grandchildren – refuse to settle in Newtown because it’s become just another suburb.

So much for “confused.” As for “hustled,” sir, you know as well as I that any con man will tell you that the mark cons himself by looking for something for nothing. Surely you didn’t move to Newtown looking for a free ride. On reflection, you will not feel hustled, only confused – and only temporarily as you settle in and enjoy this precious place.

Justin Scott

Parmalee Hill Road, Newtown                                     February 26, 2001