Buy Open Space Now, or Pay More Later

While there are many issues being discussed with respect to the proposed planning and zoning changes in New Hartford, one issue that deserves more attention is open space preservation.

As more homes are built in New Hartford, more children enter our school system. Since 72% of our budget is devoted to education, additional children only increase the strain on the town budget and result in increased taxes. This in turn has created the perceived need for commercial development to generate tax revenue and reduce the burden on residents. Then more residential homes will be built, taxes will increase to cover educational needs, and more commercial development will ensue to generate tax revenue. Before you know it, our beautiful rural town will be rural no more. This is what I call the vicious cycle.

We have only to look at our neighbors such as Torrington and Canton to see that once the cycle starts, it repeats itself over and over again. Obviously, this strategy hasn’t worked for other towns, and it is unlikely that it will work for us either. The problem with relying on commercial development alone to solve our tax woes is that this approach treats the symptom and not the cause. The cause of our tax woes is residential development and the strain it puts on our school system.

In order to really solve the problem, we need to address the cause. The best long-term strategy for stabilizing our taxes and retaining our rural character is open space preservation, because it reduces residential development. While many might say that the town can’t afford to buy open space, I contend that it can’t afford not to. Consider the following example.

Assumptions: $1 million buys a 40-acre parcel of land; 20 houses could be built on that land; each house averages two children; cost to educate those two children is $15,000 per year ($7,500 each); and the average house pays $4,500 in taxes per year. The average home will generate a deficit of $10,500 per year; 20 homes generate a $ 210,000 deficit per year. Thus, in five years the $1 million investment would be paid back.

The cost to educate children essentially continues on forever, since statistically speaking, there will always be children associated with any home that exists in town. In addition, these educational costs do not even include the capital expense of building a new school to accommodate the rising enrollment, a figure that could easily be in the $10 million range.

What does buying open space mean to the average household in terms of taxes? A $1 million yearly investment spread equally among 2,400 households results in an expense of $35 per month per household—less that the cost of buying cable TV. Looking at it another way, this is less than the cost of buying coffee and a donut at work each morning. I, for one, would be very willing to sacrifice $35 a month to preserve open space, protect the rural character of our town, and help stabilize our taxes. And, based on the response at the recent Planning and Zoning hearings, I believe there are a lot of other residents of New Hartford who care enough about our town to do so as well.

Preserving open space must be an integral part of an up-to-date, comprehensive development plan for our town. Most other towns that are already more developed than New Hartford did not start preserving open space early enough in their development cycle. We have a unique opportunity to learn from their experience, start preserving open space now, and break the vicious cycle.

One of the lessons another Connecticut town has shared with us is to have a significant fund in place that is readily available to purchase strategic parcels of land that come up for sale. Otherwise, the town is unable to compete with the private sector, because the seller is usually not willing to wait for the town to allocate the funds through referendum. Instead, the referendums are proposed and passed in advance of land becoming available. When these funds are exhausted, another referendum is proposed to refresh the fund. All referendums to allocate money to an open space fund are overwhelmingly supported by the residents in this town. Another lesson shared by this town is to leverage partnerships with entities such as the Nature Conservancy, local land trusts, and State of Connecticut grant programs so that the town gets the most value for its money. I propose that New Hartford heed this advice, learned through the school of hard knocks.

W. Edwards Deming, the quality guru, once said, "If you always do what you’ve always done, you will always get what you’ve always got." If New Hartford follows the same strategy that neighboring towns have followed, we will get the same results, which are unacceptable to me and many of the other residents in our town. We need to develop a different approach to make sure that we get different results. One way to make sure that we protect New Hartford’s rural character is to embark on an aggressive open space acquisition process early in our development cycle. New Hartford’s greatest asset is its rural character and we need to protect it now, before it’s too late.

Public input on the planning and zoning debate will continue on Tuesday, October 22 at 7:30 p.m. at Regional #7. The public should take this opportunity to express its opinions prior to the Planning and Zoning Commission’s decision on this critical issue, which will be final.