One of the biggest issues facing the town of Easton is always the preservation of land. Fortunately, a large amount of land in Easton is forever preserved for several reasons. The town owns several large tracts of land which have been deed restricted to remain open space forever. Examples are Paine open space or the northern portion of South Park Avenue. Other tracts have been sold to the Aspetuck Land Trust whose mission is to preserve land. Examples are Trout Brook Valley or the Angler’s preserve among others. Several farms have been preserved by facilitating transitions or sales so that they can remain farms. Still more land is preserved by state law as it protects our reservoirs. These strategies have been successful in the past.
Going forward, it seems our greatest challenge will be preserving land which is currently being farmed. It is no secret that farming is hard work and that many of our farms have been worked by families for many years. A recent excellent piece in the Courier described all of the succession issues and mechanisms available to keep farms as ongoing concerns. However, it seems younger generations of our farming families are no longer willing to remain farmers and will look to sell the land they inherit or gain control of from previous generations.
As a town, I believe that it is overwhelmingly agreed that we want to preserve as much of that land as possible from any kind of development, but how do we do it? In general, we cannot control the private sale of land. That land could be sold to developers particularly if they are willing to build low-income housing. State statute 8-30g provides that developers can bypass many of the town’s zoning laws if they are building low-income housing and it is difficult to fight this. Obviously, there are challenges to building denser housing in Easton due to lack of public water and especially public sewage, as well as our need to protect the watershed. Still, this is a concern.
We have reconstituted the Land Acquisition and Preservation Authority to study this, but let’s explore their options. The simplest answer is for the town to purchase all of the land which becomes available and then we can control its destiny and use or preserve it as we see fit. While it is difficult to accurately predict, the cost of that would potentially be millions of dollars over the next one to two decades.
A second option is to look for partnerships and groups we can work with to preserve land, the most obvious being to work with the Land Trust, or other nonprofits committed to land preservation as was done with Gilbertie’s Farm or the first 19 acres at South Park. We can look to keeping farms as ongoing concerns as was done with the Barney farm. That was a cooperative effort comingling town and state funds to preserve the farm. In order to do this, we must maintain farm-friendly policies in terms of zoning regulations so that people will be willing to come to Easton to farm. (More about that in a future article.)
If we cannot purchase or partner with others for all the land that comes on the market to remain open space, can we encourage sales to groups we can work with to ensure that any kind of development remains consistent with the character of the town? We have zoning and conservation restrictions to enforce our vision, but these must be updated as needed. We may need to consider limited development, i.e., single family homes or other uses like recreation/sports or mixed uses, or town use buildings, but under our restrictions. These situations might require more difficult decisions.
These are broad questions to consider and I write today to stimulate conversation and thought. I look forward to the fine work that I know the Land Acquisition and Preservation will do and to the decisions that we as a town will have to make together.
