By John Schwing
WESTPORT — First Selectwoman Jennifer Tooker, acting only 18 hours after receiving a recommendation for construction of a new Long Lots Elementary School, formally endorsed the plans Friday — including a last-minute change to relocate the Westport Community Gardens from its current location to the Baron’s South open-space property.
The project to replace the seven-decade-old school on Hyde Lane, which currently has the largest enrollment of the town’s five elementary schools, is estimated to cost between $92.1 million and $98.2 with “enhanced sustainability” options. When complete, it is expected to be the town’s most costly municipal project.
Planning for the new school began last year with the appointment of the Long Lots School Building Committee, followed by the Board of Education’s approval of educational specifications for the new school in April.
In the intervening months, the building committee, consulting with architects and construction professionals, considered a range of options for the project, which included renovating the existing building, renovations with an addition or an entirely new structure in various positions on the Hyde Lane property. All but one of those six scenarios would have uprooted the community gardens and Long Lots Preserve. (Updates from the committee on the project’s feasibility study and other reports are posted on the town’s website.)
For months, gardeners at the 20-year-old community plots adjacent to the school lobbied town officials on different boards and commissions, as well as speaking out via media outlets, in an effort to maintain the gardens where they now grow. “Moving” the gardens anywhere, they argued, would be tantamount to destroying them.
When the Long Lots School Building Committee on Oct. 5 selected “Concept C” for the project — a plan to construct an all-new school — the proposal at the time called for placing a new, larger athletic field on the site of the gardens and relocating them elsewhere on the property.
The plan also calls for the existing school to remain in use while the new building is constructed.
However, in a brief meeting Thursday evening, the building committee voted unanimously to formally recommend the plan for Tooker’s approval, while amending the proposal to say the community gardens should be moved entirely off the Hyde Lane property and to Baron’s South, between Compo Road South and Imperial Avenue.
“I am wholly confident that the LLSBC, through its intense evaluation and thorough review process, has produced a well-thought feasibility recommendation that incorporates multiple stakeholder concerns and issues,” Tooker said in the statement released at noon Friday.
The first selectwoman noted that, with her endorsement, the proposal will now face hearings before a series of town boards for financing and zoning approvals, which “will provide multiple opportunities for public input.”
Tooker’s decision to formally accept all of the Long Lots Building Committee’s recommendations, including the last-minute change, is likely to spark further controversy over the future of the community gardens.
Community gardens still a battleground
Louis Weinberg, chairman of the Westport Community Gardens, on Friday described the decision as “a fait accompli” and “a slow-moving train wreck.”
The plan to supplant the gardens, which he called a nationally recognized “environmental gem,” with a larger ballfield, complete with dugouts, scoreboard and likely light installations, represents “a failure of transparency and leadership,” he said.
Plans for enhanced athletic facilities on the property, Weinberg said, apparently were underway for months prior to being publicly discussed by the building committee. That “none-too-transparent” process, he added, enabled a “land grab” by parks and recreation officials and the Tooker administration.
Tooker, however, echoed what building committee members have previously said is a major reason for moving the gardens. Because of “the high probability that the gardens will be a staging area for the new construction,” she said, “the administration is proposing working with the gardeners to establish a new location at Baron’s South.”
That newly proposed site for the gardens, she said, close to the Westport Center for Senior Activities, would provide “access to infrastructure resources, water, restrooms and additional public access that is not available at the Long Lots location.
“It would be located in the area of Baron’s South that was previously a garden, therefore returning the space to its original use,” Tooker continued. She said that moving the gardens before construction starts on Hyde Lane “with the help and resources of the town” should avoid missing a growing season.
The viability of the new location, however, has been called into question by several garden advocates, who say the area remains the site of contaminated fill excavated when the senior center was expanded.
John Suggs, a former Representative Town Meeting running for election to the body again this year, said ground dug from the area of what was once Baron Walter Langer von Langendorff’s perfume laboratory and dumped on the property in 2019 contains petroleum products, elevated arsenic levels, asbestos and more.
On that issue, the building committee, in its recommendation, said it acted based on a consultant’s 2020 report that concluded after soil was remediated on the property “arsenic concentrations in soil at the site appear typical of arsenic concentrations in soil throughout New England.”
It also said relocating the gardens to Baron’s South would likely require removing at least 3 inches of soil to prepare the site.
Neighborhood concerns
Tooker’s statement did not specifically address concerns raised by Long Lots neighbors about potential water runoff and flooding caused by the newly constructed school and athletic field, other than to say planning considerations included “potential impact to the neighboring properties … and stormwater management.”
Others have expressed concern over the potential for more noise in the neighborhood caused by placing the new multi-purpose athletic field close to the Hyde Lane property lines.
John Schwing, the Westport Journal consulting editor, has held senior editorial and writing posts at southwestern Connecticut media outlets for four decades. Learn more about us here.
To approximate the living conditions of the current soil at the Westport Community Garden, soil scientists at the Connecticut Agricultural Experiment Station told me you must take between two – three FEET of soil (not three inches) to bring just some of the existing universe of life. That does not even begin to address the surrounding ecostystem. I thought it was funny when one recent day I stumbled upon a prominent developer in town walking the gardens. When I resisted his idea to move the gardens, and everything in them, he said: “All it takes is money.”
All predictable but at least our First Selectwomen has come out of hiding Unfortunately she had better things to do last night than come to two public meeting and listen to her constituents.
None of this is a surprise as she had already decided at the early stages of the formation of the LLSBC to kill the Community Gardens. Unfortunately, they didn’t even mention the possibility in public meetings to the stakeholders concerned until months later.
What a horrible spiteful and provocative act this is…to move our award winning garden to a toxic waste site off property at the expense of a ball field that is not needed and will produce significant water runoff into the yards of neighbors, not to mention the noise and light pollution that it brings with it.
In Westport the Democrats are not Democrats and the Republicans are not Republicans…we are led by people who are drunk on their own power…I changed my voter registration today from Democrat to Unaffiliated after I witnessed last night’s BOE meeting.
Ordinarily the answer would be at the ballot box in a few weeks but now I find myself wondering whether I would rather be stabbed or poisoned.
The BOE meeting last night was a total fiasco
Shameful. Jen Tooker should be there the day that the bulldozers take out the garden. That will be her legacy.
And she should be joined by the spineless Democrats on the Board of Education who will sell their constituents down the river to get what they want. Dumbfounding act of selfishness.
The Democrats are hyperventilating about the Republican candidates for BOE and actively campaigning for an independent write-in BOE candidate (which seems like nothing more than a blatant attempt to skirt Town laws that allow for only a bare-minimum partisan majority on Town Boards).
I’m pretty far left on the political scale, but I have way more integrity than Westport Democrats have shown of late.
Remember in November.
We have been led to believe it is about the “Babe Ruth” baseball field, but the truth coming out is this is all about WSA getting more fields, including turf fields. This now makes sense why the baseball community was out in left field on a new home plate over the Gardens… See what I did there?
Notwithstanding the fact that the Barons South site is a six foot high pile of contaminated rubble filed with chunks of asphalt, nails, jagged steel, glass, asbestos, etc., I have a question.
And this is it: when caught red handed back in 2019, the town advanced the defense that the pile was just TEMPORARY. And by temporary, it meant that the pile could remain where it was for the life of the Senior Center expansion project’s permit – 5 years. After that, it was explained to us, the town would be obligated to produce a compliant remedy. So the clock is about to run out on the permit which allows the town to (sort of) legally temporarily store its dump in a public park. Is it going to comply with its own regulations and remove the contaminated construction fill before exiling the poor community gardeners to this site?
This makes no sense to me. A resident at the BOE meeting made a very interesting observation. Why would you destroy the award winning garden, which is located all the way to the left of the school’s current parking lot as a staging field, when the new building will be located to the right/ north of the existing school. Why not use the upper field as the staging location and find a transitional space for the upper fields. Once the new school is complete the fields can be restored where the existing school is now? This would allow the garden to remain, the construction site workers would not have to pass by the existing school while still in session & the kids will have uninterrupted field space.
I have suggested before that Baron’s north would be a better place for the transitional fields & ultimately a place for a permeant Babe Ruth size ball field. Once again I ask the Parks & Rec. department to dig deeper to find a different location for the additional field. Thank you.
Hi Susan – Of course it makes no sense until you look at it through the lens of it being the quickest way for LLSBC to bulldoze the gardens and thereby end all debate on the land use.
This is all about getting a ball field (now PRC noq calls it “muti-use” – see how quickly that changed?) that was baked into the cake months before and in secret.
I usually don’t like saying, “I told you so,” but in this case I relish saying it. I vigorously campaigned for Jonathan Steinberg two years ago, and the main reason I and other members of the DTC did so was for one important reason, LEADERSHIP! Now for all of those that voted for Ms. Tooker can see first hand what a weak, non-communicative, and uncaring First Selectwoman she is. I hope you all remember this for next first selectperson’s meeting.
In a 4/23/19 email copied to numerous town officials, P&R Director Jen Fava responded to the Barons South dump controversy: “the decision was made by the [Senior Center] Building Committee to store the fill on the site temporarily for use in other town projects within the town and/or Barons South”.
In a 5/1/19 follow-up email on the same thread, then First Selectman Jim Marpe characterized the dump as a “temporary construction stockpile” and indicated that he had requested “a plan to safely distribute the surplus soil to other sites in the future”.
Right. But now it’s apparently not only permanent but we’re going to use the contaminated site for…growing food?
The town’s own soil reports – including the most recent one (Thunderbird, 2020) cited by the First Selectwoman yesterday, make it abundently clear to any adult who bothers to read them in their entirety, that you can’t have people in close contact with the fill at Barons South, you can’t have them raising dust from the site – and you can’t have them ingesting things grown there.
Someone recently commented to me that he explains life to himself by assuming that everyone is drunk.
He might be on to something.
As a former Jesuit who proudly taught and coached the State Champion Speech and Debate Team at Bellarmine College Prep, I would have immediately flunked any student of mine and contacted their parents if they had ever attempted to win one of their debates using the unethical tactics displayed in the LLSBC report that was endorsed by our First Selectwoman yesterday.
The LLSBC report on pages 12 and 13 of the Executive Summary states:
“While raised as a concern during public comments at public meetings, the Committee has reviewed the 2020 Supplemental Soil Investigation and Preliminary Risk Assessment Report completed by Thunderbird Environmental, LLC. The Consultant concluded that after remediation of the area, “Based on a statistical analysis of the recently collected site-wide soil data, arsenic concentrations in soil at the Site appear typical of arsenic concentrations in soil throughout New England.” Furthermore, it is expected that any rebuilding of the Gardens at this location would require the removal of 3” of soil as part of the earthwork to rebuild a new Garden.”
They then helpfully provide the following link to the source that 2020 Risk Assessment Report
https://www.westportct.gov/home/showpublisheddocument/29903/637302570450630000
And sure enough, the sentence they quote is found in the report.
BUT, if you bother to read further – the VERY NEXT PARAGRAPH – even the VERY NEXT TWO SENTENCES – you quickly discover the assumptions made to reach that conclusion do not all match with what the LLSBC is proposing here. The report’s risk assessment continues to state quite clearly:
“Potential health risk associated with soil arsenic is driven primarily by two factors: exposure and toxicity. Exposure to soil arsenic requires direct contact and intensive interaction with the soils in question. According to the ATSDR, the principal route of exposure to arsenic for the general population is oral intake, primarily in food and drinking water.”
“The state of Connecticut designed its residential (R) and industrial/commercial (IC) soil criteria to allow human exposure for regular frequency, typical intensity level, and for an extended period. In the case of soil arsenic, these criteria are driven by the state’s non-urban soil background concentration; that is, the State emphasizes that the best way to protect human health is to maintain exposure levels around background soil concentrations preferably below non urban soil background concentrations of around 10mg/kg.”
“Regarding risk to human health from soil arsenic, the site is located within an urbanized area and has limited current usage but it’s academically accessed by the public for walking and exercising (running). Other forms of limited trespass are possible; however, the property’s ground cover is well vegetated in areas not covered with buildings or impervious surfaces (ie asphalt and concrete). The vegetative cover and impervious surfaces greatly decreased direct human contact with site soils and suppress the potential for dust creation or soil erosion therefore, direct and indirect exposure to soil arsenic at the site is minimal and therefore, risk to human health from arsenic in soil at the site is low.”
Hmm…EXPOSURE REQUIRES DIRECT CONTACT AND INTENSIVE INTERACTION WITH THE SOILS IN QUESTION. THE PRINCIPLE ROUTE OF EXPOSURE … IS ORAL INTAKE, PRIMARILY IN FOOD AND WATER.
Like…maybe…basically… A COMMUNITY GARDEN?!
Who ever wrote this shoddy, misleading LLSCB report, as well as all those who voted to accept it and/or endorse it count yourselves very lucky that you were not a student in my classroom. Because I would have flunked you and called your parents.
John F. Suggs
It would seem that sheer ignorance, deliberate denial and cruel insensitivity is the hallmark of the Tooker administration as she creates anger and anxiety instead of trust and reliance .
I would think recall or referendum are the next tools we need to get our message to the First Selectwoman.
Is this an option?
YES, Carolanne. Pursuant to CT, statute 28 Spec.Acts 427,No.383, adopted in 1957, Westport CAN recall the first selectman.
John,
Am I understanding this correctly? That according to the details and attachments/links in the LLSBC very own report, that the soil in the area that the LLSBC so kindly suggested as a new home for the new, starting from scratch community garden( since the garden cannot be moved) is so contaminated, that no living being, nor creature for that matter could even fathom stepping foot on, let alone eat anything that might come from that ground.
The ground sounds more toxic than fallout from a nuclear explosion.
Do you suppose that the LLSBC even read and understood the ramifications of their own attachments ? Or were they working off the premise that none of the residents would read the report.
I’m slightly confused. I’m also confused by the intended role of the LLSBC, which I thought was to look at plans for either renovating the school or building a new school and replacing all existing fields.
I’m confused at how the role changed to include a baseball field, not for use by long lots age children( so nothing to do with the school or it’s existing fields, but a baseball field for use by others in town.
Please correct me if I am wrong but the land the WCG created their nationally acclaimed prize winning garden on is not part of the long lots campus at all.
So then what or who led the LLSBC to think they could include it in the campus.
I would love someone to explain this to me in simple layman’s terms.
Thank you
Ciara
Mary, most of us still have remants of basketball hoops in our own driveways. Public parks/ ball fields are installed in cities with children living in affordable housing high rises like the monument to stupoidity being built on the Taylortown Salt Marsh.
Totally off topic, have you considered abandoning a second restaurant on Main St. and bringing Nomade II to Elm St. New Canaan ?
Well Caroline, we are still putting our faith in the wonderful residents of Westport who have supported us, and been nothing but positive even when it takes them 30 minutes to find a parking spot, no thanks to the current administration and their appointed DPIC committee.
We hope after our P&Z commission votes on this horrendous 8-24 plan that those of us who believe in having an actual downtown will prevail.
Please send emails to the RTM AND P&Z… with your comments and opinions.
This is our last chance to stress to a town body just his detrimental this plan is going to be and will destroy Westport as we have all come to know and enjoy it.
Mary, my family and I have celebrated every bday,engagement,graduation,and anniversary at Nomade .I’m sure you’ve seen my caramel Italian leather hobo bag hanging on the corner of a chair,. But at our last raising of the glass,I told my family this may be our last meal if the Parker Harding plan becomes a reality. So yes,I stand with you and the downtown merchants in voicing an objection.
Thank you Caroline, we and all the merchants appreciate your business and thank you for your kind words. Truly.
We share your concerns. And are grateful for your support.
The whole idea is absurd.
Let us hope and pray it is shut down by our P&Z at tomorrows meeting.
If not westport will start to see a mass exodus of merchants.
It makes absolutely no sense to bulldoze Westport’s only community garden to add a massive baseball field under the guise of a school renovation.
Everyone wants a school renovation or net new building for Long Lots, you won’t find anyone opposing that. Because of that universal need, tacking on proposals completely outside the school renovation’s parameters is purely a way to force through projects that otherwise couldn’t stand on their own. This shouldn’t be acceptable to anyone.
The task of renovating a school should be just that. Not build a school… and rip out a nature preserve, bulldoze the town’s only community garden, and build a massive baseball field right on top of our neighbors. Along with a parting message of ‘here’s a previously poisoned dump site you can try to garden on! As long as you don’t touch the dirt often, it’s probably fine. And to residents, we aren’t sure what flooding effects there will be by ripping out all those plants that soak up the water and rolling out artificial turf to your property lines, but it’ll probably be fine!’