By Gretchen Webster
WESTPORT — More than 30 Westport Community Gardens members pleaded with the Parks and Recreation Commission on Wednesday to help protect their 20-year-old gardens from the bulldozer when the Long Lots Elementary School project gets underway.
The gardens are on town-owned property next to the Hyde Lane school, and depending on which option is chosen to either rebuild or replace the aging school, may be plowed under.
The gardeners asked that a usage report on all town athletic fields be made public and that discussion of the gardens’ future be put on a Parks and Recreation Commission agenda before the Long Lots Building Committee makes a final decision, which is expected shortly.
They also asked why the Parks and Recreation Commission has not weighed in on their months-long fight to save the gardens, which fall under the Parks and Recreation Department’s purview.
But there were few answers from commission members to gardeners’ questions at the Wednesday meeting in Town Hall.
Since the community gardens issue had not been added to the meeting agenda, the gardeners were allowed to speak only during the public comment portion of the meeting. And, Chairman David Floyd said at the start of the meeting, commission members would only answer questions and not give opinions or discuss the issue with the gardeners.
The meeting marked the gardeners’ latest attempt to gain assurances from officials on various town boards and commissions that the gardens will be preserved regardless of the final option selected for a new Long Lots School.
The meeting also ended abruptly when a man in attendance suffered a medical emergency.
Before that, however, the gardeners forged ahead with their crusade, asking why one ballfield, in a town with many athletic fields, might be installed on the site of the gardens, which has only one location.
And an elementary school does not need a regulation-size baseball field, many pointed out.
“I wouldn’t doubt that ballfields are important, but I’m pretty sure that people will still get to play baseball” if a field at Long Lots School is not built, Marjorie Donald told the commission.
“We’re an important part of the Recreation Department. Would anyone consider putting a ballfield on the 18th hole of the golf course? They have 17 other holes,” she said to applause. “There’s just one garden. Surely you can figure something out.”
Parks and Recreation Director Jennifer Fava is completing work on a townwide field usage report, Floyd said, and the report will be given to the Long Lots Building Committee when it’s done, not to the gardeners.
That angered several gardeners, who said the field usage report should have been available long ago and should be a public document.
“I’m astounded that it is the middle of September – there will be a decision on the placement of the school in the next few weeks,” said Julie O’Grady, yet the Parks and Recreation Commission has not weighed in or even presented a field usage report.
“The work that we have done there has taken years … in a few weeks we’re out of luck,” she added.
“We are devastated that we are marching to destruction,” Louis Weinberg, president of the community gardens, told the commission.
Many community organizations, including Earthplace, the Aspetuck Land Trust, Sustainable Westport and others, collaborated to create the gardens and the adjacent Long Lots Preserve, Weinberg said. “What we’ve done there is transformative,” he said. “We believe that any other town in America would celebrate the gardens — and protect them.”
Melissa Alexander said she attended the meeting not as a member of the community gardens, but because she feels the gardens should be an important part of the education program at Long Lots Elementary School, which her children attend.
“My nine-year-old daughter said, ‘Don’t destroy the gardens. Why would they build a ballfield there when they’re teaching us about sustainability?’ ” Alexander said.
Freelance writer Gretchen Webster, a Fairfield County journalist and journalism teacher for many years, was editor of the Fairfield Minuteman newspaper for 10 years and teaches journalism at Southern Connecticut State University.
I remember back when Stuart McCarthy (no relations) ran Parks and Rec, he was asked why we had a skateboard park at Compo. His response was that not every kid was drawn to the popular team sports and the P&R Dept had a responsibility to cater to a wide variety of interests. Seems like an appropriate reminder.
And as to who owns the field usage report. It is We The People. Not Jen Tooker or Jen Fava or any town attorney or any commission or Department. This is a disgraceful example of the lack of basic respect the entire town government has for Westport residents. Openness and Transparency is dead in Westport.
This is why a town “discussion” on this matter should have already been petitioned on to the next RTM meeting agenda.
John@openwestport.org
Winslow Park consists of 29 acres, how about a baseball diamond in one of the corners of this park? Just a thought….
Dear Town Leaders:
Please find a way to protect, and their current state, the 20 year-old Westport Community Gardens, and newly established Long Lots Preserve, while also finding equitable resources for ball fields. While putting a ball field over the Westport Community Gardens and Long Lots Preserve seems to be the easiest thing to do, it is not the right thing to do. It is hurtful. It hurts our seniors. It hurts the adjacent residential neighbors. It hurts the environment in an area being overrun with development. It hurts 20 years of community building. It hurts the educational opportunities for hands on learning for Long Lots and Stepping Stones students.
We have one Community Garden in town, carefully tended over twenty years by 120 families and their guests, your neighbors. It is surrounded by a preserve initiative to reclaim and environmentally improve town land at no cost to the town. Dozens of local businesses and organizations have contributed to this initiative. It is a tangible model of how we can help our planet, not harm it. This is what we are teaching our kids in school.
We can do better.
For those of you who do not understand the magnitude of the Westport Community Gardens and Long Lots Preserve, pictures speak a thousand words…
https://www.shutterfly.com/share-product/?shareid=b913a396-6d33-41c0-99a2-b5f2941fd42b&cid=SHARPRDWEBMPRLNK
As does this video….
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=rrlkHpSYVjI&feature=youtu.be
Please find the resources needed to support athletics for our kids. Please don’t do it at the expense of our only Garden and model Preserve.
In all of these conversations, residents and gardeners have pleaded to save the one established community garden in Westport. I haven’t heard any voices in support of building a massive baseball field at an elementary school (where students are much too young to play on a field that size even if they were so inclined). If there is such an overwhelming demand for baseball fields in Westport, please share that information! From everything we’ve heard and witnessed in Westport these fields are used infrequently, and it seems tone deaf to double down on the town’s investment in them.
It’s hard to believe that the committee has been so forceful about expanding the baseball field in their designs without any study on current field utilization. It’s another huge gap in this process that has excluded so many stakeholders, and left the decision making in the hands of a small chosen group.
With town leaders and residents trying to promote sustainability as a priority of Westport and a value that we need to pass down to the next generation, it has to start somewhere our children can see it in action, every day. Otherwise these are just words.
What message will bulldozing a native nature preserve and pollinator pathway community garden right outside their school windows send? Not “you can make a difference”, not “there is still hope to bring back the native green spaces we need to thrive” or “if you work hard on something you love, good will come of it.”
They will not have a chance to benefit from the 20 year established garden and preserve. They won’t get to see the hundreds of species of bees and butterflies that have taken years to establish themselves in the space. They won’t get a glimpse of the weasels that have returned in recent years to make a home in the dead wood habitat created in the preserve. They won’t get to watch the killdeer birds lay their eggs in a nook of the garden because they finally felt safe enough in that area to do so.
They’ll see this inspiring nature preserve and community garden bulldozed over and 20 years of work lost in an instant, in spite of the protests, because someone with much more power than them decided it was what they wanted.
I don’t feel like I’m living in a democracy.
Karen, we are no longer living in a democracy We now live in totalitarian state .If like our friend and neighbor ,Tara Mc Laughlin, you voice a different opinion you are berated ostracized and driven out of town .Obviously, the destruction of the gardens building upon Barron’s So.rather than preserving open space polluting the Saugatuck with human waste at 122 Wilton are a gut punch to sustainable development.and environmental supporters. So it would seems we have only two choices.Vote with our feet and cash out before home values plummet or vote out this administration. Let’s stand together and demand a town hall meeting prior to election day .