By Linda Conner Lambeck
WESTPORT — Planning and Zoning Commission members generally like the evolving plans for a new Long Lots Elementary School, including its unique design, placement and storm-water management.
Yet, they also told the Long Lots School Building Committee at a Thursday pre-application meeting that their eventual approval may hinge on whether a suitable location can be found for the Westport Community Gardens, which will be displaced by the $100 million school and playing fields on the Hyde Lane property.
“I want this building to get built,” Amy Wistreich, a commission member, said in the crowded Town Hall meeting room. “My only problem is that I have an 8-24 that has a community garden on it.”
No site for gardens as required
Required under state law for a municipality to redevelop property it owns, the revised 8-24 application approved in January 2024 for the new school, as filed by First Selectwoman Jennifer Tooker, called for construction of a new school, a relocated multipurpose athletic field and the community gardens to be moved to an unspecified site on the property.
Approval of that application came only after months of heated debate over the project, primarily focused not on the new school itself but how the plans would allot space for the community gardens and new athletic field.
The building committee’s latest drawings have the new field sitting on top of where the gardens are now located and no site specified for the gardens to be relocated.
Tooker offered to build the gardeners a new, accessible site for the community plots across town at the Baron’s South open space.
Many community gardeners have said they are not interested in the Baron’s South site adjacent to the Westport Center for Senior Activities, which they contend is not suitable for gardening.
With a number of gardeners and other town officials lining the Town Hall conference room to observe the P&Z work session Thursday, Wistreich urged town officials to try one more time to reach a compromise. The pre-application hearing was designed for the building committee to get non-binding feedback on its plans before a formal application for the Long Lots project is filed.
“One more conversation that we can actually all be part of,” Wistreich said about the gardens’ fate. “That’s my wish.”
Years in the making, do plans hold water?
Plans for a new Long Lots to replace the seven-decade-old building have been in the works for several years. The new school will be built on the same Hyde Lane property as the existing one, with the addition of the school district’s Stepping Stones Preschool. Both are said to be on schedule to open in the fall of 2027.
Armed with a series of drawings that showed property elevations, vehicular access and parking material samples, building committee Chair Jay Keenan told the P&Z the plans exceed current standards.
One aim of the project is to reduce flooding problems that currently afflict nearby properties.
“We have quite a bit of water under existing conditions that flows through the property,” said Ryan McEvoy, a civil engineer with SLR Consulting, a group working with the building committee. Runoff should be reduced by installation of concrete galleries and basins on the property, he added.
The new school building will encompass about 127,000 square feet with an inner courtyard. The façade is designed to resemble neighboring houses with peaked roofs.
Planned along the side of the building near the entrance is a re-created New England stream bed designed to catch water, said David Dickson, a landscape architect with SLR. Not only will it handle a lot of water, he said it will highlight the school’s entrance in a grand way with a bridge.
“This is going to make a statement,” Dickson said, but in a way that will be easy to maintain.
The adjoining building, it was promised, will be waterproofed to protect it from the feature and other water on the property.
“Not to be a kill joy here, but what is the benefit here?” asked P&Z Chair Paul Lebowitz. He wondered how much more expensive the feature is than a simpler drainage system.
He was told the site grading and pitches meshed with the design.
What goes where on Hyde Lane?
Keenan told the commission several places on the Hyde Lane property were considered for the school building, parking, athletic fields and the community gardens.
“There is not a lot of places to put it,” Keenan said of the garden, showing the commission all the sites considered on the campus.
“So what is the proposal for the community garden,” Wistreich asked. “How do we support this?”
Keenan said the offered property at Baron’s South was rejected by the gardeners. “This committee has no control over [it],” he said of alternatives.
“I think we should be looking at other options,” said commission member Neil Cohn. “The garden is important.”
“We agree with all of that,” Keenan said, but called the gardens’ location a separate conversation.
Revised 8-24 likely if gardens get booted
Board of Finance member Liz Heyer, a liaison to the building committee when she was a Board of Education member, said if the new Long Lots has to wait for a solution to relocating the community gardens it could seriously delay the project.
Wistreich said if the garden needs to be moved off site, the existing 8-24 approval will have to be revised.
To move forward, Lebowitz said, the commission needs to offer direction, with the gardens or not.
Asked for his opinion, Town Attorney Ira Bloom agreed, saying the building committee and community need input from the commission on the plans and whether the garden belongs on the Long Lots property or not.
Lebowitz asked if the Long Lots site plan could be approved with the condition that the community gardens be re-established somewhere else in town.
Bloom told him that would not be possible. He suggested instead the 8-24 application could be revised to exclude the garden from Hyde Lane. A second 8-24 could then be drafted should the Baron’s South idea, or another town-owned site, move forward for the gardens.
“It seems like there is a path forward,” said Board of Education member Kevin Christie, watching from the sidelines. “It would be really unfortunate if somehow the school process got delayed.”
Freelance writer Linda Conner Lambeck, a reporter for more than four decades at the Connecticut Post and other Hearst publications, is a member of the Education Writers Association.
Let me get this straight: A community garden next to the school is dangerous, but a “New England stream bed” on site that will “handle a lot of water” is safe?
It’s a nice looking building — certainly better than Coley El, which hasn’t been touched in decades and looks like someone turned military barracks into a homeless shelter — but the way this debacle is being handled is a travesty.
The LLSBC has an 8-24 approval that requires the school, the fields and the garden. They submit a plan without the garden and, somehow, it’s the garden that is potentially delaying the project.
In what world do we live in?
Evidently it’s one where having a twenty-second ball field is more important than a single garden. Every effort and excuse has been made to destroy the garden. Only one – unworkable – alternative site has been “offered.”
It’s time for the Town to make good on its promise of restoring the garden, and provide a workable site. Winslow Park, as an example has flat, open space. The Town previously had temporary parking just off Compo Road North for work trucks. Why not put a lot there, accessible from Compo Road, conveniently located in the center of town? There are obviously water lines available as well.
We are overdue to have a common sense solution here. Both the school and the garden can be built, simultaneously.
This process was flawed from the get go.
The PS&BC, which by Charter is the school building committee, was bypassed without a satisfactory explanation and the LLSBC was appointed by the First Selectwoman. That committee, in a short-sighted display of arrogance, refused to engage directly with the gardeners and effectively excluded them from the planning process.
If the project is delayed – and I sincerely hope it will not be – the Committee and the administration have only themselves to blame.
The Community Gardens should not be blamed for any delay of the new Long Lots Elem School. It is because the current administration wants to eventually build a baseball field where the garden is and currently, as a staging area for the construction. If there is a delay it was self imposed by the committee and the town.
Additionally, if a baseball field is built there, the neighbors to the south will be significantly impacted by water as the area already has watersheds underground. The houses surrounding the gardens are quite close and would be giving up a quiet, unobtrusive garden community.
Please take into consideration the well being of all citizens in Westport…old, young and in between!!
The BOE made the proverbial deal with the devil, here.
They happily sold out the Community Gardens to FS Tooker in order to place an expanded ballfield on the site, with the expectation that this would expedite the building process. They were wrong – and now they want to blame anyone but themselves for this show of incompetence.
For Kevin Christie to say “It would be really unfortunate if somehow the school process got delayed.” doesn’t show the kind of leadership that one would expect from a First Selectman candidate. He could have spoken up when the LLSBC added a ball field that wasn’t part of the BOE’s educational specs for the project, but he did not. The hand-wringing, now, seems disingenuous.
And, once again, Jay Keenan is doing what he wants, regardless of the Ed Specs or the 8-24. The BOE didn’t ask for a ballfield that was beyond the needs of an elementary school, but he created it. The 8-24 for the site included a community garden, but he ignored it.
And why aren’t the Gardeners able to use the site this year, when it is abundantly clear that there will be no shovel to dirt before the Fall? It is FS Tooker’s show of spite – nothing more or less. “The beatings will continue until morale improves.” Westport deserves better.
This shall go down in history as a textbook case of how not to govern. Garden or no garden, the town administration and its committee have failed their constituents with lies, lack of transparency, exclusion, and devious tactics such as treating gardeners as criminals. The real issue here is leadership and democratic government, not a garden or a school.
The First Selectwoman, and her three conflicted elected officials on the LLSBC who shepherded are shepherding the project will be reminded of this malfeasance should their names appear on a ballot this fall.
The price tag of the school should now come to the forefront, as the Committee prepares to go to the funding bodies with outstretched hands. Get out your checkbook. This is the first $100 million in capital spending of much more to come.
I’m not surprised to learn that the Community Gardeners rejected the Baron’s South location.
That’s the site of a totally and completely illegal dump (oops, I meant to use our local government’s preferred term: “temporary fill stockpile”) that was created in broad daylight by none other than the Town of Westport.
Notwithstanding the fact that it has inadequate sun, the site’s “soil” is actually a nasty mix of construction debris (including asbestos) and dirty fill – contaminated with, among other things, petroleum, arsenic and the deadly toxin DDE (dichorodiphenyl dichloroethelene). https://westportjournal.com/government/long-lots-committee-recommends-gardens-be-booted-to-barons-south/
Six years ago, the town promised – on the public record – to remove the dump within 90 days. Nobody at the time thought to ask WHICH 90 days it meant.
So the Community Garden, it would presently seem, is going to the landfill. But at least we’ll have an extravagant, virtue signaling stream in front of the new Long Lots School.