Do we have the foresight to vote Yes on the 21st?

By now, you’ve probably heard lots of different opinions on whether the town should exercise its option to buy the 31 acre parcel known as the Red Gate Farm land.  You’ve seen letters to the editor, received flyers, phone calls, emails, and read articles in the media.  As the vote draws near, and as you head to the polls on Monday the 21st, keep the following things in mind.

One of the features of the proposed development that is being touted by the development team is that a high percentage of the 31 acres will remain as conservation land.  However, their definition of conservation land is a little skewed, in that you and I will not be allowed to make use of the land other than visually from Philip Street.  The land will be conserved, but only for the seven homeowners who choose to buy the new homes.  The public will not be able to make use of the existing network of trails that crisscross this parcel.

The development plans also call for a trail easement to the existing Scout Land.  I recently hiked the Scout Land and tried to find the supposed easement that provides access via Elm Street at the Walpole town line.  My experience suggests that while the proposed development’s trail easement may look great for the first few years, over time it will get overgrown and inaccessible and the Scout Land will once again become landlocked and unusable to those who don’t hike with a machete.  Add to this that the development’s proposed trail easement does not include parking for trail use and requires walking down a private road and between two backyards, and the likelihood of convenient access to the Scout Land diminishes further.

It’s also been stated that Medfield is already largely open space, so what good is a little more open space when we already have so much?  First of all, no one ever looks back 20 years later and says, “Wow, I’m glad we had the foresight to carve up that parcel of open space and build a subdivision.”   Medfield is the place it is today because our forebears had precisely the opposite opinion. Second, a huge factor in the calculation of the town’s existing open space percentage is the Charles River Natural Valley Storage Area.  This is a great feature that is run by the Army Corps of Engineers and helps control flood runoff and protects our downstream neighbors in places like Waltham, Watertown and Cambridge from inundation, but it’s not accessible open space like the Red Gate parcel is.  Given the large number of people who regularly take their chances getting their exercise while dodging traffic on the narrow roads in Medfield, having open space that you can walk through every day right from a neighborhood setting would be a tremendous boon for the town.

If these conservation-minded points don’t sway your opinion, and you are more driven by the financial impact of the decision, let me make the following points:

The developer is now saying that the new subdivision will bring in $150,000 per year in new tax revenue, that the development will have no cost to the taxpayer, and that all the tax revenue will go straight to the town’s bottom line.  While we can argue all day and night about how much it will cost to service the development and educate the children who live in the seven new homes, to say that this cost is zero and will never be anything other than zero should strike a rational thinker as completely absurd.  If it really were the case that you can educate children for free, then why do we pay property taxes in the first place?  

The one single number that can be predicted with any certainty is the bond cost to finance the town’s purchase of the land.  The cost will be about $25 per year for the average household, or $95,000 per year townwide in principal and interest.  Remember, this cost does not go on forever and ever, but ends when the bond is paid off.  The cost of hiring even one additional teacher as a result of an increase in student enrollment is on par with the cost of buying the land.  It simply doesn’t make sense that the tax revenue from the proposed development represents nothing but an enormous windfall for the town.

It's also been said that if we keep voting for debt exclusions, Medfield becomes less and less affordable as a place to live.  While I agree to some extent, the argument that building seven new homes at $1.5 million a piece will solve our affordability problems doesn't hold any water, especially if the cost of servicing these new homes is on par with purchasing the land in the first place.

Another point being made is that other major town expenses might be of higher priority than the purchase of this land, and that we can’t afford to preserve this open space.  However, at the special Town Meeting, we learned that recent projects like the library and high school would be paid off in the next couple of years, freeing up the money to pay for new projects like a new Dale Street school or a Public Safety building, and even the State Hospital.   For example, the state just agreed to sell the town of Westborough its similar state hospital for $2.2 million for 95 acres.

At town meeting, we also learned that our town’s total debt and our principal and interest payments are much lower than they have been in recent years, even when factoring in the new town garage project.  We learned that borrowing costs are still at historic lows.  The Warrant Committee was split on the town’s purchase, but other town boards were unanimously in favor of it.  The fact that the Warrant Committee was split simply means that this purchase does not break the bank, and that the financial impact of the purchase should not be a major decision making criteria.  After all, $95,000 per year cost to acquire the land is only about 0.1% of the town’s current annual budget of about $60 million. 

This land has been in forestry classification for decades, and has been levied only a few hundred dollars per year in property taxes.  The very reason that the town has the option to buy the land is because we have in essence been buying the land all along.  That's how Chapter 61 (Forestry) works.  Either the town or the developer will get the benefit of our decades of support of this land.  The choice is yours, on the 21st.  Remember, no one will look back and congratulate us on our foresight for deciding to build another subdivision.  Vote Yes!