To the editor:
In his recent op-ed, Peter Most explains in lightly comic terms the “piece of cake” solution of using eminent domain to seize our property so that he might learn ice skating and the town see a nice windfall from selling the land to a developer. Most serves on the Great Barrington ZBA and it is worth noting his lack of impartiality as a member of a board with the power to issue or withhold permits and create regulations regarding what private citizens may do with their property. As he cautions himself, when someone tells you who they are, believe them.
He says it’s just too hard to understand what’s happened, but he doesn’t seem to have tried very hard. For one thing, providing a community resource of the type he describes is precisely what we proposed the Town do before we purchased the land. They refused but encouraged us to buy it by promising help if we did. So we tried to do just that and encountered an exhausting campaign of resistance.
We saw a biologically rich oasis in an area of aggressive commercial development which no one was willing to take responsibility for. We saw a site rich with the history of the first and every subsequent community that have called this area home. We saw a site that asserted its perpetual resistance to profit-taking ideas over decades and a string of owners. Town Hall wouldn’t step up — to preserve it or develop it — so 10 years ago we used our own money to secure the property, and have both preserved and improved it, providing community benefit in the process.
Through all the push back and through COVID, we’ve kept an all-volunteer non-profit in good standing with a mandate to protect the site from commercial development like that Mr. Most is advocating. Ironically, we now stand to lose it to the same people we asked to save it at the outset. We are currently defending ourselves in a battle waged by the Assessor’s office with your tax dollars to deny our federally granted tax-exempt status. With a decision still pending from the state Appellate Tax Board on whether their taxation is legal, the Town placed a lien for non-payment of it, and now has town officials using the media to sway public opinion towards a seizure.
The “nothing” that Most says is going on at the Fairgrounds includes a decade of hosting events, removing invasive species that had been left to multiply unimpeded, pushing back against constant vandalism and illegal dumping, and clearing actual tons of trash from the land and river buffer. It includes seeing native bird, reptile and mammal species thrive once again even as infill development continues all around. It includes hosting a dedicated group of gardeners and farmers who are growing food for dozens of families, in keeping with the agricultural heritage of a beautiful riverfront site whose value is far more complex than its sale price. In Most’s “win-win-win,” they lose their land access.
Meanwhile, the Town that promised to “partner with the new owners of the Fairgrounds” has invested tax dollars to try to stop us from mowing the grass, charged us for sewer and water we don’t use, dumped salty road run-off onto the site while calling on state officials to halt our efforts to bioremediate that pollution before it gets into the river, and waged an aggressive campaign to use our land to site and expand their sewage station in a floodplain where it risks contaminating groundwater.
People commiserate over the tangled red tape of town offices when they want to get something done at their house, but there’s little interest in how this relates to why the ‘simple’ transformation everyone dreams of for the Fairgrounds could be taking so long. Given your own experience navigating Town bureaucracy, does it track that the private citizens who’ve poured 10 years and their own savings into protecting this beautiful plot of land are the sole complicating factor here? It makes for a snappy, fun column but it doesn’t really stand up to inquiry.
We encourage all citizens holding property to look past this lighthearted ode to ice skating and consider the dangerous precedent it presents: if town hall doesn’t like what you’re doing there or sees dollar signs, the offices run in your name can be weaponized to come take it away and sell it at their own profit to someone they like better. Many, if not Most, would agree there’s a wolf in sheep’s clothing here.
Bart Elsbach
Sheffield
