Fate Of Cromwell Parcel Highlights Preservation Challenges

The management guru Peter Drucker once observed that all organizations are perfectly designed to get their current results. That would include the state of Connecticut and its towns. We are perfectly designed to produce sprawl, and we're getting it.

I was reminded of this recently by a dust-up over farmland in Cromwell.

The commissioner of the state Department of Agriculture is supposed to sign off on any project involving the use of state funds to buy 25 or more acres of prime farmland and convert it to a nonagricultural use. Lo and behold, the department discovered this year that two state grants totaling $945,000 had been approved for the conversion of 121 acres, more than half of which is classified as prime farmland, into an industrial park on the west side of Route 3 in the northern part of Cromwell.

The dilemma was obvious. The state, which attempts to preserve farmland, was paying to abandon some very good agricultural earth.

It turned out the department was a little late to the game. The grants date from 2002 and 2004. Much of the land had already been built on, with private funds. The town's solid waste transfer station is there. There is a nonworking farm on the property, but probably not for much longer.

The immediate problem is procedural. The Agriculture Department is notified early in most instances when farms are being bought with state funds. But the awards to Cromwell were Small Town Economic Assistance Program grants. Due to a quirk of bureaucratic process, no one notifies the department when these grants are awarded.

Farmland preservation advocates tried to correct this flaw in the last session of the legislature, to no avail. It should be straightened out. "We need that mechanism to work better," said agriculture commissioner F. Philip Prelli.

Prelli asked town officials to designate a committee to inventory its remaining farmland and develop a strategy to preserve the best of it. First Selectman Jeremy Shingleton said the town had preserved several parcels and would comply with Prelli's request.

But the industrial park is going ahead. Shingleton said it has the potential to produce 800 to 1,000 jobs. Across Route 3 (or Shunpike Road) is a 300-acre parcel of woods, nurseries and other open space. It too is zoned industrial. Should the owners eventually decide to sell, which I'm told is not out of the question, it too could end up in industrial or commercial buildings.

Here the Druckerian dilemma. There are many excellent reasons to preserve farms — access to increasingly popular locally-grown food, aesthetics, flood control, wildlife habitat and recreation.

Working against all of these is the bete noir of good land use in Connecticut, our heavy reliance on the property tax. Cromwell is typical. It's had a 25 percent population growth in past two decades, has had to build new schools and has relatively little land area at 13.5 square miles. Costs are rising.

Because the property tax is virtually the only way that towns can raise revenue, there is always pressure to develop farms into something with more property tax potential. The state has a goal of preserving 130,000 acres of farmland, but only 32,300 acres, about 25 percent, have been preserved thus far. Some towns — Suffield, Woodstock and others — have managed to fight development pressure and save a fair number of farms, but many have not.

With the cost of transportation rising, locally grown food is cost-competitive with the stuff coming across the country (and tastes a heck of a lot better). This is the time for a stronger push on farmland preservation.

Ideally, we would lessen our reliance on the property tax, and take some pressure off farms and other open space. Since that seems to be beyond the capability of current leadership, there are other steps.

All towns should do what Prelli asked Cromwell to do: survey their remaining farms and find ways to preserve the best of them.

Towns ought to employ soil-based zoning, so prime agricultural soils are protected. These plans should correspond to a statewide resource-based plan, one that keeps development away from farmland and other environmentally sensitive areas.

Since our forebears settled where the good soils were, and that's often where the roads and rails were built, we often have a situation, as in Cromwell, where designated growth areas happen to have prime agricultural soils.

The state has tended to write off farms that are surrounded by development and focus on larger and more rural properties. But that shouldn't always be the case. As Jiff Martin of the Working Lands Alliance put it, "good soil is good soil."

Let's join the growing "urban agriculture" movement and have small farms and more community gardens in our urban areas. Connecticut is less prone to weather disasters than many other places. Food security is now something to think about. We should be growing more of our own food. To do so, we need the farms.