42-Acre Brooksvale Park Extension Advances

Judith Beers stood facing the trunk of a tall ash, her leather clogs perched on its sloping roots. Her right hand rested on a massive boulder, rough with lichen in some places, soft with moss in others.

“They should make a big rock trail,” she said.

Beers’ daughter Rebecca used to love coming to this boulder in the woods as a child growing up in Hamden. She would tromp among the tree trunks to climb up onto the mammoth rock.

If all goes according to plan, other Hamden children may be able to romp through those woods to the boulder for generations to come on a ​“big rock trail.”

On Tuesday evening, Beers appeared before the Hamden Legislative Council to urge the town to buy her property abutting Brooksvale Park, at 370 Brooksvale Ave. Rear, and preserve it forever. The town is considering purchasing it for $676,000, mostly with state grant funds. It would make the 42-acre, mostly-wooded lot an addition to Brooksvale Park.

The purchase passed the council’s Economic Development Committee. It will come before the whole council at its March 2 meeting. Of the $676,000, a state grant would provide $432,250. The town would have to come up with the remaining $250,000, which it would do by transferring bonded funds from an animal shelter allotment, and then reimbursing the animal shelter project with Local Capital Improvement Program (LoCIP) grant funds.

On Wednesday, as Beers crunched through the woods, she looked around at a forest of which she has over 70 years of memories.

“Whose woods these are I think I know,” she said. She paused as she crested the top of a steep hill covered in brown, dried oak, maple, and beech leaves. ​“Her house is on Hillfield Road now though.”

Beers said she spent every weekend of her childhood in those woods. Her grandparents, Abraham and Ida Shanok, had bought the parcel, and lived in a small shack on a lower part of the property. Beers lived with her parents in New York City, and in 1948, her parents began construction of the house that now stands on a small hill looking through the trees at Sleeping Giant. Every weekend, the family would come to Hamden with a carpenter they knew in New York.

“Six in the morning the polka music would go on and they would hammer,” she recalled. Her parents, with the help of the carpenter, constructed the house themselves. The exterior is all granite, the walls inside completely wood paneling.

When her parents passed away, first her mother Bessie in 2001 and then her father Victor in 2006, Beers was living in Cheshire. Other siblings would have simply sold the property, but Beers did not want it to be developed. So, she took on the responsibility of maintaining it, selling about 40 acres of the parcel to the town to add to Brooksvale Park to help finance the upkeep. When she and her husband moved in in 2007, she said she did so with the intention of selling the rest of the property to the town one day so it would be preserved forever. According to the town assessor’s website, the property, including the buildings, is appraised at $845,100: about $170,000 more than she is offering it to the town for.

The time to sell the land finally came about two years ago when Beers and her husband moved out of the house. The house is not a safe place to age, she said. The steep driveway is not easily accessible should something happen to her or her husband, and the upkeep became too much. So, around the beginning of 2018, she told the town that she intended to sell the land. She and her husband moved to a house nearby, on Hillfield Road.

Beers paused as she recited her line of revised Robert Frost and bent down to pick up a golf ball nestled beneath the leaves. It was the sixth one she had picked up and stuffed into the pockets of her beige cargo pants. Unlike the others, this one was a bright neon orange.

Her husband doesn’t play tennis, she said, so he used to use the tennis court for golf practice, as he is an avid golfer. He would stand on the tennis court, or sometimes next to the chicken coop, and practice hitting golf balls into the woods.

Goodbye To The House

The tennis court where Beers’ husband would practice his golf swings sits next to a now-empty chicken coop on one side, and a large pool half-filled with murky brown water on another.

Beers’ grandparents used to keep chickens at their small house on another part of the property. They had about 20 of them in any given year. ​“My grandfather had mostly Rhode Island Reds, and they were all named Maggie,” she recalled. ​“And he would keep them for a season and then…” — she drew her finger across her throat and made a ​“chhhht” noise — ​“knock them off and have them all winter. I can’t do that with mine. Probably because they’re not all named Maggie,” she said with a hint of a smile.

The chicken coop now sits empty, save for the feathers and straw that litter the ground and the stalks of the shrub outside that have crept their way through the window. If the town buys the property, the coop, along with the house, will have to be demolished.

The town plans to use funds from the state’s Open Space and Watershed Land Acquisition Program for the purchase. As a condition of the grant, the land cannot have structures on it. So, the town will have to demolish the house and all of the other buildings on the property.

Little by little, Beers has been taking the plants she spent so long nurturing to her new house. Some bulbs she has managed to salvage. Other plants have proven more difficult. One larch leans against the fence of the pool. She said she would love to take it so it can survive when the pool is ripped up, but it’s a hard plant to uproot and move.

The larch leans almost horizontal on one side of the fence, and on the other, at the edge of the pool, Laura lies with her hair and right arm dangling above the surface of the water. She was cast in bronze by the artist Michael Shacham. Beers said she would donate the statue to a museum.

At Tuesday’s council meeting, mayoral Deputy Chief of Staff Patrick Donnelly told the council that the administration anticipates demolition will cost approximately $20,000. As a part of the purchase package, the town would enter into an agreement with the Hamden Land Conservation Trust. The land trust will fundraise to provide what it can of the costs of demolition, and other costs associated with taking over the property.

Willow Sirch, development chair of the board of the land trust, said it’s not unheard of for land trusts to fundraise in order to assist a town in acquiring an open space property. She said she thinks the $20,000 figure that Donnelly mentioned for the demolition is feasible. In 2018, the land trust raised $8,000 in a week to buy a property on Rocky Top to save it from development, she said.

At Tuesday’s meeting, Councilman Austin Cesare asked whether there’s risk that demolition costs could balloon due to unanticipated asbestos or lead paint remediation. Beers said there’s no asbestos in the house, and lead paint should not be an issue either. The house is entirely wood inside, so there’s very little paint at all. The walls, however, have solid concrete in them, as Beers discovered when she made a doorway between the master bedroom and a bathroom.

“In the 1940s and 1950s, remember, the Russians were going to get us,” she said. ​“So, my dad had to make sure they wouldn’t get us.”

Money Shuffles Cause Confusion

On Tuesday, 17 people got up to speak in favor of buying the Beers property. The council for the most part echoed the excitement they had heard from residents about the property, though not without concerns.

Marjorie Bonadies, one of three Republicans on the council, said she would vote to buy the property, but that she wanted to make sure the council had thought through the implications of making a purchase in tough financial times that would end up taking a property off the tax rolls.

Though the property is appraised at $845,100, its assessed value — the amount on which the town actually levies its property tax — is only $231,770. With Hamden’s current mill rate of 48.86, that means the property brings in an annual $11,300 in taxes. As many residents pointed out, however, keeping that land undeveloped increases property values in the surrounding area. The property also has a few streams and springs running through it, which in turn flow into the Mill River and Lake Whitney. As residents pointed out Tuesday, it is therefore a key source of the area’s drinking water. 

The biggest hold up did not come from fears about taking a property off the tax rolls, however, but rather from about half an hour of confusion over where the money will come from.

Donnelly told the council that the town’s $250,000 share of the total cost would be transferred from bonded funds originally intended to construct a town animal shelter. The town would then replenish the animal shelter fund with Local Capital Improvement Program (LoCIP) grant funds. LoCIP is a state grant that covers the cost of various municipal infrastructure improvements. Donnelly said the town cannot use LoCIP to fund the Beers property acquisition directly, so it would shuffle funds around so they could help the town purchase the property without additional bonding.

LoCIP money can be used to acquire open space. However, one of the stipulations of the grant is that it cannot be used to cover the municipal matching portion of another form of state aid. Since the town plans to fund most of the purchase with another state grant, and the town must then match the remaining portion, it cannot use LoCIP funds to cover its $250,000 match.

Councilman Harry Gagliardi was the first to take issue with the financial shuffle. ​“Ok, this is not the animal shelter,” he told Donnelly. Donnelly reiterated that, though the purchase would take money from the animal shelter, the animal shelter money would be immediately reimbursed by the LoCIP funds. 

After fielding questions about other aspects of the plan — extra costs of maintenance, where the money for house demolition will come from if the land trust funds are not enough — the council came back to the LoCIP-animal shelter transfer.

Justin Farmer said there has been an equal amount of resident activism to create a town animal shelter after Hamden was kicked out of the North Haven shelter last year. ​“I don’t want to promise this family and disrespect another community,” he said of animal shelter activists. He asked if there are other possible sources of capital funding that could be reimbursed by LoCIP other than the shelter funds.

Interim Finance Director Myron Hul reiterated what Donnelly had said throughout the evening. The purchase of the property would not affect the animal shelter because the bonded shelter funds would be immediately replenished with LoCIP. He said the town currently has $400,000 worth of LoCIP funding under its control. It would transfer $250,000, and have $150,000 left over.

“I seem to be confused,” replied Farmer. Hul explained again that it’s just a shuffle from A to B and then B to C. Farmer replied that he understood that, but didn’t understand whether there would be money left over at the end.

Valerie Horsley chimed in, asking another clarifying question about funding sources. Donnelly explained the money transfers again.

“Explain LoCIP. Just explain LoCIP,” said Bonadies (pictured above), with a hint of exasperation in her voice. Donnelly gave a brief explanation of the program and reiterated that the funds can’t be used to buy the property.

“I seem to be confused,” Gagliardi chimed in.

There are $400,000 allocated for the animal shelter, Donnelly replied. $250,000 of that would be transferred to the property acquisition, and then replenished with LoCIP.

Bonadies pointed out the that using LoCIP funds for the animal shelter would actually move the project along faster, because the town can’t sit on LoCIP money in the way it can bonded funds.

But that $400,000 was approved for animal control, not land acquisition, Gagliardi said.

“That’s absolutely correct,” replied Hul. So, the administration is proposing a transfer, he said.

Why was the LoCIP not used to fund the animal shelter in the first place? Kristin Dolan chimed in. Dominique Baez echoed with a related follow up: what were those LoCIP funds going to be used for in the first place if not the animal shelter?

Donnelly replied that they could be used for things like sidewalk repairs or other infrastructure costs.

It had been a few hours already, and the council still had the better part of its agenda ahead of it. Council President Mick McGarry suggested that the committee pass the bill so it could come before the whole council at the next meeting, and the administration could then provide full answers to all the questions that had been raised.

Farmer asked that the administration provide a list of other capital accounts that could provide funding for the purchase other than the animal shelter. He made a motion to table the item, which would have made the item come back to the committee, not the whole council, at the next meeting. No one offered a second, and the motion died.

Horsley asked for a vote to ​“call the question,” which forces a vote without any further discussion, if the vote on calling the question passes. After a moment of confusion about who had said ​“aye” and who ​“nay,” the committee chair solicited each member’s vote individually. The motion to call the question failed with three in favor, three opposed. Discussion therefore had to continue.

Farmer turned to the crowd: ​“I’m going to speak it into existence that this is going to pass,” he said, but he just wanted to get a list of other accounts for transfers. He said he would propose to just vote and move the item out of committee so it could come before the council at the next meeting.

Other council members looked confused. So you’re basically calling the question after we just voted to call the question and failed? asked a slightly incredulous Horsley. Farmer nodded.

The council voted on calling the question. This time, the motion passed with only one opposed. The council went straight into its vote on the overall motion. It passed unanimously.

The purchase will come before the full council at its next meeting, which is scheduled for March 2.