EDITORIAL
The town’s recent sale of a piece of property appraised at $200,000 left some residents saying shame on the town’s selectmen for the way they sold the property. We agree with those residents, but the selectmen aren’t the only ones who should be ashamed of what has gone on. Town officials discussing the sale yelled and cursed at each other during a public meeting and immediately after it. Shame on them, too.
First, to the sale itself. A commercial real estate agent knew the unadvertised commercial property on Benson Road was available, so he showed it to clients who decided to offer to purchase it at its appraised value. The selectmen accepted the clients’ offer and then moved the sale through the appropriate channels to its ultimate approval at a special town meeting.
The first selectman sees nothing wrong with the way the sale was handled and neither do the two selectmen. “We followed town charter,” they all say in unison. “We did exactly what we were supposed to do.” At this point, town counsel Dana D’Angelo dutifully holds up the appropriate state statute and presents her legal argument supporting the selectmen’s actions.
They miss the point entirely. No one is saying what they did was illegal. But in a town where a purchasing procedure approved by the selectmen requires three quotes for purchases over $5,000 and competitive bidding for items valued at more than $10,000 (with some exceptions), wouldn’t you think at least one of the selectmen would have thought it a good idea to be sure the sale of a property valued at $200,000 was advertised – particularly when that property is in the newly created Oxford Airport Enterprise Zone, where tax breaks for business owners are intended to make property there more desirable than commercial property in other parts of town?
“We’ve never owned property before,” our first selectman said. OK. So we understand there was no town procedure in place for marketing and selling the property because this hadn’t happened before. But he had only to look to other Connecticut towns who have sold town properties for examples of procedures that could have been put in place here.
Instead of advertising the property for sale, the town, after acquiring it a year ago, let it sit there until an unsolicited offer came in. This despite the town having an Economic and Industrial Development Commission (EIDC) that we believe would have been willing to work on finding a buyer for the property. The former chair of the EIDC, Michael Kenausis, who resigned in part because of his objections to the way the sale was handled, said the committee knew nothing of the sale until the selectmen voted to accept the offer to purchase it.
And then there is the Board of Finance (BoF). Shame on some of them for the events at their June 10 meeting, held after the land sale had gotten final approval. In something akin to the Spanish Inquisition, the chair and some of the members repeatedly asked the first selectman, “What procedure did you follow?” Then the shouting and cursing began, and the chair did not immediately stop it or tell town officials they were behaving inappropriately. Order was restored briefly before the meeting adjourned, and then the shouting and cursing continued among those who lingered after the meeting.
Although we question why the selectmen didn’t establish a procedure for marketing and selling this land, we don’t believe they did anything illegal, and we acknowledge much of what they did was done publicly and was properly noticed. BoF members could have attended the April 20 selectmen’s meeting when the land sale was first discussed. They could have gone to the May 7 Planning and Zoning Commission meeting where the sale was presented and approved, they could have gone to the May 18 Board of Selectmen’s meeting where it was moved to town meeting and they could have attended the June 1 special town meeting where the land sale was voted on. Instead, they waited until the sale was complete and then pounced on the first selectmen.
There is plenty of shame to go around here. Politics have long directed procedure in Middlebury, and the result is a totally “dysfunctional family” form of government with few boards and commissions working closely together and actions at some times dictated by an individual member’s political affiliations and aspirations rather than the good of the town’s residents. In this election year, we expect this to worsen as Republicans and Democrats jockey for position in an attempt to win the first selectman and two selectmen positions this November.
