Wallingford Farmland Leases
Last Tuesday, one of the items discussed in our Town Council meeting was that of leasing town-owned property to various agricultural enterprises. It's a program that has gone on for some time now, where firms in the farming business lease property from the town and grow crops on the land, subject to increasingly strict regulations. It's a win-win situation: the Town receives a few bucks for leasing the property and that property is maintained in the agricultural state that enhances the bucolic atmosphere that most residents find pleasing, and the farmers find extra property on which to raise crops.

It's also a program that few people are aware of, so I thought a discussion on this site might be interesting.

The discussion centered around eleven of the thirty-six properties in the program which are being leased out for one year. Most of the leases are five-year leases, and the purpose of the one-year leases is to bring the lease periods of these eleven properties in line with the others. It's an intelligent administrative decision, and necessary because of the complex nature of leasing thirty-six different properties. When the leases come up, bids are solicited from the agricultural community and the properties are leased to the highest qualified bidder.

Thanks to the excellent work from our Environmental Planner Erin O'Hare, these properties now have much more visibility. They range in size from 1.60 acres to 93.70 acres, are presently leased by five people. Most but not all are on the east side of Wallingford. The median size is around six acres, with the average around 11 acres. They are subject to 14 "covenants" written into each lease, and most have additional restrictions as to what can be grown on them developed through USDA regulations.

You would think that this would have been pretty much a non-controversial item, wouldn't you? Well, due to the efforts of one Councilor, there was an attempt to suggest that the Mayor was usurping authority from the Council. The Town Charter states that: "The council shall have the power to take, purchase, hold, condemn, lease, sell and convey such real and personal property as the purposes of the town may require.. ." It was being suggested that we were being cut out of the decision-making process to which the Charter gives us authority.

The argument didn't go very far, because there was nothing to argue about. Year after year, the Council votes - unanimously, I might add - to continue this program, and the administration assumes the administration of the program as a result of that vote. Chairman Parisi jokingly begged us not to deviate from that practice, his point being that nine part-time legislators had neither the time nor the staff to adequately deal with the complexities of almost any property management issue, and we routinely transfer (not abdicate) our Charter responsibilities in such matters to the full time personnel that perform under the supervision of the administration.

So if you viewed the Town Council meeting of March 14th, you learned quite a bit about a very interesting and creative program that the Town of Wallngford has. You also learned that not everything dramatized as a tug-of-war between branches of local government really is so because, of all things, common sense prevails.
- posted by Steve Knight @ Saturday, March 18, 2006