Category Archives: Preserving Easton

Easton, Conn.: Embracing a Farming Culture-From the NY Times

Posted on November 13, 2015 by Citizens for Easton | Leave a comment

Easton, Conn.: Embracing a Farming Culture

NOV. 11, 2015

By LISA PREVOST

Patti and Allan Popp didn’t move to the rural town of Easton, Conn., to take up farming. They were simply searching for more privacy than they had at their previous home in Stratford. Ms. Popp happened to fall in love with a 1740 house in foreclosure along one of Easton’s main routes, Sport Hill Road.

But within a few years of arriving in town in 1997, Ms. Popp, who worked as an office manager for a doctor, and her husband, a landscaper, decided to take a gamble. Ms. Popp’s employer was retiring, and she was ready for something new. So, like many Eastonites before them, the Popps would try to earn a living from the land.

Living In

The learning curve, Ms. Popp said, was enormous, and in the early years, when trial and error slowly revealed what their soil was and was not suited for, Mr. Popp’s landscaping business kept them financially afloat. Several times, they came close to giving up. But today, 15 years after they first began clearing their land, their business, Sport Hill Farm, can be counted among Easton’s small but established ranks of successful farms, with three acres of its own and 35 acres leased elsewhere.
The community has “welcomed us here,” Ms. Popp said, “even though we are one of the newer farms.”

A town of roughly 7,500, Easton is a rarity among Fairfield County suburbs in that it is home to at least 20 farms of varying sizes, from part-time specialty operations to large-scale agritourism attractions. The town is still predominantly woodland, largely because the four reservoirs within its borders put much of the land out of bounds for development — the Aquarion Water Company is a major landowner and the largest taxpayer by far.

With so much of the town in the watershed, “there isn’t a tremendous amount of land for big agriculture,” said Irv Silverman, who owns the 50-acre Silverman’s Farm, which draws many thousands of visitors every year to its pick-your-own orchards, berry fields and petting zoo. “There are only five or six farms here that are substantial enough to have at least 30 or 40 acres. But a lot of other little farms have come into existence.”

Easton’s peaceful, rural feel was the primary draw for Angenette and Bill Lynch, who moved from Stamford with their two children last year. Ms. Lynch grew up in a small town in upstate New York, and Easton felt familiar.

When a four-bedroom house went on the market right next door to one of Mr. Lynch’s cousins, the couple jumped, paying slightly more than the asking price, to get it. Mr. Lynch’s commute into New York City, where he is chief operations officer for the Specialty Food Association, is longer, “but this location checks all his boxes in terms of where he wants to be living,” Ms. Lynch said. And they are happier with the public school system in Easton; in Stamford, they paid for parochial school.

Easton’s small-town atmosphere is reinforced by avid conservationism and strict zoning. Commercial development consists of not much more than a couple of convenience stores and a single sit-down restaurant, the Olde Blue Bird Inn, serving breakfast and lunch. The Blue Bird is popular for weekend brunch, but you have to bring your own vodka for your Bloody Mary — no place in Easton sells alcohol.

What You’ll Find

Although Easton covers 27 square miles, it has only around 2,500 households, which makes it far less dense than the rest of the county — 274 people per square mile, versus the county average of 1,468, according to state calculations. Easton is not on the Metro-North rail line, so New York City commuters typically drive to the station in downtown Fairfield.

Many residents work at the headquarters of General Electric, which sits just outside Easton’s border in Fairfield. The company’s announcement earlier this year that it is considering relocating outside Connecticut is a source of concern, although the effect of a move on the local housing market would depend on where G.E. relocated and whether the company moved some or all of its offices, said Gayle Worthington, an agent with William Raveis Real Estate who lives in Easton.

Lower Easton — defined as the section below the blinking yellow light in the town center at Beers and Sport Hill Roads, according to Ms. Worthington — has mostly one-acre zoning. Upper Easton has three-acre-minimum zoning.

There are no condominiums or apartment complexes. A controversial proposal by the Saddle Ridge development company for 99 housing units, a portion of them affordable, on about 124 acres in the three-acre zone is on appeal in state Superior Court, having been turned down by the town’s planning and zoning commission, said Adam Dunsby, the first selectman, who acts as the town’s chief executive.

What You’ll Pay

The roughly 120 homes on the market earlier this month were priced from $450,000 to $2.9 million. The bulk of the properties fell between $600,000 and $1 million.

The number of sales was down about 12 percent this year as of the end of September compared with a year earlier, according to Ms. Worthington. The median sales price of $595,000 is up slightly over last year, but is still 22 percent below the market high in 2006, she said.

Properties in Lower Easton tend to sell more quickly because of their proximity to Fairfield and the Merritt Parkway, said Kelly Higgins, an agent with Coldwell Banker. But over all, buyers who choose Easton are usually seeking more house for their money, relative to towns on the rail line, and a small-town lifestyle, she said.

Sixteen new houses are planned at Easton Woods, a 44-home subdivision developed in phases beginning in the late 1980s, according to Jeff Wright, the listing agent and the owner-broker of Re/Max Right Choice in Trumbull. Twelve lots of three acres and up are still available. The homes start at 4,000 square feet; prices range from $1.3 million to $2 million, Mr. Wright said.

What to Do

Easton has a senior center, a public library and a community center, which has a rock-climbing wall and a fitness center.

The 730-acre Trout Brook Valley Preserve, which extends into Weston, welcomes hikers, dogs and horseback riders to its trail system.

The Easton Parks and Recreation department runs a variety of after-school activities for children, as well as an extended-day program with drop-offs as early as 7 a.m. and pickups as late as 6 p.m.

The members-only Easton Racquet Club has tennis courts and a swimming pool.

The outdoor patio at the Easton Village Store, which offers a variety of takeout sandwiches, soups and prepared dishes, is a popular meeting place.

The Schools

Samuel Staples Elementary School, built in 2005 with a distinctive barnlike design, serves about 600 students in kindergarten through Grade 5, as well as about 30 preschoolers.

Helen Keller Middle School, for Grades 6 through 8, features a high-tech innovation lab, said Thomas H. McMorran, the schools superintendent.

Joel Barlow High School, which is in a separate school district shared with the town of Redding, serves just over 1,000 students and has a 98 percent graduation rate, Mr. McMorran said. SAT scores for the class of 2015 were 561 for reading, 567 for math and 561 for writing; state averages were 504, 506, and 504.

The Commute

The drive to the station in downtown Fairfield takes 15 to 25 minutes. Travel time to Grand Central during peak hours runs from around 70 to 90 minutes. A monthly rail pass is $354.76 purchased online.

The History

Mills once drove the Easton economy, but little evidence of that past remains. According to a history linked to the town website, in the late 19th century, the Bridgeport Hydraulic Company began buying up land in Easton in order to secure water for that nearby city, where thriving factories were drawing people by the thousands. The waterside mill sites were chief among those acquisitions, and the buildings were demolished along the way.

THE STORY OF TROUT BROOK VALLEY

Posted on July 16, 2015 by Citizens for Easton | Leave a comment

Oh beautiful, for open space
Preserving Easton, part two
By Laura Modlin, Correspondent on July 15, 2015 in Connecticut News, Features, Lead News, News, Town Government · 3 Comments

Bruce LePage in Easton’s portion of the 1,009 acres composing Trout Brook Valley, sometimes refered to as the lungs of Fairfield County. —Photo by Laura Modlin

If bulldozers are South Park Avenue’s fate it won’t just impact sparkling waterways and vast unspoiled stretches of land — it would also crush more than four decades of vigorous work by Easton conservationists.

Preservation of the property might seem like a pipe dream, what with the town’s first selectman, Adam Dunsby, seemingly set on selling the land – but, many of these same people faced a similar scenario two decades ago with a much larger piece of untamed terrain — Trout Brook Valley.

And they won out against all odds back then.

How it happened

The story of Trout Brook Valley began, as many notable Easton stories do, with a reservoir.

Between 1913 and 1940, Bridgeport Hydraulic Company purchased 730.26 acres in Easton and Weston that were destined to become the majority of the present day 1,009-acre Trout Brook Valley Conservation Area.

The water company obtained the land to have the option to build a dam across the southerly neck of the valley — and then flood the property, increasing storage for the adjacent Saugatuck Reservoir.

Demand for water in the greater Bridgeport area ended up declining, though, and the water company decided holding onto the property was not worth the cost.

“We learned the water company wanted to sell in ’93,” resident Gail Bromer, who was at the forefront of efforts to preserve the property, said.

“It was totally pristine land,” Princie Falkenhagen, then president of Citizens for Easton (CFE), said.

Bromer and Falkenhagen, along with several others, were already working on a special task force doing an inventory of open space land in town.

“We got involved in trying to preserve Trout Brook Valley,” Bromer said.

And they picked up a lot of individuals and groups along the way.

In May 1994, resident Bruce LePage, then executive director of Aspetuck Land Trust, got a call from Jack McGregor, chairman of the water company, to meet for lunch.

At the time, 330 acres of the land was being considered for homes and 400 acres for a golf course. The water company wanted to know if Aspetuck Land Trust would buy the 400-acre portion instead.

At a cost of about $7 million.

“We couldn’t [afford to] do that,” LePage said.

But Aspetuck Land Trust did jump on board with conservation efforts already going on.

“It was a huge, long drawn-out process,” Bromer said.

They went on faith.

“We just assumed it would be preserved,” Bromer said.

Plot twists

In February 1997, the water company announced it had signed a contract to sell the land for development.

The conservationists did not give in to defeat, though.

Members of The Coalition to Preserve Trout Brook Valley, founded by Falkenhagen and Bromer, became even more determined to save the sprawling array of forest, wetlands, fields, pools, brooks, streams and wild life. The Aspetuck Land Trust was right by their side.

“We talked to everyone we could think of who might be able to preserve Trout Brook Valley,” Bromer said.

The development plan had to go through Easton’s Planning & Zoning Commission and Conservation Commission.

“We arranged for lawyers and soil scientists to testify,” LePage said.

But they came to believe that buying the land was the way to go.

Under section 16-50c of the CT General Statutes, the town in which a public utility sells land has a right of first refusal. Land trusts also have a right of first refusal.

So, even though the property was already sold, Easton, Weston and The Aspetuck Land Trust could try and qualify to buy it.

Only Weston and the Aspetuck Land Trust sent letters seeking right of first refusal.

The total purchase price would be $12.1 million.

“I didn’t think we’d have the money, but this first step didn’t commit us,” LePage said.

Then-Governor John Rowland was in the process of setting up an Open Space Land Acquisition Fund, and so 50% of the purchase price could potentially be paid for by the state.

“We had the right governor at the right time in support of it,” Bromer said.

Who’s in?

By October 1997, The Coalition to Preserve Trout Brook Valley, together with the Aspetuck Land Trust, was fund raising — and Aspetuck Land Trust became keeper of the donations for the Easton portion.

Weston committed $845,000 for the 44.56 acres of Trout Brook Valley in their town.

Easton was asked to contribute $2 million toward the 685.70 acres in town.

Tony Colonnese, first selectman of Easton at the time, felt that development at Trout Brook Valley was better for the town than preservation of the land.

Later that year, the reins of the town switched to Bill Kupinse when he was elected as first selectman. He got on board with preservation.

“He said, go ahead, try,” Falkenhagen said.

Not that the group needed much encouragement.

“Our philosophy was, we’re all lucky enough to live in a watershed town,” Falkenhagen said. “But with that comes the obligation to preserve the land. It’s our job.”

Colonnese later became one of the preservationists’ biggest allies.

Serendipity

Things were slowly moving along when one day the group heard from a new voice.

Paul Newman.

He wanted to commit $100,000 a year for five years out of Newman’s Own brand. It turned out his daughters used to ride horses on the property and talked their father into it.

In February 1998, donations were building, but there still wasn’t enough.

Enter the Nature Conservancy.

They had been approached initially but were not interested. Now, with a new head of their Connecticut chapter wanting to get involved, they came through.

Tick tock, tick tock

In the end, the state of Connecticut committed $6 million for the land, and the rest was raised by the Nature Conservancy, Aspetuck Land Trust, the Coalition to Preserve Trout Brook Valley and several individuals and smaller groups.

So there would be enough money, but some of it was committed over three or four years, according to LePage.

In order to be able to pay for the property, the Nature Conservancy gave a loan for the balance that had not come in yet.

And on Sept. 2, 1999, BHC Company (formerly Bridgeport Hydraulic Company) sold the 685.70 acres in Easton to Aspetuck Land Trust and Weston bought its 44.56 acres.

Ruth Bedford of Easton owned properties to the north and south of that land. She donated them to the Aspetuck Land Trust, bringing the total of Trout Brook Valley up to 1,009 acres.

“It was the perfect storm in the best sense,” Bromer said.

What about Easton?

In order for Easton to vote on committing the $2 million, the board of finance had to officially recommend the vote. But Andy Kachele, finance board chairman at the time, thought it was a bad idea.

Kachele eventually came around, too.

By that time, though, money for the property was raised, and it would be purchased regardless of Easton’s participation.

The town voted no by a slim margin.

“I always felt bad we didn’t pay our share,” Kupinse said.

“We all did,” Bromer said.

Easton purchased some property at the time, though.

The intersection of rt. 136 and rt. 58, considered one of the gateways to Easton and known as The Four Corners. —Photo by Laura Modlin
The intersection of rt. 136 and rt. 58, considered one of the gateways to Easton and known as The Four Corners. —Photo by Laura Modlin
The land at the intersection at Routes 136 and 58, known as The Four Corners, was also in danger of development. Conservationists had been working to raise money to buy those parcels, too.

Easton bought one of the corners, included in the deal with BHC Company, with $160,000 raised by residents. Coming into town from Fairfield on Route 58, it is the near corner on the left.

Two of the other corners are owned by the Aspetuck Land Trust, and one is owned by Aquarion Water Company.

Why bother?

Kupinse has often referred to Easton as “the jewel of Fairfield County.”

“There is no place like Easton,” he said in a recent interview.

He has always felt a need to draw a line in the sand against any development, a sentiment Dunsby appeared to echo in a statement in The Courier during his campaign for first selectman in 2013.

“…the Easton we enjoy requires vigilance,” Dunsby’s Oct. 3, 2013 statement said. He warned of ongoing attempts at commercial and residential development that could break zoning and “take us down a path of inappropriate development.”

Kupinse said that all CFE (he is a board member) had to do was not fight development and the town would look much different.

“I have no doubt,” Kupinse said.

He speculates that if conservationists had not taken a stand all these years, there would be more commercial development around Silverman’s Farm and Greiser’s Store. And pockets of intense residential development, perhaps even townhouses and semi-high rises.

South Park Avenue

In the group’s 2015 annual newsletter, Verne Gay, CFE president, wrote an overview of the South Park Avenue situation. The group was formed in 1972 to protect against development of the same land.

“Any move to sell the property at this time is shortsighted,” he said. “Developers’ assurances are simply instruments of convenience — for them.”

He said those assurances can be “reordered at the stroke of a pen.”

Gay said that any tax dollars recaptured would be modest and not worth it.

“What is permitted on the South Park property won’t necessarily stay on the South Park property,” he said. “Precedence is a dangerous wedge that will be used to open the door to projects which do not comply with our zoning.”

Easton’s three-man Board of Selectmen has the power to sell the property without a town vote.

“CFE urges our town leaders to move forward with care and deliberation,” Gay said.

To learn more about CFE and their preservation efforts, visit citizensforeaston.org.

Learn more about Trout Brook Valley and the Aspetuck Land Trust at Aspetucklandtrust.org

Connecting with native trout

Preserving Easton

By Laura Modlin on July 9, 2015 in Connecticut News, Lead News, News, Town Government · 0 Comments

Some families have made Easton their home for many generations, but none have been in town as long as the brook trout.

Wild breeding grounds for these native fish have come up against threats of development since the early 1970s on unspoiled open and feral expanses of land known as Trout Brook Valley and South Park Avenue.

One of these parcels has already been preserved.

Back in the mid-90s, a group of town conservationists came together to protect Trout Brook Valley — and its namesake fish — imperiled due to the prospect of a golf course and condominiums.

Thanks to the band of determined locals, the Trout Brook Valley property, and the wild trout breeding ground in its streams — called class 1 wild trout management area — is safe from development.

However, across town the South Park Avenue property — and its share of the town’s class 1 wild trout management area — still faces an uncertain fate.

This piece is much more impressive, according to James Prosek, author of several books on trout and a lifelong Easton resident who caught his first trout there.

“The Mill River is a much more robust wild trout fishery. It’s a larger stream with larger fish and more friendly to anglers than the brook in Trout Brook Valley,” Prosek said.

The uniqueness of having two such pristine streams in one town is due to the legacy of Easton and its residents, who have a tradition of protecting wild places.

Class 1 wild trout management area is a designation where trout reproduce enough to keep it stocked all on their own. Only 10 such places remain in the state of Connecticut.

Other rivers have trout that is farmed by the state and put into the waterways.

They’re just fish

That the brook trout are able to survive — and reproduce naturally — on these properties is a testament to something really special in today’s increasingly polluted world.

“The fact that they are there reproducing tells us it’s a remarkably clean resource,” Prosek said.

And that’s not all.

“It’s not just any stream,” Prosek said of the Mill River, “and therefore the land that embraces it is not just any piece of land.”

Prosek has fished streams around the world, from Spain to Japan, from Iceland to Arctic Russia, to document trout diversity for his books. The Mill River on the South Park Avenue property, he says, is one of the best he has seen for brook trout.

“My fear is that once we hand over the property to development we lose control,” he said.

In order for the brook trout to survive they need cold water. The Easton Reservoir releases cold water from its depths, which then feeds into the Mill River.

It’s cold enough for trout even through the summer.

Which will become more crucial to the survival of trout as the climate warms, according to Tim Barry, supervising fisheries biologist for the Connecticut Department of Energy and Environmental Protection western headquarters.

If developed, asphalt on parking lots in South Park Avenue will heat up in summer, and when it rains the warm runoff will make its way into the water, raising temperatures and becoming inhospitable to brook trout.

Brook trout lay their eggs in specific-sized gravel, and they have to stay buried and oxygenated from fall through to spring. There needs to be spaces between the gravel for the water to run through and provide the oxygenation.

When development happens, heavy rain on the exposed ground causes sand and other deposits to run off into the water, where it plugs up and buries the gravel. The eggs then suffocate.

“Any number of known and predictable… or unknown effects of development and human overuse will lead to the end of this fishery,” Prosek said. “In two or three years, the trout will be gone.”

He has seen it happen time and time again, from development and from excessive sanding of roads and parking lots in winter when the eggs are in the brooks.

Barry said that it would be very hard to prevent the loss.

“Based on past track records everywhere else, it would be a challenge,” Barry said. He has spent 28 years working as a field biologist, several years as an environmental consultant and time in the Peace Corps in Central America as a fisheries biologist.

It’s our ecosystem

Barry pointed out that there are all kinds of cascading effects accompanying losing one piece of the environmental puzzle that sometimes are not seen until many years later.

“How far down that road do you want to go before you put everything into a tailspin?” Barry said.

He said that when we lose these things, we see it has much more of a ripple effect than we knew when they were here.

“Everything in nature has a role,” Barry said.

Some insects on the river have the same requirements as the brook trout. And those insects feed frogs, salamanders, turtles and more. Birds, otters, mink, raccoons, ducks and fish are among the other creatures that feed off the river.

Altering one part shifts everything.

“A lot of people that don’t fish are oblivious to changes that occur,” Barry said.

Awe and wonder

Prosek would also like to see trout specifically and nature in general preserved for the next generation to help light their hearts and imaginations.

“The more of nature we cover with asphalt, the less we have to feed our awe and wonder,” Prosek said.

On youtube.com there are many interviews with Prosek educating and inspiring others — a lifelong mission first sparked by his time enmeshed in the beauty of the Mill River.

You can also find his film, “The Complete Angler,” on youtube.com and below. It chronicles Prosek’s journey to Europe, following in the footsteps of the author Izaak Walton, who wrote a book of the same name.

The film speaks of a connection to the natural world and one’s place in it through fishing, and won a prestigious Peabody Award. Part of it was filmed on the Mill River, and the ethos of the piece was inspired by it.

“If [the Mill River] hadn’t been there for me as a kid in its pristine state, none of those videos or interviews or my books would exist,” Prosek said.

Barry said a connection to nature is really central to this whole discussion.

“When people don’t have that connection it’s easy to make short-sighted decisions,” he said.

Barry is thinking long term, the next generation.

“We’re at a really critical juncture,” Barry said.

The state’s involvement

The state usually does not get involved in discussions with towns about preserving resources like the Mill River on Easton’s South Park Avenue property, Barry said.

“It’s up to the town,” he said.

All the state can do is provide data and information if municipalities ask why it is a class 1 wild trout management area, he said.

“Some towns are very progressive and forward thinking,” Barry said.

Right now, DEEP is in the process of recommending a change to regulations. It would like to get the entire area from the outflow of the Easton Reservoir dam all the way down to Fairfield designated as class 1 wild trout management area.

It’s a slow process to get the state to make this designation, and if trout start dying in Easton due to development, they will be rethinking it.

Class 1 wild trout management areas are considered so special that they are catch-and-release areas for fishermen. There is no bait allowed, only barbless, single-hook artificial lures and flies, “to reduce hooking mortality,” Barry said.

And everything else that comes after.

“We consider the Mill River a gem because we have so few other places like it,” Barry said. “We would like to see it continue to be operated in a natural state.”

NEXT WEEK: How residents banded together and saved Trout Brook Valley and The Four Corners in Easton in the 1990s.

Link to The Complete Angler below