Our view: Public left out of loop on Higby Park

School, town leaders wrong to leave taxpayers out of decision-making

Observer-Dispatch

Posted Apr 16, 2009 @ 09:42 PM

It’s not wrong for school districts and the municipalities they serve to work together on cooperative ventures. We need more of that as costs rise and governments seek ways to keep taxes down.
But when such ventures are done outside of the public purview, it becomes a problem.

That’s what has happened in the case of Higby Park in the town of New Hartford. Instead of acting in a public fashion, school and town leaders took a back-door approach to land acquisition by working through a private foundation to secure a 22-acre site that was given to the school district for future development.

Taxpayers had no say in the deal, but are now the ones who will pay to maintain and develop the site. And this is just three years after taxpayers voted down a similar proposal on the other side of town.

The Higby Park land is situated behind Perry Junior High School. It was sold Feb. 19 by O.W. Hubbell & Sons Inc. to the New Hartford Central School Education Foundation for $250,000 — more than 13 times its assessed value — with funds raised through private donations. The foundation, formed in 1993 to fund efforts that cannot normally be met through the school budget, then donated the property to the school district.

Though the school district got the land “for free,” it is now responsible for it, and that expense falls on taxpayers. And it’s not really “free” land. When owned privately, it was on the tax rolls. Now as school district property, it’s tax-exempt. That’s less money for the district, which will have to be made up by taxpayers.

Second, there’s no plan for developing this land. Former schools Superintendent Daniel Gilligan, who put together the planning committee that raised the funds, hopes the land can be developed to improve recreational opportunities for all New Hartford residents. What that might cost is anybody’s guess. A similar situation presented itself in 2006 when the New Hartford school district wanted to purchase 87 acres off Tibbitts Road for unspecified future development. Taxpayers had a voice in that decision, and rejected it for lack of specifics.

The latest deal cut the public out of the land-acquisition option. And by taking this back-door approach, taxpayers are kept in the dark on things they have a right to know.

Consider the land appraisal. Since it was done for a “private foundation,” the public is being denied access to a copy of the appraisal on land it now owns. Foundation co-president Marcia Archibald said her group had the appraisal done on behalf of the private donors. She said Linda Romano, a local lawyer whose family donated $40,000, told her she did not want the information released. According to Archibald, Romano said “it’s no one’s business, that it doesn’t matter.”

It most certainly is the public’s business. They own the land. And that matters.
Even school superintendent Robert Nole said he doesn’t know who did the appraisal. Really? Wouldn’t that be information the school superintendent and school board would want to know before they accepted this “gift?”

The bottom line is this: Whenever public leaders — and there were a lot of them involved here, including several school board members — are dealing on behalf of the taxpayers, they have a moral and ethical obligation to conduct business openly. Without transparency, trust is lost.

In this instance, the New Hartford Central School Education Foundation provided a vehicle to privatize a deal that should have been public. It took power from the majority and placed it in the hands of a few.
And that’s just wrong.

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