Source: Hartford Courant (Conn.)
Behind a big farmhouse along Route 164, silt fences snake among the trees and hollows of Ayer Farm, marking curves and lines that soon could become the fairways, tees and greens of an 18-hole golf course.
Shawn Powers, whose family owns the 235-year-old farm, argues that those construction fences are a template for the future of Connecticut agriculture. To state officials fighting the family's golf development plans, the black barriers are an ominous threat to the state's $85 million investment in the preservation of its dwindling farmland.
Powers' parents are heirs to the late Joseph Koniecko, who sold his 221-acre farm's development rights to the state for $232,603 in 1986. Lawyers for the family and for the state will meet in a courtroom in January to debate whether plans by Koniecko's heirs to build a golf course violate the contract the farmer signed with the state to preserve the farm from any activity detrimental to its agricultural potential.
In part, they will try to answer this question: Can a golf course be considered agriculture, at least in urbanized Connecticut?
As one of Connecticut's primary means of preserving its farms and, as a byproduct, its open space, the legal battle over the Preston farm may resonate across the state's rural lands. It is being closely watched by farmers and land preservation groups. If Powers and his parents, Virginia Landis and Frederick Peacos Jr., are successful in building a golf course on land protected under the farmland preservation program, many say that would intensify development pressure on other farms. The battle also points out a problem in a program intended to preserve land in perpetuity, should succeeding generations have different ideas for the land.
Powers, 44, says a golf course is a way to keep much of the farm in agriculture while creating a viable business around the growing tourism market of eastern Connecticut. "We're creating an agri-tourism business," he said. "We're looking to do what's in the best interest of everybody in the town, and our family, and everybody that's involved with this [farmland preservation] program."
Golf would only be the centerpiece for an array of agricultural activities, he said, including organic farming and pick-your-own-produce, that would preserve most of the farm as a viable agricultural enterprise.
But, Powers said, "The golf course is an agricultural activity, and that's what we'll prove in court."
With the golf course plans already approved by the town of Preston and construction set to begin, Attorney General Richard Blumenthal obtained a court injunction this month blocking the project pending a court hearing scheduled for Jan. 10 in Hartford.
"Really the survival of the farmland preservation program is at stake, not just a single piece of land or a farm," Blumenthal said. The family's "rationale would enable them to build a coal-burning power plant on the land simply to raise money for farming. Why not a nuclear power plant? Why not an amusement park with miniature golf? The whole point here is the family was paid, it didn't gratuitously donate this land. ... Bottom line, the taxpayers own these development rights."
Connecticut lost a greater share of its farmland than any other state in recent years, according the 2002 Census of Agriculture, and in few corners of New England is development pressure more intense than in rural New London County, which saw more than 17,000 acres of farmland pass out of agriculture between 1997 and 2002.
In 1950, when Connecticut had more than 4,500 dairy farms, there were 17 on Route 164 in Preston. Only one survives today, on a state highway that has become a busy thoroughfare for people headed to Foxwoods Resort Casino 8 miles away in Ledyard. Powers says if his family's farm is to have any agricultural future, it needs a way to pull people off the highway.
The Preston farm, he says, could become an Eastern Connecticut version of Lyman Orchards in Middlefield, which boasts golf courses designed by Gary Player and Robert Trent Jones, all wrapped around more than 200 acres where people can pick their own apples, peaches, blueberries and pears.
"It's going to be a landmark property," Powers said. "You have to look at the whole property; you can't just look at the golf course. And the state can't get past the golf course. All they see is the [golf] land is no longer agricultural."
Preston First Selectman Robert Congdon said the town could use the tax revenue from a golf course and a planned clubhouse and restaurant, which Powers said could be worth $500,000 a year.
"My personal feeling is that this family is not going to farm this land, and it seems to me there should be a mechanism that you could buy back the development rights or part of the development rights," Congdon said. "This property would be better preserved as open space as a golf course in my opinion, than if it ends up being overgrown by Russian olive and every other invasive plant."
Farmers, land preservation advocates and state officials say expanding the definition of agriculture to include golf would make it more difficult for farmers, who depend on the state preservation program to acquire new land at more affordable prices. Because the use of the land is restricted to agriculture uses or open space, it trades or rents at lower prices than land without those limits. Farmland is more expensive in Connecticut than anywhere in New England, having gained 23 percent in value over the past five years, according to the Connecticut Conference of Municipalities.
"The farmland preservation program is essential because it creates a land bank of affordable farmland for the future. The land on which the state holds the development rights arguably may be the only land that farmers are able to access, to lease or to purchase in the future, given the current real estate value of land," said Jiff Martin of the Working Lands Alliance, a farmland preservation coalition.
Since its inception in 1978, the state preservation program has bought the development rights to 211 farms, preserving 29,900 acres in more than half of Connecticut's 169 towns. Under the program, farmers who sell their development rights retain ownership of the land, are free to sell it to anyone they choose, and are not obligated to farm the land. But they agree to place a covenant on the deed to the land that forever bars uses that are contrary to agriculture.
The deed covenant Joseph Koniecko signed in 1986 says: "No activity shall be carried on which is detrimental to the actual or potential agricultural use of the Premises, or detrimental to soil conservation, or to good agricultural management practices." It "binds himself and his heirs, successors, assigns, executors and administrators forever."
Whether land preserved under the program is being farmed or lying fallow, the key is preserving the quality of its agricultural soils. The cuts and fills required to build a golf course would damage those soils, said Bruce H. Gresczyk, the state's commissioner of agriculture.
"If they can do this, and my staff is wrong in their interpretation of the deed covenants, it would diminish the state's preservation interest in the 200-odd properties we have preserved in perpetuity," Gresczyk said.
Koniecko had no children of his own. Peacos is the son of Koniecko's wife Rose, from a previous marriage. In the 1980s, Joseph Koniecko wanted to make sure Rose Koniecko did not give the land to Peacos, who wanted to develop it into a residential subdivision, according to letters Koniecko's lawyer wrote to state officials in 1985.
Selling the development rights to the state was a way for the old farmer to preserve the farm he had inherited from his father in the 1930s, the letters say. "We are all crossing our fingers, especially Mr. Koniecko, to whom this farm means so much, that the sale [of the development rights] will go through," his lawyer, Deborah Tedford, wrote to state officials in 1985, before Koniecko died.
Nearly 20 years later, Powers said the deal his step-grandfather struck has become a burden for Landis and Peacos because of the taxes and insurance they must pay on the land.
"They are in such a hardship case right now financially, that it's sad," said Powers, who has a landscaping business. "I really want it known that when you engage this program, for someone like myself who is an heir ... you have only one option, and that option [to farm or sell the land] is not a good one."
That's not the issue, Blumenthal said.
"Maybe their course is to seek some remedy through the legislature," he said. "But we're not sort of being hyper-technical, or nitpicking. This proposal goes to the heart of the farmland preservation program. Its core values are at stake."
