Should Charlestown buy the Y Camp outright?

Or should we leave it to those who stand to benefit

By Will Collette

Last Friday, Jim Mageau announced he was launching a petition drive to put the question of  buying the abandoned YMCA campground on Watchaug Pond outright for up to $600,000 before the voters in a special financial election .

He needs 400 signatures of registered Charlestown voters to make that happen. Click here for Mageau’s news release, which includes information on how you can sign the petition if you support his approach.

If Mr. Mageau gathers enough signatures and then convinces enough voters to authorize up to $600,000, then the Y-Gate scandal might end with the town owning the property, although that depends on whether the Y actually wants to sell directly to Charlestown.

Although Mageau’s proposal for Charlestown to simply buy, own and operate the land for the benefit of all is better than the alternative of buying a conservation easement of dubious value from the Charlestown Land Trust, is it the best approach?

Gentz: pushing the Y-Gate deal hard

Click here for our complete coverage of the Y-Gate Scandal.

If you believe we are going to get stuck with the bill anyway – and Council President Tom Gentz (CCA) seems determined to stick it to the taxpayers no matter what – better that the Town should own the land directly.

However, my own preference is a solution that does not involve any public money.

I prefer to see the Charlestown Land Trust and the Sonquipaug Association use their own considerable assets plus the proceeds from their fund-raising (an amount they have not disclosed) to buy the land from the YMCA without the injection of any public money.

Let them negotiate a reasonable price with the Y and consummate the sale. And let the Y provide the mortgage, if that's what it takes.

If that is impractical, let’s go back to the idea of a conservation development, like that proposed by Ted Veazey over a year ago. His proposal even won the approval of the Charlestown Planning Commission, and we all know how almost impossible it is to please them.

He was prepared to do it with his own money. All he needed was a zoning change from Open Space/Recreation to residential. But a smear campaign by the Sonquipaug Association killed the Veazey plan, putting us where we are today.

We learned at the July 9 Town Council meeting that privately-owned land should not be zoned Open Space/Recreation. So that opens up another question – what if Veazey had simply bought the land and then appealed to have the zoning changed as inapplicable to privately-owned land?

Planning Commissar Ruth Platner has raised the specter of another developer coming along to buy the property if the town doesn’t cough up dough. Given that any such developer would have to go through the Planning and Town Council buzz saws to get a zoning change, I’m not afraid of some terrible new project proposal coming along.

Another option: Charlestown could condemn the abandoned and neglected property as a safety hazard. Children climb the fence and play on the site, according to testimony from one Sonquipaug mother. Some say there are unknown environmental hazards on the site.

According to the appraiser who did the first Charlestown Land Trust appraisal, there are up to 20 buildings on the site and nearly all of them are in poor condition.

The Y shuttered the site over four years ago, leaving it decaying and unguarded. If this property was privately owned, it would have been subject to a tax sale, like our tax-delinquent local Tim Horton’s. But as a nonprofit, the YMCA has never paid taxes on the site and never will, so we can’t take the land as a tax foreclosure.

But the YMCA has left behind a neglected, potentially dangerous property.

If Charlestown wants the property, maybe we should just take it and negotiate a price under the terms of a condemnation where the costs of site demolition and cleanup would become a factor.

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Ruth Platner, the Charlestown Land Trust and the Sonquipaug Association have spun quite a yarn about the old Y camp and what a precious and unique piece of land it is. There’s no question that 27.5 acres on the Pond is a very nice piece of land if you ignore all the crap the Y left behind. However, its actual importance, in context, is greatly overblown.

Aside from the terrible conditions the YMCA left on the site, it is only a tiny segment of the shoreline of Watchaug Pond.

If you look at Charlestown’s open space map for the area (to the right, and below), note that nearly the entire shoreline of Watchaug Pond is currently zoned open space. The Y camp’s 560 feet of pond frontage (120 foot beach) is nothing compared to what is already permanently protected.

The largest pond front by far is Rhode Island’s Burlingame Park. In addition to Burlingame, there are stretches of pond-front that are owned by nonprofit organizations, including the YMCA’s other campground, Audubon, the state and the federal government.

One large plot not marked green for open space is located just to the north of the Watchaug Heights neighborhood. This is state-owned property, zoned R2A. It contains only two buildings.

Indeed, the only real stretches of pond-front that are not already open space or government owned are the Watchaug Heights neighborhood to the north of the Y Camp and the Sonquipaug neighborhood to its south.

If the Y camp was somehow re-zoned residential, that would hardly create the ecological tipping point of development on the pond that was claimed during the campaign to derail Veazey’s plans.

As for threats to the ecology of the pond, I submit the Sonquipaug neighborhood poses far more danger with its crammed-in 1/10^th acre plots jammed with vacation homes. This neighborhood contains two old cesspools and four undersized septic systems.

Perhaps the best way to protect Watchaug Pond would be to buy the Sonquipaug neighborhood, level it and restore it to open space.

But as the old saying goes, “if wishes were horses, we could all take a ride.”

I know Charlestown isn’t going to condemn the YMCA camp and seize it. I also know Charlestown isn’t going to buy out the Sonquipaug neighborhood, bulldoze it and return that land to its natural state.

I know that if the Y doesn’t unload its property, they will try to find another buyer – but that buyer has got to know that the land stays zoned as it is unless or until that buyer comes up with a plan that can survive running the gauntlet past the Planning Commission and the Town Council.

I know the Charlestown Land Trust and Sonquipaug Association are determined to make the taxpayers buy the property and are unwilling to buy it themselves.

So next Monday night, at the continuation of the Town Council's July meeting, there may be only two options on the table.

One option is Gregg Avedisian’s proposal to ask voters if Charlestown should pay the Land Trust $398,000 for a piece of a worthless conservation easement, thus enabling the Land Trust to pay the Westerly YMCA 46% over the current appraised value of the land.

If this is what goes to the voters, I hope the voters’ answer will be a resounding NO.

The second option is Jim Mageau’s proposal to put a different question before the voters: should Charlestown buy the YMCA property outright for up to $600,000?

While Mageau’s proposal is better than Avedisian’s, neither of them benefit from a complete and full disclosure of the information voters need to make informed judgments.

There’s also another potential fly in the ointment with Mr. Mageau’s approach: the Y might not want to sell to Charlestown if Charlestown wants to use the camp for active recreation. They have insisted on a “no-compete” clause with other potential buyers who might cut into their business at their nearby active campground.

But in the end, both proposals assume that a fair price is somewhere around $600,000. I don’t know if that is true. We won't know until we see all the information the Westerly YMCA and Charlestown Land Trust have held back – the new appraisal, the reports on environmental conditions from the engineers CLT Treasurer Russ Ricci claims to have walked the site and an independent, honest estimate of the clean-up costs.Avedisian's option also lacks an independent appraisal of the true worth of a conservation easement on the land.

Because we have been fed so much dishonest and misleading information, I can’t support either proposal until we have all the documents and facts in front of us. That's not a criticism of either Avedisian or Mageau, but of the YMCA and the Charlestown Land Trust.

If the YMCA can’t wait and the Charlestown Land Trust and Sonquipaug Association believe this is a deal too good to miss – let them make their own deal with their own money. Maybe that’s what they should have done in the first place.