(Cross-posted from The COFAR Blog)
Suppose a couple owned a house, and one day, the husband stated that they couldn’t afford to live there anymore and would have to move out. However, rather than putting the house up for sale, he said he planned to let a friend live in it for a dollar a year.
Might the wife not object and say maybe they could afford to stay there if they didn’t need the income from a sale of the property?
Isn’t this the same sort of giveaway that the administration has just agreed to concerning 69 acres of state-owned land at the Glavin Regional Center, which has been targeted for closure as of next July?
As we previously noted here, the governor signed a bill into law in August to lease 69 acres of land at Glavin for $1 a year for the next 25 years to the Town of Shrewsbury. The land subject to the lease consists of 15 acres currently used as soccer fields and 54 acres of farmland.
The Worcester Telegram & Gazette reported in 2010 that the total amount of land at Glavin is “more than 120 acres” and had been assessed at $22.36 million. Thus, the land that has been effectively given to the town in this case could be worth as much as $12.9 million.
Many people seem to think we oppose the continued use of open space at Glavin for recreational and agricultural uses. That’s not the case. Our main question here is what happened to the deliberative process that the administration promised with regard to the disposition of the land?
We ask this question not because we want to see this land sold or used for any particular purpose. But like the wife in the house giveaway scenario above, we question the administration’s assertion that it can no longer afford to keep Glavin open and must evict its longtime residents. If closing Glavin is about saving money, why effectively give almost $13 million worth of land away without going through the promised reuse process?
In 2008, the administration announced it was closing the Glavin, Fernald, Monson, and Templeton developmental centers, contending there would be a fiscal savings in doing so. In making the closure announcement, the administration expressly stated that disposition of the land at those centers would be subject to a “collaborative” reuse-committee planning process.
Legislation was subsequently enacted into law to set up land reuse committees for the Fernald Center (Chapter 149 of the Acts of 2004, S. 402) and for the Monson and Templeton Centers (Chapter 59 of the Acts of 2009). However, a bill filed in January 2009 to establish a similar land reuse committee for the Glavin Center never got out of the Bonding Committee.
The Glavin land reuse bill, which had been filed by then state Representative Karyn Polito, had stated that the proposed reuse committee “will be mindful of the rights of current Glavin residents, and their need for adequate and appropriate housing, clinical services, and appropriate staffing…”
Why Polito’s bill died and was never refiled is a mystery to us.
Interestingly, in February 2010, the administration proposed to sell what appears to be the same parcels of land at Glavin that it is now prepared to lease to the town for $1 a year. Area legislators opposed the planned sale of the land.
What caused the about-face on the administration’s part from wanting to sell the Glavin land with no formal reuse process in place, to agreeing to effectively give the land away, with no formal reuse process in place?
We’ll continue to ask these questions, hoping for some answers.
I said it before, and I’ll say it again. This sounds like a carnival shell game. “Keep your eye on the shell, folks! Follow the pea! What? You picked the wrong shell? Well, you don’t get $13-million. But here’s a buck.”
What? 69 acres of land disappeared? Shocking!
I agree that there are some legitimate questions that should be asked, but I think your analogy is flawed.
Say that couple owned a great, big giant estate, one with a manor house in bad need of repairs. It may need hundreds of thousands of dollars a year in upkeep, and additional hundreds of thousands or even millions in restoration, renovation and repairs.
Say that couple loved the estate and didn’t want to see some great, big giant development be built on it, ruining it.
Say that couple also had a friend who could afford the upkeep.
For that couple, it may absolutely make sense to lease out the estate — in perpetuity — for a $1 a year, even if the friend only wanted to keep the grounds of the estate, but knock down the aging manor house.
So… as you can see, there are indeed plenty of reasons why a someone may give away a property for a $1, if they cared about was the land. In fact, go around the state and you’ll find dozens or even hundreds of great old parks — like Lynch Park in Beverly or the Swampscott Town Hall and the parklands surrounding it — that were created out of similar premises.
The state spends millions of dollars a year on these facilities, which over even a few years well exceeds the value of the property itself. The state may have decided it doesn’t really need to sell the land to the highest bidder, and that giving the property to the town would be enough to improve the fiscal outlook — and heavy development of it could cause another giant headache between the state and town, one the state may not want on top of other headaches with other properties being sold off. So it could, in fact, be a prudent course of action.
Note: I’m not saying that’s the case here, or that I don’t agree with your basic premise. It may well be better to put the lands to bid, or keep the hospital open. To be frank, I don’t really know enough about the property or the state’s needs to make that judgment.
However, I am saying that your analogy is flawed and, because of its flaws, only serves to be a (rather poor) straw man. Your argument would be better off without it.
By these facilities, I was referring to the hospitals. I wasn’t sure that was clear, so I thought it needed a reply.
There’s a couple other typos in there, too, though I think everything else is clear enough. My apologies.
The facility is the newest and smallest of the state’s developmental centers, having been opened in the mid-1970s. It provides state-of-the-art care; so, to continue with my analogy, the “wife” really wants to continue living there.
I agree with you that there may be reasons why the state doesn’t want to bother with the upkeep of the land. But the administration promised a deliberative process to determine the land disposition, yet, for some reason, abandoned that process and made a quick decision. It’s as if the wife said, ‘let’s think about this first,’ and the husband said, ‘sorry, I’ve already signed a legal pledge to my friend to give the house away.’
Whether you agree or not that the giveaway of the land was the right move, there was absolutely no need for the hurry and secrecy, without the promised deliberative process.
And while it’s true that the state does pay millions of dollars to operate Glavin, it’s a mistake to assume any of that money will be saved in closing the facility. The residents will still need state-funded care after they are transferred elsewhere, and that care will always be more expensive than that provided to the average client of the Department of Developmental Services.
To continue once again with my analogy (which, like any analogy, may not be perfect), the husband and wife will still have to pay a mortgage and many other expenses when they get a place elsewhere. If, in fact, they really can’t afford to continue living in their current house, it’s going to be just as expensive elsewhere, in our view.
in this case, the upkeep isn’t mowing the lawn and trimming the hedges, it’s taking care of patients at the cost of many millions a year.
I think I made was clear about that in my original comment.
Getting back to what you wrote,
That’s one of those legitimate questions. Will it save money and still provide the necessary care, or won’t it? That’s obviously what this all boils down to.
The state obviously thinks the answer is yes, you obviously think the answer is likely to be no.
Why I commented was because a flawed analogy doesn’t help your case. There are conceivable reasons why someone living on a 69 acre estate may want to donate it away for a $1 a year, so you shouldn’t say that what the state is doing is conceptually impossible to be a good idea. You should instead focus on making the case for why it isn’t.
to give away the land. I’m saying the effective giveaway raises questions about the administration’s claim that it can no longer afford to continue to keep Glavin open.
Note that the “wife” says “maybe” they can still afford to stay in the house if the husband is willing to give the land around it away for free. Our issue here isn’t with the state’s decision itself, but with the way in which that decision was made — without the promised deliberative process.
and the costs of a one-time infusion of selling the facility are very different.
An entity may not be able to reasonably afford the upkeep and other costs, if it’s expensive, but could afford to give the land away. Hence my references to the state being ‘cash poor.’ It may not need any one time cash infusion, even at the same time that it may not be able to afford the expensive maintenance and costs of an additional facility.
Plus, it makes sense for the state to lease out property to a town or something like that, even for a $1 a year, because the state can always take that land back later if needed…. instead of being in a position where it has to buy land, use less desirable land or take land by eminent domain if it ever wanted to open a facility of any kind in that area of the state again (unlikely as that may be).
Such a decision may be more practical than leasing the land out to a private business, which would take time to find an interested party (or parties), be a big expense in and of itself to market and come up with various proposals, and be forced into a situation where it would have to sign away a long term lease it couldn’t easily get out of… with jobs situated there, which would be trickier to remove than, say, a soccer field, if the state ever wanted it back.
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Again, I think you make some great points and I’ve been reading your posts with interest for quite some time. I just think your metaphor is flawed and a distraction. That’s all.
In my experience, anything not on message is off it. Take it as my 2 cents on messaging for your PR campaign.
I appreciate your thoughtful comments and am glad you’ve found these posts to be of interest.
missed the point.
I only commented on the analogy and why it was flawed. Beyond that, I said there were legitimate questions, but did not comment on them beyond recognizing the fact that they exist.
You opined that Dave’s analogy was flawed, but did not say why, and then introduced yet another analogy.