Tuesday night, before the Pledge had even cleared the room, Town Council Chair Brian F. X. Connolly told the people who came to talk about Don Tinty's park that he had something to say. He got about three sentences in — Farmington has been working with its Cemetery Association for "approximately 8 to 10 years" — before Patti Boye-Williams, a Second District Democrat, moved to amend the agenda first, since the chair statement wasn't on it yet. The council amended unanimously. Connolly thanked Patty. Then he delivered the news.
A legal opinion received earlier that day, Connolly said, concludes that using the land Donald Tinty conveyed to the town in 2004 for cemetery purposes "would violate the covenant contained in the deed." The opinion also concludes that "the town does not have a legal obligation to devote town-owned land for burial grounds." The legal answer the May 12 meeting had asked for — and the question residents had been asking for eight years — came back the way nearly everyone in chambers that night had wanted.
"In the future, the Town Council will need to regroup with the Cemetery Association," Connolly said.
What the legal opinion is, and what comes next
Town Manager Kathleen Blonski received the opinion earlier on Tuesday. It will appear in her manager's report at the council's next meeting, June 9. Connolly said he had also asked Blonski to send the opinion to the email chain the Nadia's Way and Old Canal Crossing neighbors had been corresponding on. The first audience for the document, in other words, is the residents who walked into chambers on May 12 carrying a 2004 deed and a 2016 email from a former town planner — the same residents who had been asking, in two separate decades, for someone to read the deed in front of them.
The 8-to-10-year search, end of the line
Connolly's statement filled in what had been an open part of the story. Over the last two years, he said, the town had narrowed its search to two alternative properties — what Connolly called the Hind parcel, on which the town had reviewed plans with the state, and the Bland parcel, on which testing was completed. Both were ultimately determined to be unsuitable for cemetery use. The position of both the town and the Cemetery Association coming out of that work, Connolly said, was that there were "no other suitable town-owned properties for or locations for a cemetery." That was the box the Cemetery Association was working inside when it came back to ask whether the current council wanted to revisit the Tinty parcel — the question that put the item in the town manager's report and on the May 12 agenda, alongside the council's $30-to-$35-million fire-station overhaul.
The answer to that question, as of Tuesday, is no. Not because the council declined to consider it, but because the deed will not allow it.
The neighbors who came back
The May 12 meeting was packed with residents from Nadia's Way and Old Canal Crossing. Two of them came back on May 26 to say thank you.
Jim Drake, who lives against the Tinty field, told the council he had been Don Tinty's neighbor for 15 years and had talked with him "a couple of times a year." He said he wanted to thank the council "for looking into that and pretty much shutting this down." Then he used most of his five minutes to ask a question the council did not have an answer for yet: who, exactly, is supposed to maintain the park now. A neighbor he believed to be a surgeon walks out with a tractor to cut the paths. Dog walkers park along Nadia's Way, which Drake noted is not an organized parking spot. The silo came down. The historic barn — work on which started last year — reached a point where Drake said it should have been taken down too. As a former scoutmaster and Eagle Scout, Drake offered: "if Don wanted this... I can tell you there'd be an Eagle project next year if somebody just put the word out there."
Brian Bell, of 6 Nadia's Way, kept his thanks short. "On behalf of the neighbors I would like to thank the town council for taking the time to carefully consider our concerns regarding the Don Tinty family park," he said. "The decision to preserve the space as it was originally intended means a great deal to me, my neighbors, our children, and our pets who enjoy this park on a daily basis." Bell was the same neighbor who, on May 12, read the 2004 deed and a 2016 email from the then-town planner into the record, asking what had changed since the last time this was settled. The answer that arrived two weeks later — a covenant on a 22-year-old deed and a written legal opinion that confirms what residents had been telling the town the whole time — was the change.
The thing the 2018 round didn't produce
Boye-Williams, the only current council member who also served in 2018, said on May 12 that the town had been asked then to look elsewhere and had done so — and had run out of elsewhere. Dave Wlodkowski, a First District Democrat, said the same night that no preliminary work on the property should happen "until we have a legal opinion on exactly what that deed expresses" — and that it "should have been done in 2018." The chair statement on May 26 was the document that did not exist in 2018, eight years and one full search cycle later.
What the council will do next with the Cemetery Association — when Garden Street fills, by Bruce L. Polsky's accounting two years from now, the town still needs a place to bury its dead — is a different question. The town's land acquisition committee can take it up. The May 26 statement closed only the question on the table.
The deed is still the deed. The park is still a park. The June 9 meeting will have the legal opinion in writing.
This coverage is supported by Farmington Storage, 155 Scott Swamp Road — the only storage facility in Connecticut with Museum air. A covenant is one way to keep something exactly as it was meant to be kept. Climate-controlled storage is another. The covenant comes with a deed. The storage comes with a key. 📦 860.777.4001
— Jack Beckett has covered Farmington long enough to know that "we did this in 2018" is the sentence that gets said the most and settles the least. He has read the May 26 transcript twice. The coffee is now lukewarm. ☕
The Farmington Mercury covers the town nobody else is covering — the deed nobody reads until it has to be read, the legal opinion that takes eight years to commission, the dozen neighbors who gave up a Tuesday night to ask for what they had already asked for. We publish slowly and without apology. Our motto is "Always last to breaking news," and we mean it: by the time you read this, the dust has settled, the votes are counted, and Jack Beckett has had at least two cups of coffee. Find us at farmingtonmercury.com and tell your neighbors. #WeAreFarmington 📰