Capital Planning Committee Takes Heat on Process and Plan During Ambler Yellow House Discussion

The Wilton Capital Planning Committee (WCPC) was taken to task on Wednesday evening, Sept. 10, both by a preservationist who believes the WCPC is neglecting attention to historic structures, and by representatives of Ambler Farm who were offended at a suggestion that they raise at least part of the money to repair the farm’s Yellow House.

“I’ll call the meeting to order. We don’t have a quorum,” WCPC Chair Jeff Rutishauser noted.

Though it was a short meeting by design, with some members unable to engage for more than 30 minutes, the WCPC technically violated the CT Freedom of Information Act by conducting business without having a quorum of members, briefly at the start but also for a significant portion later in the meeting, with only three of its eight voting members in attendance by the time it wrapped.

Passionate Funding

The Ambler Farm Yellow House was one of the main topics of Wednesday’s meeting, including its need of more than $1 million in renovation work.

Rutishauser started the discussion by presenting the WCPC with a short list of “projects” that he said were built on town-owned land, but were funded through “relatively passionate but smaller groups in favor of them,” including Trackside Teen Center, Wilton Commons, and WFRAC (Wilton Family Recreation and Activity Center, which was never actually built because the Town Meeting voted it down in 1999), among others.

“Wilton, in each case, contributed the land as its contribution at usually a dollar a year,” he said, drawing up a comparison to Ambler Farm’s historic Yellow House, which is in need of more than $1 million in renovation work.

“Then they would raise the third-party money through various sources, whether it be banks and construction loans, or tax-exempt bonds in the case of Wilton Commons, but externally supplied capital to the projects,” Rutishauser said.

“That can be a guiding principal as we look at something like the Yellow House, whether a structure like that — and there are parallels — should be employed to raise the capital to do something with this property, do something being defined later,” he said.

Ambler Takes Umbrage and Corrects

But two representatives of Ambler were on hand to dispute the comparison and take the WCPC to task for suggesting that Friends of Ambler Farm (FOAF) become responsible for raising its own money to repair the house. They started by pointing out what they said was a key difference:

“The Yellow House is owned by the town,” Ambler Farm Executive Director Ashley Kineon said. “It is not owned by [Friends of] Ambler Farm.”

FOAF President Patti Temple, who last year chaired the WCPC in its previous iteration as the Town and School Needs Assessment Priorities Committee (TSNAP), also contradicted the comparison that Rutishauser sought to draw and reiterated an argument that FOAF is an agent of the town.

“It is definitely apples and oranges,” Temple said. “The work that Friends of Ambler Farm does is 100% on behalf of the town,” she said. “The work that it does is work that is required by the deed.”

“It is all work on behalf of the town on a property and buildings that the town owns,” she said.

Kineon echoed the thought, saying, “For the past 20 years, we’ve been dedicated stewards on this property.”

For much of that time, FOAF were also paying rent for the use of the Yellow House — to the tune of over $390,000 between 2007 and 2021, for the property manager to live there and work overseeing security.

“In that time, despite [us] paying rent, the town did very little to maintain it, to simply put a fresh coat of paint on it, to take care of the rot and the degradation that we’re seeing today,” she said.

Kineon said that the town has been delinquent in caring for its own property. “To actually ask us to fundraise for a building that the town has watched degrade into nothing, it’s unfair, and it’s unrealistic,” she said. “We are a one-million dollar operation and every single penny, we work very hard to earn it.”

Kineon also expressed her unhappiness that the WCPC had not reached out to Ambler Farm for a visit. 

“I actually would take exception to the fact that this committee (has) not completely come out and spent time to talk with us, to invite us, to share the knowledge that we have. That’s, I think, just a common courtesy,” Kineon said.

Concerns for Historic Structures

Lori Fusco, chair of the Wilton Historic District and Historic Properties Commission, also shared a range of concerns about the WCPC, including what she spelled out as the WCPC’s failure to look at historic buildings holistically.

“It’s not just about being fiscally responsible,” Fusco said. “It’s about being plain responsible. Let’s take care of what we own, and if we don’t think that historic properties are important, I would invite everybody here to revisit the Plan of Conservation and Development.”

“I look through it all the time and one of the things that it has outlined here, and again, you probably already know this, but one of the goals is to maintain town-owned historic structures in a state of good repair, which we have not been doing,” she said.

Rutishauser told Fusco that he knew what the POCD document contained, as he had worked on it several years ago.

“I was on the POCD Commission, so I know what’s in it because I was part of the group that spent a year and a half to put it together,” Rutishauser said. “It’s designed as a blueprint for what we’d like to do. It’s aspirational. It’s not a contract.”

Fusco said that she had taken part in the process as well and understood that.

Untapped Grant Money

Fusco also told the WCPC members in attendance that, while they had previously been discussing the issue of lead abatement at the Yellow House, they were unaware that she had helped Hadley Boyd, communications and community outreach coordinator in the first selectman’s office, secure a matching grant of $55,000 to cover remediation costs.

“We were granted that award back in January,” Fusco said. “We had a meeting in March and nothing has moved since then. The town, as of now, hasn’t even accepted the funds.”

“That Yellow House is a state-recognized historic home and I need to make the distinction because I think too often people get confused … I would love if, going forward, when you’re having conversations about these homes, that you give that some thought,” she said.

“You speak a lot about historic properties (but) I’ve never been invited to talk at your meetings at all,” Fusco said. “I find that kind of peculiar. I’m not offended, I just think it’s kind of a loss of a resource, quite frankly.”

Fusco indicated that in previous discussions about town-owned properties on New Street, the WCPC was not privy to complete information during its discussion.

Rutishauser Pushes Back Against Idea of Demolition

After several references to the WCPC’s consideration of demolishing the Yellow House, Rutishauser said Fusco was misunderstanding and urged her not to perpetuate the idea.

“Who said we’re demolishing it? I thought we said in this meeting that that is not something we’re planning to do. Did you hear it?” he said.

Rutishauser told Fusco to stop saying they were.

“It keeps getting repeated and gets an echo going,” he said. “Our plan is not to demolish it. It’s to do something with that. Please correct that, because they sit and put that in the paper and we have no way of refuting it. The plan is not to demolish it. It’s not the primary plan.”

Fusco repeated his last sentence, with a decided emphasis: “It’s not the primary plan.”

Capitalizing on Fear

Boucher said she didn’t believe people in town wanted to see it destroyed, though it could have at least some advantages.

“It could conceivably just be more land that could be used for activities for [Ambler Farm], and it would solve some of the liability issues for that old building,” Boucher said, “but I think [the] negative response … That would be politically not a good thing to do, from my perspective.”

She said she has talked to many people who want to see the building saved.

While Rutishauser declared that there was “little interest” among WCPC members to demolish and “grass over” the Yellow House, he said the threat of it could also be used as a way to “prod people” into giving money to renovate it.

“Maybe that using the, ‘If we can’t raise funds, then we will have to dot-dot-dot,’ may be a good way to kind of prod people into opening their wallets and purses to contribute,” Rutishauser said.

“Certainly that is a very good argument to be made, sure,” Boucher said.

Rutishauser called demolition a last resort.

“Demolish-and-grass-over is last resort,” he said, “and that is if we can’t either get third party private capital and/or town capital, then it ends up basically staying as is and nature’ll take its course.”

Fusco, meanwhile, chastised the town for its poor stewardship of the property.

“It’s very disturbing to me as a resident here and with my passion for historic preservation, that we allow these things to happen,” she said.

“We’re terrible stewards,” Fusco said. “Not only that, but we have the ability to do something about it. This should be a nonnegotiable.”

“Let’s move forward and find a way to pay for it,” she said.

Editor’s note: two mistakes were corrected after publication: a reference to “old house” in a quote from Ashley Kineon was corrected to “Yellow House” and the spelling of Patti Temple’s name was corrected.

The article was also updated a second time to add a paragraph that had been omitted during the editing process regarding $390,000 in rent that was paid by FOAF for use of the Yellow House from 2007-2021.