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To the Editor:
The members of Town Council were unfair to the tax payers of West Hartford by offering to buy the UConn property without a public hearing. Sure $1,000,000 sounds cheep for 58 acres, but you never asked the the tax payers or experts who have experience rehabilitating contaminated property in West Hartford to help you. If the Town purchases this property, I believe you have no estimate of the cost of preparing it for further use.
The property would have to be fenced in to protected it from being vandalized, from vagrants occupying the empty buildings and from citizens getting near PCB’s and asbestos. A police presents would be needed twenty four hours a day.
Some of the problems are known of the west side of the property, but the possible contamination of the east side parking lot is unknown. Thousands of cars, trucks, buses, construction equipment have been parking and stored there for more than fifty years. If each one of those vehicles just dropped a tablespoon of hydrocarbons on the black top each day, the lot is contaminated. Storm water is washing this contamination in to the water course which is 100 feet from more than one half the lot. The DEEP would require storm water drains and a retention structure if there a new owner of the property. A fence and police patrol would be needed.
I believe more problems would be reviled at a public hearing. I urge the Town Council to drop the purchase like a contaminated hot potato.
