Is it land banking or is it robbing the piggy bank?

A standard gag in the mid-1960s animated cartoon “Rocky and Bullwinkle” had Bullwinkle J. Moose dressed as a magician exclaiming, “Hey Rocky, wanna see me pull a rabbit out of my hat?” He would put his hand into the magician’s hat and pull out anything but a rabbit. Whatever he pulled out was always unexpected, and always frightening.

Town officials, and that includes Selectman Janet Wheeler, Carole Makary, and Steve Dungan, are using this old gag to try to pull a school building site out of the same magician’s hat, and this time it’s no gag. It will cost you $1,200,000.

Magicians never explain how their tricks are done, but I think I have this one figured out. In a town that is land rich, we find our three magicians standing next to a small table. On the table is a standard magician’s hat labeled “land bank.” First, Steve Dungan approaches the hat, places his hand inside, and pulls out a document labeled “Cushing land lawsuit.” Wow! That was scary. Back into the hat it goes. Selectman Dungan returns the hat to the table. Next, it’s Selectman Carole Makary’s turn. She walks to the table, thrusts her hand into the hat, and she pulls out the shreds of a document labeled “Question 2-- the Minuteman Property proposal.” Yikes! That plan was a nightmarish failure. It is quickly returned to the magic hat. Selectman Makary steps away from the table.

Next, stepping confidently to the table is Selectman Janet Wheeler. Demonstrating she has nothing up either sleeve, she places her hand into the hat and carefully retrieves a beautiful, gold embossed children’s book titled “Tales of the Snow Property.” Sadly for us, it’s a pop-up book, and when the taxpayer opens up the little book--up pops a brand new school.

By Jove, that was as an interesting sleight of hand. Houdini, himself, could not have done better. The latest proposal circulating through the corridors of the Town Building is a land bank initiative known as the Snow property. It seems the land bankers have located an 13 acre site off Old Bolton Road. Now, if you thought paying four million dollars for one hundred and thirty acres of land was an exorbitant price, then what do you call paying one million, two hundred thousand dollars for fourteen acres? Let me do the math. The Minuteman properties were less than thirty-one thousand dollars an acre. The Snow property is about ninety-two thousand dollars an acre—almost three times the price of the Minuteman properties. The Cushing land’s seventy acres, ringing into the cash register at seventeen thousand an acre seems like an absolute bargain. My, what a sweet deal the Snow property is. How can we pass up as good a deal as that?

My crystal ball might be a little cloudy, but the picture that is starting to develop. Land banking is a backdoor to a school site, even though it was discovered that 90% of the Snow property is in the water protection district. Parking lots are severely restricted, as is septic discharge. Well, since the town made the rules, I guess we can obtain variances to allow a school or other municipal building on the site. Maybe we can use it for conservation land. Gosh knows, (tongue-in-cheek) we don’t have enough land in conservation.

Many town officials will agree that we should buy land the town “can” use; however, buying land because it is a “nice” thing to do for the birds and the bees just does not make a lot sense. Land banking, as a concept, is good only if you have valuable pieces of land, el primo sites, and money in your pocket to buy them. We have no savings that we can invest in land, and borrowing money to buy land will eventually reduce the town’s ability to borrow money to the level of junk bonds. This town is addicted. It is addicted to overrides. We don’t have a tightwad virus in Stow, we are override addicts. At the rate we spend, we cannot live without overrides.

Heard around town: “What’s with these land bankers anyway? For some reason they act like overly excited little dogs who fall in love with the leg of any landowner who has more than ten or fifteen acres of land.”

© 2006 Jim Dunlap