Nine months after the town’s entire Affordable Housing Committee resigned, the Board of Selectmen is contemplating appointing a new one — maybe.
“We don’t have an Affordable Housing Committee right now,” First Selectman Rudy Marconi said Monday, May 11. “And I need to find out from the Board of Selectmen whether they feel it is important to reconstitute it, and ask for volunteers to come forward.”
At the selectmen’s May 6 meeting, ambivalence about the Affordable Housing Committee was evident.
“They’re just advisory to our board. We can just let it lapse,” Selectman Andy Bodner said.
The previous committee had resigned en masse last August after the selectmen decided to put the 10-acre multifamily-zoned former Schlumberger parcel out to bid without requiring an affordable component.
Former Chairman Dave Goldenberg, who was the first to resign, said at the time that the gesture was made not from anger but from disappointment.
The bid that was eventually accepted for the Schlumberger site — a $4.2-million sale to Charter Group Partners — won voters’ support on the basis of a plan to build “coach homes” expected to start selling at about $450,000.
That’s a price range many Ridgefielders said would be “affordable” for downsizing retirees in town.
The selectmen aren’t alone in remembering that as voters’ dominant outlook during that debate.
“When looking at Schlumberger, what we heard there, people wanted ‘affordable housing’ — someone came up with ‘in the $450,000 range’ — that someone can downsize to,” Housing Authority chairman Bob Hebert said at an April 28 meeting with the Planning and Zoning Commission.
“Affordable housing within the context of the town of Ridgefield,” said Planning and Zoning Commission member John Katz. “The $450,000 — that’s what we heard time after time.
“When they use the word ‘affordable,’ that’s what they mean.”
The selectmen are taking a slow and cautious approach to relaunching the Affordable Housing Committee.
“I viewed the Affordable Housing Committee as what it should have been, as providing the Board of Selectmen with advice,” Bodner said.
“I didn’t view it was an advocacy group, which is what it turned into.”
The selectmen decided they will first review, and perhaps revise, the “charge” that describes the committee’s mission.
“If we’re going to reconstitute it at all,” Bodner said, “the charge needs to be very clear.”
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