Amended Reservoir Farm lease heads to Bridgeport City Council
BRIDGEPORT — Two significant changes to a proposed lease renewal with the city have the operators of the Reservoir Avenue Community Farm feeling more positive about its future heading into the 2022 growing season and beyond.
“It came out of a place of goodwill, which is great,” Eleanor Angerame, executive director of Green Village Initiative, said Friday.
Angerame was referring to a couple of lease amendments members of the City Council’s contracts committee passed Thursday that are expected to be approved by the full legislative body at its Monday meeting.
The community farm has operated on 1.5 acres of public land at Reservoir Avenue and Yaremich Drive in the North End for a decade. With the attraction’s lease up at the end of the month, Mayor Joe Ganim’s administration — which inherited the farm from predecessor Mayor Bill Finch — proposed a new, five-year pact.
But local City Council members have also been pressuring Ganim to keep a campaign promise to build a library at that site. And while City Hall and the library board have made it clear their goal is for that new building and the farm to co-exist, the draft lease renewal made no such commitment to Green Village Initiative.
Neither, technically, does the document passed out of the contracts committee Thursday. However, Angerame and others noted, council members did remove what they found to be troubling language allowing the city to maintain development rights for purposes other than a library.
“The way it was worded it could be purchased by anybody and built on by anybody,” Councilwoman Jeanette Herron, a contracts co-chairperson, said Friday. “We took that out and said the only entity that could be built on there could be the library.”
“I think what it guarantees is that the farm and library will be working in partnership on this land and it has been re-framed to make that into a safer partnership that doesn’t include any other developers being able to enter that conversation for the term of the lease,” Angerame said. “Which really, when it comes down to it, is a huge relief. Both of us are nonprofits that really want to do service to the community. And it’s traditionally so difficult for us to work against deep pockets of for-profit developers.”
Another contracts committee member, Councilman Jorge Cruz, said, “We just wanted to make sure no other development other than a library be placed there.”
The contracts committee also gave the farm more time to relocate should, in the worst case scenario, things not work out and the city end the deal. Under that circumstance City Hall would have to notify the farm not one year in advance, as originally stated, but give two years notice to vacate the premises.
Though a popular local attraction for those who want to grow or just buy fresh produce, some neighborhood leaders in recent years have criticized the farm as a poor use of valuable public land and demanded a library go there.
Then in 2020 the council set aside $2 million in the municipal five-year capital plan — the budget for large infrastructure projects — for a “new North End/Reservoir Avenue library branch.”
That resulted in some tension, with Angerame at this time last year confronting council members about what she considered to be behind-the-scenes maneuvering.
“We were alarmed to discover plans already in place ... to convert the urban farm site and green space into a public library,” Angerame had said. “We seek more open and transparent communications from you.”
That eventually occurred thanks in part to the city’s library board, which ultimately has responsibility for planning and funding its new library facilities. And by last fall the sides had agreed on a tentative plan for the farm and a library to share the land.
“That’s the library’s position,” Jim O’Donnell, the library board’s chairman, said last October. “I attended an informative session the farm had put together back in late September and they had some rough ideas how the property might be used. It would be a shame for them to lose all the good work they do there when I think we can work hand-in-glove together.”
The two councilwomen who represent the neighborhood and have been lobbying for a library — Rev. Mary McBride-Lee and Rosalina Roman-Christy — could not immediately be reached Friday for comment.
Angerame said she would be very content to see the full council pass the proposed lease on Monday.
Meanwhile she and other members of Green Village Initiative are readying this year’s seedlings indoors for planting at the farm. The site will again open to volunteers the first weekend in April through October, Angerame said.
“Every single Saturday, people can come to the farm between 10 a.m. and 2 p.m. and just pop in and volunteer or schedule time to bring a field trip of kids, a family picnic,” she said. “Every time the gate is open, we’re open for everybody in and outside of Bridgeport to learn about agriculture and food justice.”