Farmstand seeks apology
A local man whose farmstand has been at the center of a townwide dispute asked for an apology from the New Milford town council Tuesday night.
He didn’t quite get it.
After someone filed an anonymous complaint regarding the sale of meat and baked goods at the farmstand, the council discussed the issue at its meeting two weeks ago. Since the complaint was under review, some questioned why the council would talk about potential issues at that meeting, and Mayor Pete Bass said it was to address incorrect information surrounding the topic that had been circulating online. The Quaranta
family was not named during the discussion.
But this week, during public comment at the start of this Tuesday’s meeting, Joe Quaranta said he had asked the town for a “redaction” and had been in touch with the USDA, Department of Agriculture and the Department of Consumer Protection. Quaranta said “false information” had been shared during the last council meeting on Sept. 28 regarding the regulation of food products.
In the September meeting, Bass cited health regulations related to farmstands. Examples included that “meats and cheeses require an USDA inspection” and “[b]aked goods require a license,” according to town minutes.
At this week’s meeting, Quaranta said if meat was “cut and slaughtered at a licensed USDA facility and packaged at said facility with proper labeling” that it would be “free to move in commerce at any retail store” without additional licensing. He also said the Department of Consumer Protection wouldn’t require a bakery license for farm stands to sell baked goods, so long as the goods came from “a licensed manufacturer, and pre-packaged at the licensed facility.”
Despite not being specifically named, Quaranta said the discussion had made him feel “betrayed” by the town, and the last meeting had left his wife, Meredith Quaranta, in tears.
“We were painted as some sort of cookie monster, salami-slinging villains,” Quaranta said. “And that is the furthest thing from the truth.”
During this week’s meeting, Councilwoman Mary Jane Lundgren motioned for the mayor and council to formally apologize for the discussion from the last council meeting. It was “inappropriate and almost litigious,” she said.
“I think if we don’t resolve this, and we have the opportunity to resolve it tonight, the town could be facing litigation,” she said. “Do we want to incur more legal fees, or do we want to just say, let’s move on from this, let’s hope it never happens again, because it was inappropriate to have this all discussed out in public.”
Councilman Chris Cosgrove disputed the assertion that the conversation was inappropriate, saying the Quarantas were the ones who “made it public” by posting on Facebook about the issue and the council had the right to “set the record straight.” Ultimately, the apology was voted down.
Meredith Quaranta said the previous meeting’s discussion hadn’t set the record straight, though, referring to it as “the public 45 minutes of assumptions.”
When health director Michael Crespan visited the farm stand to get further information in response to the complaint, Quaranta posted about it on Facebook in a townwide page, referring to it as “trespassing.” When asked about their social media activity earlier in the meeting, Meredith Quaranta said they had wanted “full transparency” about the situation.
“This isn’t the first time that we, or our efforts, have been under attack by people that have an invested interest for some reason,” she said.
During the meeting, town attorney Randy DiBella said that a complaint being anonymous didn’t “immunize” it, and anonymous complaints were normal.
“The fact is, a complaint is a public document. Whether or not it’s anonymous, unfortunately if it’s anonymous, which they most are, they still have to be looked into,” DiBella said. “From what was explained to me, the town did everything by the book.”
A petition from the Quarantas urging the council to include farmstands in the right to farm ordinance — a provision aimed to “conserve and protect agricultural land and to encourage agricultural operations and the sale of local farm products within the Town,” according to the ordinance — has reached over 2,200 signatures as of Wednesday.