MYSTERY BUYER SPENDS $9M TO PROTECT LAKE
Girl Scouts make deal to sell 90-acre Candlewood Lake site
In recent years, Subway co-founder Peter Buck, one of Connecticut’s billionaires, bought vast tracts of Maine forest for preservation as timberland.
Those acquisitions might help solve a mystery closer to home:
In the final few months of his life, did Buck’s fortune underwrite the purchase of wooded shoreline on Connecticut’s largest lake, with the goal of conservation?
His namesake foundation is not saying. But its executive director confirmed that preservation was the goal for one of Connecticut’s largest real estate purchases of 2021.
The Girl Scouts of Connecticut quietly found a buyer last September for its Camp Candlewood grounds in New Fairfield, accepting $9 million for the 90-acre property. The camp includes 2,000 feet of frontage on Candlewood Lake, across from a peninsula with an extended stretch of undeveloped waterfront.
In listing the property last May, a broker with William Pitt Sotheby’s International Realty confirmed that developers had expressed interest in carving up the property for luxury homes.
Prices have skyrocketed. In June, a lakeside house on Sail Harbour Drive north of Camp Candlewood sold for $4.3 million, triple the value of the town’s 2019 appraisal of the property, the most recent posted online.
The Camp Candlewood land went to a limitedliability company managed by Ben Benoit, president of The PCW Management Center in Mystic, which stewards the assets of family foundations including the Peter and Carmen Lucia Buck Foundation.
Benoit does double duty as executive director of the PCLB Foundation, as the Buck trust is known, which over the years has made land conservation a prominent part of its mission along with health care, summer camps and more recently, charter schools.
Across the two latest fiscal years for which it has posted annual reports, the PCLB Foundation granted the Girl Scouts of Connecticut $200,000 with similar amounts going to other scouting organizations in Connecticut and New York. The Girl Scouts had run Camp Candlewood since 1959, before closing at the outset of the COVID-19 pandemic and electing to capitalize on the value of the property.
Reached Friday, Benoit would not say whether the Buck family was behind the purchase. But he gave a hint: The PCLB Foundation’s board had a meeting at Camp Candlewood after the sale of the property.
Whomever the buyers, Benoit confirmed the intent was to prevent any future large-scale development on the peninsula that juts southward in the lake to Spear Point. He did not rule out the possibility of the new owners reintroducing a summer camp at the site down the road.
“There was some concern about development on the property,” Benoit said. “We are simply maintaining it and we are assessing what we might do — but right now it’s really about land conservation on the lake.”
Peter Buck died in November at age 90, having lived the majority of his life in Danbury where he became a billionaire through his founding investment in the company that would become Subway under the leadership of Fred DeLuca, who died in 2015.
As of last June, assets totaled $686 million for the PCLB Foundation that Peter Buck created with his spouse Carmen Lucia who died in 2003. That would rank among the five largest family foundations in Connecticut, though the PCLB Foundation lists a New York City office as its headquarters.
The Bucks’ philanthropy extended to Danbury
“Real estate — they’re not making any more of it. What people don’t realize about some of the large tracts of land that are around here is that they are open space right now, but they are not preserved in perpetuity.”
Cheryl Rykowski, Candlewood Valley Regional Land Trust president
Hospital where the couple helped underwrite the cost of a new tower for patient care. This past January, the PCLB Foundation awarded $3.5 million to a hospital in the Moosehead Lake region of Maine’s back country, which Benoit said was “a special place” for Buck in comments
accompanying a press release at the time. Buck grew up on a farm in southern Maine.
The PCLB Foundation’s conservation funding has extended to Connecticut and New York, including to a predecessor trust to the Northwest Connecticut Land Conservancy in Kent; and the Hudson Highlands Land Trust in New York, which focuses on preservation in Putnam County west of Danbury.
Candlewood Lake is busy throughout the summer with boaters, with homes crowding sections of its shore. The head of the Candlewood Valley Regional Land Trust said developers remain interested in lakefront property, including through “tear-downs” of individual houses and cottages to make way for larger structures.
“Real estate — they’re not making any more of it,” said
Cheryl Rykowski, president of the Candlewood Valley Regional Land Trust, whose activities span Danbury and New Fairfield. “What people don’t realize about some of the large tracts of land that are around here is that they are open space right now, but they are not preserved in perpetuity.”