Theme parks wanted

Since the very beginning of development of Foxwoods Resort Casino, the rural little town of North Stonington aggressively practiced a strategy that planning officials might have deemed containment.

The town, which, like the two other towns adjacent to the Mashantucket Pequot reservation, had no control over the enormous resort growing topsy-turvy on its border, chose essentially to ignore rather than engage.

North Stonington might have tried to capitalize from the beginning on the newly energized Route 2 and allowed new commercial development to take advantage of the spike in traffic.

Instead, from a planning perspective, the town chose disengagement, declining to make the zoning changes that would have flipped much of the Route 2 corridor from residential to commercial. What was already commercial stayed that way.

The result is the strange approach today to Foxwoods, which rises out of the rural landscape of North Stonington like Oz, with little preamble for approaching visitors in the way of strip malls, hotels and burger joints.

Curiously, this resolve, to ignore and isolate the resort development, is being reconsidered at a time when the future of Foxwoods is more uncertain than ever, likely to see sharp declines in attendance as new casinos open in Massachusetts.

Mohegan Sun, too, is bracing for this sea change, as fewer gamblers find their way to the remote destination resort near Montville, playing closer to home instead.

The Mohegans have sketched out a strategy for this eventuality, hoping to bring in new attractions at the nearby Norwich Hospital property in Preston, which might draw tourists who also would visit the casino and gamble.

The underlying premise of this strategy is to find other developers willing to invest in and build these attractions, resort amenities, theme parks and amusements, without significant investment by the tribe.

The Pequots succeeded in this strategy in enticing a developer to build an outlet mall on their property, leveraging the land and proximity to the casino without actually building the attraction.

Now North Stonington, with an eye toward reinventing the Route 2 corridor with development related to Foxwoods, could put the two tribes in more direct competition than ever, this time more for well-financed resort developers rather than slot machine players. I wish them luck with that. I always admired North Stonington’s preservation-minded, stiff-upper-lip approach to Foxwoods: You do what you can, we’re not changing.

I understand that the new thinking — to allow general kinds of resort development on large tracts — still would not create the kind of strip development and obvious commercialization you might think of as highway clutter.

It does make you wonder, though, what happens to the remaining residential property, which the containment strategy devalued over the years as Route 2 became a major thoroughfare.

It is also interesting that the town would have this change of philosophy toward Route 2 zoning, at a time when the number of total visitors to Foxwoods is about to plummet.

In any case, whether or not North Stonington decides to get into the resort destination development game, it looks like the two tribes might both be looking for the next big indoor surf beach or simulated ski resort that might put more bodies in front of their slot machines.

The Pequots still own a lot of land around North Stonington, beyond the reservation, that might be suitable, with the town willing, for this kind of development.

Or maybe this is about to be the bitter end of the growth curve for Foxwoods and Mohegan Sun, and no amount of traffic-generating theme park developments is likely to save them here.

In that case, North Stonington may be very late to the game.