It took longer and cost more than its buyers would have liked, but now it looks like Deer Lake Boy Scout Reservation in Killingworth, a scenic 255-acre forest that one environmentalist called an “amazing geological wonder,” will stay open . space and protected from development.
The Connecticut Yankee Council of Boy Scouts, which owns the land, is in the final stages of negotiations to sell the land for $4.75 million to Pathfinders, Inc., a local nonprofit that runs programs camping at Deer Lake for many years under a lease. agreement with the scouts.
“We think we’re very close,” said Ted Langevin, president of Pathfinders. The Scouts had no comment, but in a July 25 lawsuit about the property, attorneys for the Scouts said the “contract for the sale of the Deer Lake property to the Pathfinders is nearing completion.”
The lawsuit, which involved a bird sanctuary on the land, could have stalled the sale, but was settled on Monday and dropped.
If the sale goes ahead as expected, Pathfinders plans to continue its camping programs and otherwise protect the land from development, Langevin said.
The sale would put an end to a months-long controversy that has swept the country attention and gained considerable support for the preservation of the property. The “Save Deer Lake” Facebook page has attracted nearly 2,300 followers and more than 1,300 donors have contributed money to preserve the site.
“They want him saved,” Langevin said.
Best offer
To preserve the open space, Pathfinders had to overcome a bid that looked for a moment as if it would carry the day. In the spring, the Connecticut Yankee Council of Scouts announced it was selling the land for $4.62 million to a major real estate developer, Margaret Streicker, who is also a member of the council’s board.
This caused considerable backlash. Conservationists were outraged that a supposedly conservation-oriented nonprofit would sell open space to a developer. David Stephenson of Madison filed a lawsuit to protect a bird sanctuary on the property.
Attorney General William Tong’s office launched an investigation into the nascent deal, focusing on conflict of interest and charitable fundraising statutes.
Pathfinders started a “Save Deer Lake” campaign in hopes of raising enough money to beat Streicker’s bid. They have, and Streicker said in a phone interview last month that he would not increase his offer.
A 255 acre Deer Lake scene in Killingworth that is for sale. Christopher Guerette / Courtesy of Hearst Connecticut Media
Double challenges
For the Council, which represents Scouts in New Haven, Fairfield and part of Hartford counties, the sale of Deer Lake helps solve one of two major challenges facing the organization.
On the one hand, he had more land and camps than he needed, because the number of members had decreased significantly. While he wouldn’t comment on this story, Council CEO Mark Krauss told one interviewer in January that when the council was formed from the merger of two previous councils 21 years ago, there were more than 20,000 active Scouts, but that the number had dropped to more than 5,000 by the end of the last decade.
This reflects a national trend: The Associated Press reported that national Boy Scout membership has dropped from more than 4 million in the 1970s to well under 1 million today (Girl Scout membership has also hastily downloaded).
At the time, the council owned four main camps, a smaller camp, an office building in Milford and various random and mostly undeveloped properties that had been given to them over the years. Krauss told the interviewer that the camps were expensive to run and the city could get away with two of them.
The second issue, tangentially related to the first, was that the Boy Scouts of America (now rebranded as Scouts BSA) filed for bankruptcy protection in February 2020, facing thousands of claims of sexual abuse from former scouts . (The proposed settlement, $2.7 billion for about 82,000 claims, is making its way through the U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Delaware.) The 251 councils will have to shoulder part of the tax burden of the deal, which has led to a sell-off of stolen properties across the country.
Maintain Deer Lake
The Connecticut Yankee Council created a property and planning task force in 2020 to evaluate its properties and make recommendations both for right-sizing and to assess “potential liquidity and other options” that could be pursued in connection with bankruptcy .
The task force worked for several months and produced an 11-page report. He recommended that the council unload the small properties and give the Milford and Camp Pomperaug office building to Union, which is a considerable distance from the council boundaries. As for Deer Lake, the task force recommended that “operations continue as is” and that a five-year plan be developed for the property. In other words, don’t sell it. The council’s board of directors accepted the report.
So it came as a surprise to task force members last fall when Deer Lake suddenly hit the market.
“I was shocked,” said a member of the task force who asked not to be named.
It’s unclear how or why board leadership overruled the task force’s recommendation, though a source said the board authorized the board’s leadership team to take the action. None would comment; Krauss referred questions to a council spokesman who said council officials had agreed not to speak to the media while negotiations were ongoing. The spokesman asked not to be identified by name.
In any case, three potential Deer Lake buyers emerged. One was the nonprofit Trust for Public Land, which has helped protect more than 8,000 acres of open space in the state. The Trust appraised the property and offered $2.4 million earlier this year. The Trust’s effort was supported by the city, other conservation groups and the Pathfinders.
The offer was rejected when, seemingly out of nowhere, Striecker came in with the much higher bid of $4.62 million. She is a Connecticut resident who runs Fortitude Capital LLC, a real estate investment firm based in New York. She unsuccessfully challenged Rep. Rosa DeLauro for the state’s 3rd Congressional District seat in 2020.
Streicker said she was initially looking for another Scout property, but was asked if she was interested in Deer Lake. She was.
The policy of the Trust for Public Land is to pay no more than the appraised value of the land in its current condition. That’s also the open space acquisition policy of the state Department of Energy and Environmental Protection, Gov. Max Reiss said. But private investors don’t have that limitation, they can project what they think the land might be worth when developed and bid accordingly. Striecker said he did a “commercial appraisal” of the Deer Lake property to meet his $4.62 million offer.
The Council agreed to sell it, but gave the Pathfinders, who stepped in when the Trust’s offer was rejected, more time to match the offer. The board rejected a $4.3 million offer from Pathfinders in April, but negotiations continued. They are expected to settle on the $4.75 million deal.
To meet its obligation with the bankruptcy settlement, the council will sign Camp Pomperaug over to the national organization and pay the rest of its endowment, the spokesman said.
Bird Sanctuary
David Stephenson’s lawsuit, filed in Superior Court on April 25, claimed that in 1985, New Haven ornithologist and philanthropist Richard L. English donated money to the Connecticut Yankee Council to establish the Richard English Bird Sanctuary in Deer Lake and that council established the sanctuary. .
The lawsuit claimed that if the land were sold to a developer, there would be a “reasonable likelihood” the sanctuary would be “discontinued.” The lawsuit asked for legal protection of the land.
The council’s attorneys filed a counterclaim, claiming Stephenson’s lawsuit caused financial harm to the Scout organization and seeking compensatory damages from Stephenson.
Both the claim and the counterclaim have been published, according to Stephenson’s attorney, Keith R. Ainsworth, as well as a Scouts spokesman. Ainsworth said with the property going to Pathfinders instead of a developer, Stephenson believes his mission will be accomplished.
questions
He is not sure how the impending sale will affect Attorney General Tong’s investigation. His office declined to comment this week.
While the question may now be moot, it’s also unclear what Streicker intended to do with the land if she was the buyer. He had a meeting in the spring with Killingworth First Selectwoman Nancy Gorski, who said Streicker brought up the idea of affordable housing for the site.
Streicker said it wasn’t an actual proposal, but a statement of what the zoning allowed. The area is in the RR zone, which allows single-family housing. But a city zoning review said subdivision development at the site would be limited by a lack of access to much of the land.
Gorski also said the site is not close to jobs, transit or downtown and is therefore not optimal for affordable housing.
Streicker stressed that he did not have a plan for the property. He called the land a “jewel” and said his idea was to “do something good for the community and give the Boy Scouts the solvency and liquidity they need to continue fulfilling their mission.”
He said his involvement as a board member has been almost non-existent.
The earth
Few would disagree with Streicker’s positive characterization of the Deer Lake property. Consisting of forests, meadows, the long lake, and unusual rock formations such as cliffs and caves, caves are quite rare in Connecticut.
The Nature Conservancy of Connecticut has identified Deer Lake as part of a network of ecosystems and landscapes that are a “high priority for preservation,” said Shelley Green, the group’s director of conservation programs.
These forested areas help clean air and water, store carbon in plants and soil, protect communities from extreme storms and floods, and provide “refuges, migration corridors, or resilient habitats for plants and animals that they adapt to a warming world,” he said. “Protecting these resilient lands is key to a future where people and nature thrive.”
As the US Environmental Protection Agency and others have pointed out, fragmentation, breaking into small pieces, is a constant threat in the forests of the eastern United States One of Deer Lake’s advantages is that it is part of a major forest region that includes Chatfield Hollow State Park and the 17,000-acre Cockaponset State Forest.
That streak is getting bigger. The state just awarded the Madison Land Conservation Trust a $585,000 grant to buy a 30-acre tract of land called Birch Branch Meadow, which is in the nearby town and, like much of Deer Lake, in the watershed of Hammonasset river. In addition to the forests to the north, the state has a “large area of greenway,” said Ben Diebold, president of the Madison trust.
Langevin said if Pathfinders acquires the property, it will honor Stephenson’s wish to preserve the bird sanctuary.
This report was made possible, in part, by the generous support of Robert W. Fiondella and the Fiondella Family Trust.