Like most people, I can point to very few concrete ways in which I’ve made a big difference, but by dint of my political activities I can claim a few. I’ve often joked that my gravestone will identify me as the man who kept baseball out of Groton, because I was instrumental, both in public and behind the scene, in preserving the Copp property as open space after Glenn Carberry fixed on it as a possible location for a minor league team. Besides being vocal in public, I provided a private legal opinion to one of the Copp Board members to counter the bogus opinion the town got saying it would be legal to use that property, which was restricted by deed for certain purposes, for a profit making enterprise such as a baseball team.
The team went to Norwich, which City today is struggling with the inevitable headaches associated with the constant demands from athletic teams for more and more state and municipal subsidies. When the Navigators (remember them?) promised to come, in doing so they were giving the back of their hand to Albany. Turnabout being fair play, they abandoned us for greener fields as soon as it suited their purposes, and we had to trade our Yankees farm team for one affiliated with the – sorry, I can’t remember. No one goes to the games anymore, the stadium is deteriorating, there’s no money to fix it because the team isn’t paying rent and Glenn Carberry (remember Glenn?) is making excuses for them. All of this was perfectly predictable, and it’s a credit to Groton that so many of its citizens (although not its politicians) wanted to have nothing to do with the team. Because of citizen support, the Copp Board resisted the politician’s pressure to hand over the property, which some of those politicians still resent, the lessons of the past few years notwithstanding.
The way these teams operate reminds me of something else I actually helped accomplish-heading off a tax break Mark Wolman wanted for a proposed office building, in which he intended to rent space to a tenant he intended to entice away from from a tax-paying Groton landlord. When he appeared before us (during my brief town council stint) with his hand out, he told us he wanted to build this great new office building, and he was asking us to “share the risk” with him by cutting his taxes. Now, in the world of private enterprise when you share the risk you also share the profits, but not so when a municipality shares the risk. If there are profits made they go unshared. Losses like those in Norwich? Those get shared, or transferred in bulk to the town.
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