Editor’s Note: We received the following op-ed from George Frampton Jr., who co-owns12 and 19 Tantummaheag Rd. in Old Lyme, with his wife Carla Darista.
Old Lyme First Selectwoman Martha Shoemaker has now acknowledged in a published interview [with The Day] that she misrepresented the press release she issued Monday on the Town’s plans for Tantummaheag Landing as a decision discussed and voted upon by the Board of Selectmen. To the contrary, it was entirely her own doing since [she says] “as the CEO, I can ask the town attorney to do anything that I feel is right for the town.” And she also now reveals that the promised new “survey” will not be an actual or honest survey of the original 1701 right-of-way, but simply a re-embrace of the fraudulent 1931 survey that remains the sole basis for the Town’s claim that our back driveway has been a public highway for 320 years. This is laughable since the 1931 surveyor admitted in a signed memorandum that he moved the actual 1701 route onto our driveway to “give the town what it needed” in order to access the river, the original route (as he pointed out) having run over our neighbor’s property and been destroyed thirty years earlier by an ice-pond. Piling dissimulation onto fraud can’t erase the original fraud.
More central to the matter, Old Lyme’s two selectwomen continue to hide from the inconvenient truth: the 1701 right-of-way could not even be found by 1712 and was turned back over to the owner Richard Lord and replaced in 1713 in a deal the Town made with him to create a different right of way (which is now tracked largely by Tantummaheag Road) and which also never went across our property – – and on which public access rights would end at the owner’s death in 1727. This bargain, recorded in Town deeds, is indisputable and enforceable and must be honored by the Town.
This pair, however, have now apparently declared their plan to once again bulldoze our property just as they bulldozed the “peace agreement” their fellow-selectman Jim Lampos (an expert historian) and town counsel negotiated with us after a deep review of all the evidence, an agreement that seemed likely to lead to a long-term resolution. This “deny the facts and law, but bulldoze the property” strategy has failed miserably and is likely about to result in even more unfortunate consequences for the Town.
CEO Shoemaker seems intent on moving toward an inevitable endgame in which we have to close our property permanently to all public users including pedestrians, which we have the absolute right to do based on official Town records, and the dispute will then shift to federal court in New Haven where the Town and town officials as well as individual defendants who knowingly worked with the Town to threaten our safety, security, privacy and legal rights over the past three years work to resist the compensatory and punitive damages, attorney fees and injunctive relief to which well-established case decisions entitle us and which we will be seeking to prevent similar overreaching by Town government on our private property and the property of others in the future.
The CEO may be able to do “anything that I feel is right for the Town,” but is the bulldozer approach really what is in the Town’s long-term best interests?