GREENWICH — When Rob Burton Jr. goes to Greenwich High School’s Cardinal Stadium, it feels like stepping into a time machine and whooshing back 25 years.
When Burton played football at Greenwich High in the early 1990s, the stadium’s field, now turfed, was grass. But the stands where his friends and family cheered are exactly the same. The press box that announced Cardinal touchdowns is the same.
The lights that illuminate Cardinal Stadium are also frozen in time. They were installed in 2003, after Burton graduated from Greenwich High, largely thanks to funds donated by Burton’s father, Rob Burton Sr.
The fight to put those lights up lasted more than three years and often pitted parents of athletes, school neighbors and town departments against each other. It resulted in a court battle and a compromise that limits the use of the lights — a compromise that now has some sports teams practicing in the dark.
Articulated in a 2003 court agreement between the town and Greenwich High School neighbor Bill Effros, the compromise could result in a new fight soon, as a new generation of sports parents argues more light usage is needed given the high school’s switch to later start and dismissal times this year.
The Board of Education voted on Nov. 14 to authorize litigation to try to renegotiate that agreement, which limits Cardinal Stadium light usage to 16 times per year. If the Board of Selectmen gives the litigation its OK, the town and Effros could be headed back to court — to reopen a compromise that today, nearly 15 years later, has many scratching their heads wondering how the town agreed to it in the first place.
Keeping up
Where this story starts is murky.
Effros, a 75-year-old Old Church Road resident whose bedroom window looks out over Cardinal Stadium, claims the roots of the 2003 settlement reach back to the 1960s, to an “Ironclad Agreement” the town reached with neighbors when the school opened in the leafy neighborhood off East Putnam Avenue in 1970.
“Our neighborhood was given an ‘Ironclad Agreement’ by the Board of Education,” said Effros, in an email. “In it, BOE stated the Agreement would be honored in perpetuity. To allay neighborhood concerns, and make it ‘official,’ BOE inserted into the public record a stipulation that the school and playing fields could be used only in the daytime.”
Effros would not produce a copy of the “Ironclad Agreement.” He said it was attached to GHS site plans dating back to 1966; Greenwich Time examined every site plan for the school on record at the Planning and Zoning offices in Town Hall but found no reference to an agreement. No other Greenwich High School document on record at Planning and Zoning or the Town Clerk’s office mention an agreement. No source interviewed by Greenwich Time, including current and former town officials and GHS neighbors, said they had ever seen the document.
Effros and several other neighbors suggested the town might have purposefully lost or destroyed the document.
“We don’t have it. We have looked for it. We would be delighted to see it," said Wayne Fox, town attorney. “It makes no sense for us to try to hide it.”
Ironclad Agreement or not, the issue of lights at Cardinal Stadium heated up in the late 1990s. A collection of football parents and school supporters from the Greenwich High School Sports Foundation were eager to revamp the aging Cardinal Stadium and add more practice fields behind the school.
Other Fairfield County towns like Stamford and Trumbull had lighted athletics fields and the Connecticut Interscholastic Athletic Conference had passed a rule requiring sites hosting playoff football games to have lights, according to conference officials. The sports foundation also wanted to add turf to the stadium field at the time, so the timing seemed right.
“At that time, more and more towns were getting lights,” said Burton. “I think the sense was when would Greenwich keep up with the Joneses?”
Parents raised more than $100,000, the lion’s share of the funds coming from Burton Sr., to buy lights for Cardinal Stadium.
“The BOE was 100 percent in support of installing the lights on the GHS field and, indeed, of most of the improvements that the Sports Foundation proposed,” remembered Sandra Waters, who served on the Board of Education from 1997 to 2005 and was chair in 2003.
Denied
In June 2000, the Board of Education submitted a municipal improvement application, a necessary first step for public construction projects, to the town Planning and Zoning Commission. School officials sought approval to add four, 90-foot light poles to Cardinal Stadium, according to court documents. In October 2000, Planning and Zoning rendered its decision: denied.
Commission members who opposed the application worried about light and noise spilling into surrounding neighborhoods, attracting large crowds to the stadium, traffic and parking. They questioned whether stadium lights were needed to provide “excellent athletics,” according to a 2000 letter from the Commission to former Superintendent of Schools Roger Lulow.
The Board of Education appealed that decision to the Representative Town Meeting, which, in December 2000, voted 106-to-74 to reverse the Planning and Zoning denial, forcing that board to reconsider, according to court documents and newspaper accounts.
In 2001, Effros filed his first action against the town in court, an appeal of the RTM’s support of the project.
He contended the lights would “have an adverse environmental impact upon the natural resources of the State by unreasonably polluting, impairing or destroying the public trust in air, water and other natural resources,” according to Planning and Zoning documents. Effros insisted the lights were too bright and shone into his home.
His was the loudest voice opposing lights at Cardinal Stadium, but he was not alone. Groups of neighbors attended public hearings and meetings with the school district to discuss the lights. Former First Selectman, and GHS neighbor on Old Church Road, Dick Bergstresser said he mediated a meeting between neighbors and the schools once in which both sides hashed out what they could and could not agree on, resulting in some of the language in the lighting limitations that exists today.
“The neighbors and the town worked very hard for a very long time — for years — to come to agreement about the use of the field and the lighting,” said Rob Searle, a former Old Church Road Association president.
Hindsight
Despite Effros’s appeal, nine months later, after hearing from students and parents who wanted the lights and from neighbors who did not, the RTM voted 126 to 70 to accept the lights as a gift.
In June 2002, the Planning and Zoning Commission finally gave its approval to the lights, now on poles 70 feet high, subject to a string of conditions. According to a memorandum describing the decision of the Commission, the lights had to be taken down during “non-playing seasons.” And the lights could only be used for 10 athletic matches per year, including state playoff games, and six practices, not lasting more than one hour. The limit had been proposed by the Board of Education as a concession to the neighbors.
“It was kind of a compromise between the high school and the neighbors,” said Peter Crumbine, who was selectman from 1999 to 2009. “Everybody was happy that we had lights and they didn’t focus on what would happen in the future.”
But concessions notwithstanding, Effros kept up his opposition. He followed his first appeal with two more court filings against Planning and Zoning, the Town and the Board of Education in 2002.
As the lights became closer to reality, pressure to put them up grew. Indeed more than 1,100 parents and students signed a petition arguing the lights should be installed.
“Although the town had a strong position, there was no clear outcome as to what was going to happen in the court and how long it could take,” said Rick Kral, a member of the Greenwich High School Sports Foundation. “There was a lot of pressure from the community to get the lights installed.”
Eventually, the town and Effros negotiated a settlement that resolved all three of Effros’ court actions. On July 22, 2003, the settlement was codified with a Stamford Superior Court stipulation and order of judgment.
According to the court order, the Board of Education agreed to follow all of the light restrictions set out by Planning and Zoning in 2002, regardless of any future changes in Greenwich light or noise standards or ordinances. They agreed professional engineers would ensure their compliance with rules about how much light could be emitted from the poles and compliance reports would be given to Effros.
Most important, the order states that if the town or Board of Education does not follow these rules, Effros can seek an order of contempt from the court. The settlement was agreed to by the Board of Education, Greenwich Public Schools, Town of Greenwich, Representative Town Meeting, Planning and Zoning Commission and Planning and Zoning Board of Appeals.
“The decision to agree with the restrictions on the number of nights the lights were used was viewed by everyone involved as a reasonable settlement just to get the lights installed,” Waters said. “The implication that the BOE should have fought harder to get the lights with no restrictions in 2003 is reading history with 20-20 hindsight.”
A continuing fight?
Since 2003, Effros has threatened to file a contempt motion against the town or Board of Education about light usage or other matters on several occasions. According to Town Attorney Fox, he has never gone through with it.
Effros, who was arrested in 2009 for trespassing on high school property while taking photos of the performing arts center construction, has many concerns about Greenwich High, from wetlands to field contamination to parking to undue expansion. While some see him as “extreme” in some of his methods, his views on lights and contamination are shared by many neighbors on Old Church and Hillside roads.
In a meeting between neighbors and the school district this fall, not attended by Effros, neighbors expressed outrage that the school district was examining long-term plans to replace Cardinal Stadium’s aging lighting with new LED lights. They described feeling consistently “steamrolled” by a school district that ignores them to pursue its own objectives.
“I, too, feel it is unfair for the kids to deal with a substandard field, and the people I talk to in the neighborhood feel the same way,” said Searle. “However, we, as a town, have a court order to deal with, and it is quite clear what it says, and it was signed by a number of departments in this town ... if the town had wanted something different than it agreed to, it could have continued to negotiate.”
But other parents and students are equally vocal that more light usage is needed and litigation should proceed.
“Don’t compromise like we did then,” said Toni Natale, who was involved the Greenwich High School Sports Foundation and the original push for lights, in November. “Get these lights done for the kids. Let it be safe.”
Current Superintendent of Schools Jill Gildea has been unequivocal that her students should not be forced to choose between holding practices in the dark or having their athletics cut short.
“I don’t understand why there is a moment’s hesitation,” she told the school board in November. “Whatever you do, you make the decisions to make the kids safe and that has to be the ultimate priority for this board and for everything we do. I can’t believe I am in Greenwich, Connecticut having to say that.”
Effros has vowed to fight any attempt by the town to modify the 2003 settlement. It is not known if and when the Board of Selectmen might vote on pursuing litigation, although there have been indications that the board is discussing the subject in executive sessions. The Board of Education discussed the potential litigation in executive session as recently as Thursday.
Several sources expressed doubts that litigation to overturn the settlement would succeed.
“Before we litigate, we really ought to sit down with everybody and discuss the issues,” said Bergstresser. He suggested more informal meetings between neighbors and the school with a mediator. “I think we can find reasonable compromises that would suit most everybody.”
“I am hopeful to find a solution going forward and not to re-litigate,” said Burton, who is now president of the Greenwich Athletic Foundation, a group that replaced the Greenwich High School Sports Foundation in athletic fundraising. “There are other locations in town that we believe could be potential options — not necessarily for the high school, but to have turf fields across this town that potentially are lit.”
emunson@greenwichtime.com; Twitter: @emiliemunson