LETTER: `The bloom is off the rose regarding our love affair with Franklin'

To the Editor:

A recent letter to the editor cited our town administrator’s comment about Franklin being “at the crossroads.” It is more like being “in the crosshairs.”

My wife and I recently returned from an eleven-day trip abroad, only to discover per registered letter and a postcard, that our beautiful backyard forest view was about to be taken away from us.

It had already been compromised once but now, due to the ambitions of an out-of-town owner and a developer, it appears that nearly all of it will be replaced by twenty-nine units of housing.

The registered letter and the post card had different dates for meetings (January 23rd and January 30th), so I called one of the entities for clarification. Imagine my surprise to find out that there was a Town Planning Board meeting that very night (January 13 th) on that very same proposed project! Legally, it was above board; notice of the proposal had been published the bare minimum of times in a newspaper (Milford Daily News) that few people read. Morally, however, introduced within such a limited timeframe, it assumed a less-than-honest profile.

From my perspective, a “fast one” was being pulled. I also noticed after I had called, that the same notice was published in the Franklin Observer on that same morning (the 13 th).

We used to love this town. We moved here in 2001, attracted by moderate property value commuter rail, the Zeotrope theater (long gone), Dean College, and a reasonable cultural sense, among other things.

Unfortunately the bloom is off the rose regarding our love affair with Franklin. Now we stay because our son lives here—and, because of advancing age, we don’t really want to move.

Last year, a tax override, which would have helped the schools, was defeated. Upon reading comments from people about this, one in particular (which I did not write) sticks out: “Stop the Building.” In recent years no fewer than eight building projects have gone up (or will go up soon). These compromise the character of Franklin, either because of size, location or both: Westerly Apartments, the subdivision off Pond St., proposed Eaton Place expansion, bus barn apartment complex where Franklin Lumber used to be, the Central Street “cubes,” the in- progress structure on Central Street with its steel skeleton too close to the street, and the enormous complex next to Big Y that blocks a Central St. access to the Franklin Town Forest.

Others could be added: a municipal building nowhere close to the center of town, etc.

All of this appears to be the courtesy of the town’s Planning Board. Do all members of the board have the town’s best interests at heart? Does our Town Administrator? Don’t they realize that in their eagerness to (a) citify Franklin and (b) make it easy for commercial landowners to make a profit that they are contributing to a deterioration of the quality of life? Do they care? The resultant traffic ties-ups, diminished countryside, and strain on the water system do not “insure domestic tranquility.”

In 2007 I was in Romania and saw firsthand how their communist dictator Nicolae Ceausescu had destroyed downtown Bucharest by razing existing structures and erecting, block after block, ugly six-story apartment buildings. The artist conception drawings of Needham published in the January 15th edition of the Franklin Observer, although not quite as severe, brought to mind the plight of the Romanian populace.

How many Franklin residents realize what is happening, that their town, once deemed the “safest city in America,” is quickly slipping away? Is it too late?

[Name withheld upon request.]