It really doesn't matter who's right on this, because we'll discuss the proposal for another twenty years and then let it die.

“If I owned Texas and Hell, I’d rent out Texas and live in Hell” — Philip Sheridan

Freddie Camillo and the First Selectman’s Advisory Committee want to get the town’s Board of Education department out of the Havemeyer Building, lease Havemeyer, and move the Board down to Railroad Avenue, and already the opposition is forming.

The building’s a wreck, and has been for decades, so Camillo, Andy Duus and other Committee members have a strong argument here, but that’s not the way Greenwich operates. Those with a long memory will remember the decades we spent arguing about a parking garage on or near Greenwich Avenue, without result. When Richards was moving across the street and building its new flagship building, for instance, the town was offered a chance to build, at very little cost, two floors of municipal parking beneath it. We dithered, we lost.

Back in 1954, the real estate agent who helped my parents find a house assured them that my sister Lorin would graduate from the new high school soon to be built. The town broke into several camps: we need one new school; we need two; we don’t need a new one at all, we can just dust off the blackboard at the old one. It took a decade before we decided on one new school, and another decade to decide on where to build it before we finally compromised on the worst possible site, a swamp on Field Point Road. The high school graduated its first class in 1971.

So don’t worry, Jim Finn and others who demand to know, “what’s the urgency?” — there is none. You can relax.

(The Greenwich Historical Society provides an interesting history of the building here.)