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Will Suffer for It

First Selectman Matt Hoey spent the past 10 months working behind closed doors to fast-track a methadone clinic on Boston Post Road in Guilford that will serve over 500 drug addicts from New Haven to New London. He didn’t think it was important enough to bring the citizens of Guilford into such a critical conversation. In an APT Foundation-sponsored podcast in December, when asked who the “stakeholders” in the process were, Hoey cited the APT Foundation and the town’s land use regulatory bodies, including representatives of building, health, environmental, engineering, and planning and zoning. He failed to mention the most important stakeholders—the 22,000 residents of Guilford who, according to Merriam-Webster, “are involved in or affected by a course of action.” Whoops!

This is not a question of whether drug addicts deserve treatment. It’s about an appropriate location for such clinics, about community safety, and the process by which a community—not an individual—makes such a determination. The three existing clinics in New Haven and adjacent towns are in industrial zones, two of them following protests by local residents. APT Foundation CEO Lynn Madden didn’t learn her lesson. She selected a Guilford site because it offered an easy target in a loosely defined PRB-3 zone that she knew didn’t require public meetings or Planning and Zoning Commission approval. I call that callous indifference to the people of Guilford.

The fault for this fiasco falls squarely in the lap of Hoey, who should have stopped the project in its tracks in March 2023. He should have insisted on an industrial zone, conducted due diligence impact studies regarding crime, traffic, environment, police and fire, and property values, and conducted a background check on the applicants. He did none of those things, and the citizens of Guilford will suffer for it.