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Previous Coverage: Can We Talk (About Toll Brothers?)

Dolington: Historic Village vs. McMansion Development

This battle has been focused on a proposed national veterans cemetery adjacent to the village and a Toll Brothers development that threatens to spoil one of the last rural, historic villages in Bucks County.

It also exemplifies the heavy handed tactics of a developer which will use its overwhelming resources to bully its way into new markets.

On Veterans Day 2003, President Bush approved a new national veterans cemetery for southeastern Pennsylvania. The Veterans Administration (VA) expressed interest in a parcel of land owned by Toll Brothers and known as the White tract based off of its scenic beauty and proximity to historic Washington’s Crossing. The veterans cemetery project gained favor in the community because of its patriotic appeal and its promise to preserve open space.

Toll’s plans for the White tract had been under contention for years. Toll Brothers had been fighting with township officials to build almost 300 houses on the tract, and earlier, going back to about 1995, it proposed 1200 houses. The latter plan had gone through the entire chain of government bodies and courts, from township zoning board to the state Supreme Court, and was denied at each level.

At first Toll demanded $25 million for the entire tract which raised angry questions in the community about the high figure. (Community member Robert Ciervo wrote an opinion piece for the Bucks County Courier Times [9/24/04] titled, “For whom gross profit tolls: developer a poor partner.”)

When, by the end of 2004, it appeared the cemetery deal would fall through, the community rallied behind then, Bucks County’s Military and Veterans Affairs director Mike Fraley bringing Toll Brothers back to the table. This resulted in a tentative agreement that Toll would sell 200 acres of the White tract for $7 million. On Jan. 8 of 2006, the VA formally announced its choice of Dolington for the new cemetery site.

However, by March of this year it became clear that Toll Brothers would use its resources to leverage much larger concessions. With accusations of back-room dealing Toll Brothers demanded “density concessions” (more houses than current zoning permits) to be part of the cemetery land deal, so that the developer could put 235 houses on a combination of the remaining 100+ acres of the White tract, plus an adjoining 94 acres which Toll planned to purchase with funds from the sale of the cemetery land.

Toll's local attorney Edward Murphy said, in the defiant tone that seems to typify statements by Toll affiliates, “There is absolutely linkage . . .;” in other words, no cemetery land without higher-density development that the community has always opposed.

It seems an obvious pressure technique; in this case to imply that the cemetery deal could be off, and also to strain the resources of local governments. This is obviously a key technique for the Toll organization, which has vastly greater resources than the small local governments which it attempts to bludgeon into submission. In any case, the title of a Courier Times piece about the situation seemed to sum it up well: “Toll’s squeeze play.”

Unity among Dolington residents began to crack, with some opposed to a zoning change and others supporting it because they feared that if Toll did not get the concessions, the cemetery deal would be off and they might be faced with one of the developer’s more egregious plans. Veterans groups were supporting the deal with Toll because the cemetery was, naturally, foremost in their minds. The situation became increasingly complicated because the second parcel (known as the Melsky tract) of land that Toll had involved in its proposals was part of 134 acres that actually belongs to the Council Rock School District, and lies partly in adjacent Newtown Township. Many in the community pointed out that the taxpayers had actually purchased this land; it made no sense for the school district to sell land for development which would bring in many new students and could necessitate construction of a new school.

Worth mentioning here—a Courier Times guest editorial from June 26 noted that two Upper Makefield Township supervisors and the Township solicitor flew to Washington on a private jet arranged by Toll Brothers, and in Washington they were chauffeured to and from meetings about the VA cemetery project. The author of the editorial, Gene Epstein, felt that this indicated corruption.

Meanwhile, there is the village of Dolington. Despite vigorous efforts of many residents to preserve the integrity of their community, it seems that their concerns were more often drowned out in the battle for the cemetery.

The latest Toll’s proposal linked to the cemetery land sale was whittled down to a smaller number of houses—170. As of a few days ago, July 18, it appeared that an agreement on the cemetery land/170-house development plan would be reached, although Toll had come up with requests for additional waivers and variances. This seems another favorite technique of the developer—in the final stages of negotiations, to suddenly present a new set of demands. The VA has stated that it has a deadline of Sept. 30 2006, the end of the federal fiscal year, to purchase cemetery land. Stay tuned.

Valley Forge: Nothing Given Away

The developer had an agreement of sale for 62 acres, one of several privately owned parcels within the park. Such lands exist within the park because, when the park was expanded in 1980, not enough money was appropriated for the National Park Service to buy all of the land within the new borders. Of course, funding remains a tremendous problem throughout the National Park system.

According to the Inquirer, these acres were always “. . . conceived as visual buffers against development . . .,” and by 2001 there was a great deal of development around the park to need buffers against. The parcel in question was called in recent times the Schwoebel tract, but it had been the Waggonseller farm when it looked out over Washington’s Continental Army encampment in 1777-78.

By the time their plans were well publicized, Toll Brothers had already named the proposed development: Valley Forge Overlook. To many, the plan represented a disrespectful intrusion on the significance of the park.

A coalition was created, led by activists from the Sierra Club and the National Parks Conservation Association (NPCA), but also including area residents and other organizations. Even children became involved when there was a public protest. Information about the proposed Toll project was added to Valley Forge’s “Threatened” entry on the National Trust for Historic Preservation’s “11 Most Endangered Places” list in early 2003. (The park had been placed on the list first because of deteriorating historic structures.)

The National Trust’s online magazine quoted CEO Robert Toll as saying, rather disingenuously, that the land was for sale and anyone could buy it. He added, "Even though the National Park Service has the authority to add this land to the park proper, it has declined to do so, although it could still do so at any time if it so chooses." Of course, he chose to overlook the financial realities of national park management. “Anyone” could NOT have bought the Valley Forge parcel. Quite possibly, no developer devotes more of its deep-pocket resources to land location and acquisition than Toll Brothers; and even a New York Times Magazine piece by Jon Gertner (Oct. 16, 2005) called Toll’s acquisition practices “stealthy.”

In a written statement quoted by Greenworks, Robert Toll said that the National Park Service had known of possible development by his company for over two years but did not buy the property, and ". . . the only thing they asked of us was to grant them a scenic easement to preserve the views from the park . . . We agreed to fully cooperate." If that is true, it raises some disturbing questions about the Park Service’s stewardship.

The massive public outcry against development in Valley forge led to the involvement of elected officials in efforts to have the land purchased from Toll Brothers by the National Park Service, and eventually the developer (which actually purchased the land in June 2002) agreed to sell. The Inquirer (Aug. 25, 2002) called this “. . . an extraordinary move for a builder with a history of not backing down from a project regardless of public opposition.” Former Congressman Joe Hoeffel helped start negotiations and began efforts in Congress; then Senator Arlen Specter, with his senior position on the Senate Appropriations Committee, secured the greater part of the funding.

The final price, according to Joy Oakes of the National Parks Conservation Association, was $8.5 million: “$7.5 million in 2 separate federal appropriations, and $1 million in 2 separate "reprogrammings" of [funds] the NPS had on hand.” So Toll Brothers made over $5 million on a piece of land that they actually owned for just about two years. True, this was considerably less than the profits on 62 houses would have amounted to, but still a profit. Never mind the costs, economic and otherwise, to the public.

Fredericksburg, VA: Sacred Soil and Profit

A couple of months before, Chancellorsville had been included on the Civil War Preservation Trust’s list of the country’s ten most-endangered battlefields.

But then this is northern Virginia, and the real estate market has been hot. At the time when Toll Brothers purchased the land, there was every indication that they planned to build on all of it.

The Civil War Preservation Trust and a coalition of other preservation groups fought Toll’s plans, with some success.

As of May of this year the actual plan, with work in progress, was to build 196 houses; not quite on the battlefield, just at the edge. Most importantly, Toll agreed to sell 75 significant acres of the most significant land to the CWPT. The selling price has apparently not been disclosed for the 2006 transaction. Toll’s attorney called it “substantially below-market,” but that probably just means less than windfall profit. In other words, the developer no doubt made some profit on the 75 acres.

Of course, this agreement had an additional price in the form of Toll’s demand for 33 houses more than the zoning had originally allowed (shades of Dolington). The development in progress has house lots of two-plus acres, so 33 houses would approximately add up to 75 acres. What this means is that Toll Brothers had their cake–profit on the 75 acres; and ate it, too–the profit on 33 houses that they were going to build on the 75 acres. The icing on the cake: to make the deal look as if they were public-mindedly giving something up!

Jim Campi of the CWPT said that increased density was “the carrot that attracted” the developer, implying that without permission to build the additional houses, Toll would have kept and built on the 75 acres of “sacred soil.” That is, they had no real concern for preservation or for doing the right thing. Interestingly, Toll’s present Website for the “Chancellorsville Hunt” development makes no mention of the Civil War battle or of history at all. Was this a rare spasm of good taste, or even rarer shame?

We’ve just looked at how Toll Brothers operated in three specific cases. Next week, we’ll step back for a bigger-picture view of this corporation—and the larger implications of its behavior.