When Groton Town Manager John Burt was asked in April about reports implicating the developer proposing one of the most massive projects in the town’s history — a mixed-use commercial project with 700 to 850 housing units — in a 2004 New York City bribery scandal, the town’s chief executive officer said, incredibly, he was unconcerned.
“We looked into it. I had a long discussion with (him.) He answered all the questions I had satisfactorily,” the town manager told The Day.
Developer Jeffrey Respler, in his own interview with The Day at that time, denied the accusations, said they were untrue and claimed his lawyer had advised him to take the plea deal offered to stop the investigation and move on with his business.
But in a court hearing in 2004, Respler made detailed admissions under oath to a series of crimes, including bribing public officials with cash, that should give any municipality dealing with him reason to pause, or at least investigate beyond the “long discussion” with the developer that town manager Burt said put him at ease.
It is striking that Groton officials would shrug off the troubling criminal history of public malfeasance of a developer who would have such an enormous impact on the town. But what is even more alarming to me is that he was selected in the first place by both the town and the state Department of Economic and Community Development as the preferred developer of the abandoned, state-owned Mystic Oral School property.
Town manager…
