GRS President’s Yom Kippur Remarks

Oct 12, 2011 by Stephanie    No Comments    Posted under: GRS Blog

Good morning!  I Hope everyone is having an easy fast on this Yom Kippur morning.
By now, you all have seen the playing field construction now underway by the Stanwich School, and no doubt have questions about what this means for GRS:
First, a little history:  The Torah tells us that the Israelites wandered in the desert for 40 years before finding the promised land.  Well, we haven't yet arrived at the promised land, but we're not in the desert either.  GRS had its first home at Diamond Hill Church, then St. Paul's in Riverside, and arrived here in 1993, transforming the former Greenwich Catholic School gymnasium into the sanctuary you see today.  In 1998, we began renting space to Stanwich School, and in 2003 began discussions regarding sale of our property to Stanwich. A plan for a campus which included both Stanwich School and GRS was approved by the town of Greenwich in 2009, and the ensuing lawsuit, filed by the neighbors, was dropped in 2010.  This summer, Stanwich School began building a regulation-size playing field with artificial turf and is installing a state-approved waste water treatment facility.

Although GRS has the greatest respect and appreciation for our long-time relationship with the Stanwich School, our foremost responsibility is to YOU, our members.  The role and responsibility of the GRS board is to ensure the long-term health of the congregation. In that regard, I have an important update and some good news regarding the building of our future synagogue.

As you already know, we have been in negotiations with Stanwich School for the sale of some of our property for quite some time. Recently, it became increasingly unclear to us when we would have a synagogue and whether it would be economically viable in a deal with Stanwich. As a result, we began to investigate alternatives.

Today, I am happy to announce to you that due to the hard work of our members, committees, and notably the creativity of Louis Van Leeuwen, we indeed found an alternative to the sale to Stanwich which would both speed the timing of the building of our new synagogue and result in far superior value to our congregation—economic value that would ensure our ability to grow and thrive as a Reform synagogue.

Out of consideration for Stanwich, as a long-standing, good tenant and neighbor, recently we entered into discussions with their board to see if we could structure an agreement which would put them in a similar economic neighborhood and timing to our alternative, providing them, in fact, with some discount as well. Unfortunately, despite hard work by our committee members and temple stakeholders over the last couple months, Stanwich did not approach the value of our alternative plan or even provide a level of financial consideration which would have ensured the future viability of GRS, let alone provide certainty on the timing of our synagogue.  As a result, after considered thought, GRS respectfully called off discussions this week with Stanwich in order to solely focus on our exciting alternative.

So, our plan, which LVL and team came up with, is to develop either all or a part of our property with townhomes which would also have an affordable housing component. Affordable housing refers to homes for people such as firemen, police officers, and teachers. This plan would permit GRS to either stay here and build our synagogue or to relocate should we find a better location to build more quickly or more economically. The project has been vetted by board members and key stakeholders of GRS as well as professionals. There is excitement about the plan and we see little issue with any approvals and we have been advised by town professionals that it actually helps the Town of Greenwich with their affordable housing requirements. The result is an expected value to GRS of approximately $14 million to $18 million or more, depending on whether we build our synagogue here or build elsewhere, and it would speed up the completion of our synagogue to within 2.5 years or quicker. Compared to the proposed Stanwich sale which our congregants conditionally approved years ago, we see this as an increase of $4M-$8M in cash and likely having a synagogue 2-3 years sooner. Most importantly, it works financially for GRS, enabling us to pursue our own ambitious plans and to thrive.

We are very excited about finally moving forward with this plan and believe this project will attract new members, provide us with space for membership growth, a new preschool, and help us re-emerge as a truly outstanding congregation of which we can all be proud. I sincerely thank all of our committee members who worked so hard on the project and helped GRS turn the page to a new exciting chapter in the story of our success. In light of the holiday, the Rabbi has requested that we refrain from a dialogue on this topic, so I would ask you to hold your questions for now, and we will schedule a discussion to go over particulars of our plan and answer any questions; we will email the congregation as soon as the date and time are set.

Bill Grad

President, Greenwich Reform Synagogue Board of Trustees

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