Residents of Madison Connecticut voted Jan 26 to buy 42 acres along Long Island Sound from LeylandAl

Residents of Madison, Connecticut, voted Jan. 26 to buy 42 acres along Long Island Sound from LeylandAlliance, which for nearly a decade had been planning to build a development called Madison Landing on the site. Leyland, which had paid $4.2 million for the land, agreed to sell it to the town for $9.5 million. The municipality intends to preserve most of the area as natural habitat and to install recreation fields on the rest. The Trust for Public Land will contribute $1.7 million toward the purchase. Howard Kaufman, executive vice president of Leyland, said the company could have built Madison Landing and sold all its houses without difficulty. However, the company has a strategy of pursuing development through private-public partnerships, and did not want to go against the town’s wishes. Kaufman said the sale will recoup most but not all of the expenses that Leyland incurred in nine years of planning the project and advancing it through dozens of meetings.