Town and community leaders agree that Fort Williams Park should be permanently protected, but can’t agree on whether it already is, or if more steps need to be taken.

Representatives of the Cape Elizabeth Town Council, Fort Williams Advisory Commission and Fort Williams Charitable Foundation met Tuesday to find some common ground before a July 14 Town Council workshop about the issue of permanent protection over the park and the foundation’s request for a conservation easement.

Two weeks ago Town Manager Michael McGovern released a memo outlining reasons why the easement proposed by the foundation was impossible because of federal restrictions, which already provide protection for the park’s future.

This week Clint Blood and Glenn Israel, the foundation’s president and vice president, said they were considering other possibilities and would have a revised proposal for the July workshop.

Israel said one option was a conditional easement that would go into effect if the federal grant restrictions the park is subject to were ever removed.

Town Councilor Mary Ann Lynch said conservation easements were very good tools for private property, but the park is publicly owned. She said a conservation easement wasn’t necessary because the park was already permanently protected.

“I can’t see how it can be any more protected, the people of Cape Elizabeth own it … lock, stock and barrel,” Lynch said.

The park currently has a multiple layers of protection, including numerous Town Council resolutions reaching back to 1976, town zoning ordinances and federal grant requirements.

Town Council resolutions or zoning ordinances are not permanent, but Lynch said she couldn’t see one council member voting to sell the property, let alone four, which is the number of councilors that would be needed to make the decision. “You’d have to be in a state of lunacy,” she said.

“Nothing is permanent,” Town Council Chairman Anne Swift-Kayatta said. “The pyramids will crumble,” but the park is as protected as absolutely practical.

Layers of protection habr been the trend in the past because conservation easements are a relatively new tool, Israel said, but they are currently “the strongest level of protection we can put in place.”

The foundation wants that highest level of protection for the park because they say that assurance that the park will be there in the future will help attract major monetary donors. The foundation’s mandate is to raise funds to make the park financially independent of the town budget.

Lynch said there are no conservation easements protecting Central Park in New York City or Deering Oaks Park in Portland, but they still attract major donors.

“We’re creating the situation where donors won’t give,” Lynch said, by creating the perception that the park is not adequately protected. Their efforts should be focused on raising money, she said.

“The issue is control of the park,” Swift-Kayatta said. “Who’s going to control the park? … Who do we trust? I trust the people.”

Charles McCarthy, chairman of the Fort Williams Advisory Commission – the body that makes recommendations to the Town Council concerning the management of the park – said he didn’t want to give away something that the people of Cape Elizabeth might want to use. He would rather have the town retain full ownership of the park rather than share ownership with a private, unelected body. “My confidence is in democracy,” he said.

Israel said the foundation was asking the town to give away development rights to the park, but those are rights that they’ll never use. He used the analogy of using a trust fund to ensure something of value is there for future generations, rather than just passing it down and hoping each generation takes care of it.

A few members of the public who attended the meeting Tuesday morning were able to give some historical context to the issue.

Steve Simonds was on the original study committee in 1976 that recommended the Town Council set aside the park for future generations. At the time, he said, there was a very clear understanding that the fort would be left as open space and for passive recreation use only. But, he said, there was always that “specter” of future councilors overturn those decisions. The barriers could come down, he said.

School Board member Henry Adams was on the Town Council in 1976 when they adopted the original resolution protecting the fort, which stated, “the portion of the Fort which includes all the shore front and the parade grounds should be permanently dedicated to use as public open space and should not be developed or built upon.”

He said two years later, in 1978, when he was the council’s chairman, two councilors were in favor of selling part of the fort for development, but he ended the discussion quickly. He warned that there would always be rogue councilors who will want to sell it, but “I think the fort is protected,” he said. “But, I might be wrong.”