MVFF to buy 10 acres from Ag Society

Updated 3:30 pm

The Martha’s Vineyard Film Festival (MVFF) has entered into an agreement to buy approximately 10 acres of land from the Martha’s Vineyard Agricultural Society to establish a permanent home, a milestone for both nonprofits.

In the works for months, the deal came close to falling though due to an unformalized right of first refusal on the land given to Polly Hill Arboretum by past Ag Society leaders.

However, what first looked to be a poisoned pill for MVFF to sink roots in West Tisbury, turned out to be a catalyst for unity between the three organizations. Tuesday afternoon in MVFF board president Steve Bernier’s office space above down-Island Cronig’s, representatives from each of the three nonprofits hashed out an impromptu compact that not only upheld MVFF’s purchase, but assembled a permanent working group. Composed from members of the three nonprofits, the group will shepherd the management of the property, which includes a 2.5-acre solar array and a 1.5-acre fenced off cranefly orchid reserve. The group will also explore other avenues of cooperation and community engagement.

“Polly Hill left the table feeling good. The film festival left the table feeling good. We left the table feeling good,” Ag Society president Brian Athearn told The Times. “Everybody made concessions but everybody made agreements and everybody got something.”

For MVFF, the acquisition, which is still in process, ends a multiyear quest for a four-season gathering place with some elbow room.

MVFF founder and executive director Thomas Bena said in the past his board fielded offers for down-Island locations, but those always fell short of the festival’s vision for its setting.

“For years there’s been a really strong desire by our organization to be in a rural setting in the woods so there’s picnic tables and people are outside, you know, barefoot on the grass in the summer or in the woods in the winter,” he said. “There’s a real clear desire for us to build a barn — of course film will be the centerpiece of the organization, but it’s really a year-round gathering space. And the one sentence that I think sums it all up is the wood stove burning in the winter and the doors are open in the summer.”

Athearn said the proceeds from the impending transaction, which the parties declined to disclose, will clear the Ag Society of the debt it incurred when it purchased the land and erected the solar panel array. Furthermore, MVFF has agreed to lease the solar array plot back to the Ag Society for one year shy of an entire millennium, he said, with the Ag Society, and its partner in the solar array project, Bennett Electric, retaining the electricity profits. Athearn said the coming sale stands to shore up and expand programs, grants, and scholarships. For the first time in its 160-year history, the Ag Society will have an endowment, he said.  

In a statement to The Times, Polly Hill executive director Tim Boland wrote, “a land transaction at the scale and complexity presented, including solar panels, setbacks, and assessing land value, is complex. Our concerns moving forward are to make sure the Arboretum and its landscape ethic are enhanced, not diminished. We are appreciative of the open dialogue established between the Agricultural Society, the Film Festival and the Arboretum. We are optimistic that our interests are being taken seriously, and that the promise of thoughtful development is ahead.”

In summary Athearn said some of what Polly Hill gained in negotiation was a promise of some type of buffer zone between itself and the MVFF’s soon-to-be acquired land, which it abuts. That could take the form of a sale of a band of border land or an easement, he said. A deal involving the cranefly orchid (tipularia discolor) conservation area is also possible, Athearn said, as is transferring the solar array to the roof of the Ag Hall and nearby buildings and turning over the acerage it sat on for reforestation.

“Polly Hill of course wants to create a buffer to keep Polly’s Play Pen quiet and feeling wooded and so how can we talk about making that happen,” Bena said of MVFF’s mindset on the matter. Polly’s Play Pen is a portion of the arboretum right alongside the land to be sold.

“We want to explore all kinds of things — could we share walking paths?” Bena asked. “Could this become a central nonprofit campus? Could this be a place you could go and maybe take in something at the Ag Hall then take in something at the MVFF or at Polly Hill. So we’re hoping we unify that campus. That’s what we’re hoping to do.”

“We will still do our annual film festival,” MVFF artistic director Brian Ditchfield said, “and we will continue to do the events that we already do, but the hope is we get to expand our educational mission and we get to be an open door for all these other art forms as well: music, theater, storytelling, workshops, and discussions. We’re hoping that it can be a home for all of those things.”

Honor and diplomacy among nonprofits

March 28, three hours before the Ag Society board prepared to vote on selling the land to the MVFF, Boland said the arboretum wanted to make an offer, or “an offer to make an offer,” as Ag Society executive director Kristina West put it. A week earlier, on the coattails of key Ag Society officers discovering a verbal right of refusal had been given to the arboretum years earlier, the Ag Society and the MVFF gave Polly Hill a heads up a deal was imminent. That brought about a spate of separate conversations, West said, but nothing from Polly Hill surfaced until the 11th hour. Athearn said a heated meeting ensued and the Ag Society board voted in favor of selling to the MVFF. He’d  hoped the vote reached a two-thirds margin but it didn’t. Coupled with the pact his predecessors had made with Polly Hill, the situation didn’t sit well with him.

“We had thought it was just going to be a short meeting to review the final offer by the MVFF,” West said, but it became more consequential and “difficult” with several board members learning of the nonbinding right of first refusal for the first time in the meeting.

“It was a tough meeting trying to navigate what the right thing to do was,” she added.

“The meeting was so contentious, but it passed,” Athearn said. “I didn’t like the feeling of it. On the way home, something just didn’t feel right, so I contacted Thomas Bena and I said I have an idea.”

Athearn said he pulled over to the side of the road to make his pitch. Even though it was a signed deal, he suggested “we invite Polly Hill to make an equal offer on the land — you [MVFF] step back and let them come in and make an offer on the land. And they said yes.”

Ag Society officers met with MVFF officers the next morning.

“Bernier agreed with the idea,” Athearn said. “They gave us a written statement that said we’ll back off from the deal, let Polly Hill come forward and make an offer and if you go with that offer, we’ll walk and everybody will be fine.”

“That was something that sometimes you kind of can’t believe — the words that are coming out of your mouth — but that was something that Steve and I and the whole staff felt really strongly about,” Bena said. “We don’t want to start this big venture off on the wrong foot.”

Athearn said Polly Hill requested several months to put together their offer but the Ag Society opted to narrow that to a couple weeks. But when Tuesday came around, Athearn, who cited pressure from outside inquiries on negotiations that had otherwise been kept under wraps, pressed Boland to show his hand prematurely, Athearn said. Boland conceded Polly Hill was unlikely to match the MVFF offer. A short time later MVFF, Polly Hill, and the Ag Society had their supermarket confab and struck an accord.

“It’s something we all felt really proud of today,” Bena said on Tuesday.

“You know all the stuff you wish you saw in government?” Athearn asked. “You know — why can’t this just happen? It happened with our organizations. It was like democracy in its purest form — how this transpired.”

Homecoming

“I guess when we first started exploring this option, just the first kind of visceral thing that hit me was remembering helping with their original barn raising back in ‘93, ‘94 and I was I think 8 years old or so at the time,” MVFF director of productions Ollie Becker said. “And thinking how cool that would be if we actually got to do another barn raising — so it’s definitely exciting now that we have something like that on the horizon.” Becker went on to say growing up in West Tisbury he recalled there was no real place “with open doors all the time” and he sees the future MVFF barn as being such a place.

“It’s definitely been a dream of mine to be able to give back to the community that raised me,” MVFF managing director Hilary Dreyer said. “It’s very much what has helped me gravitate to this line of work and working for the film festival. And so I feel like this next step with the film festival acquiring the land and building a year-round gathering space is very much to serve our community.”

That new step comes after Chilmark selectmen recently voted in fee increases for the MVFF’s longstanding rental home, the Chilmark Community Center.

“Our desire to be in West Tisbury stems from the fact that we do want it to feel like anyone from anywhere on the Island can drop in,” Bena said. “And we know being in Chilmark, just that extra 10-minute drive, does keep a lot of people away. And we really wanted to make a clear statement that this is the Island’s gathering space — not just an up-Island thing.”

Athearn praised the hard work Kristina West and treasurer Bob Egerton, among many others, put in to boost the organization’s fortunes and deepen its ties with its neighbors, both new and old.

“Where we’re at is a good place,” he said.  

Updated from original post at 9:30 am Wednesday with comments from Polly Hill Arboretum executive director Tim Boland.