Woodstock CT Café

by Becki 

Just in from the Board of Education meeting…….

The BOE voted and elected Anthony Walker as Chairman, Scott Sincerbeaux as Vice-Chair and Carol Andrzeicik as Secretary.

Chairman Walker took the gavel and started conducting the meeting with a personal greeting – a positive and inclusive message. One item Chairman Walker brought forth was the suggestion that the chairmanship be a rotating, one-year position with a new chairman voted each November. Members will consider this and revisit the matter at their December meeting. The agenda item concerning committee assignments was put off until the December meeting as well. Members were requested to email their preferences to the chairman. Walker also would like to see a board member at each of the town committee meetings to enhance the flow of communication. He also suggested the board consider a new committee to address academics/raising test scores. There was a general consensus that this could be piggybacked to one of the current standing committees.

Dr. Baran presented an update of the budget and where the district stands currently. He was able to illustrate the fluidity of expenditures versus changes in revenues and expenses. The newly elected members asked many questions and actively pursued items to clarify their understanding of specific issues. There were a multitude of suggestions and requests pertaining to information that would augment/increase their understanding of an array of subjects. I guess the district office will be fairly busy for awhile.

The upcoming budget timeline was revealed and a list of dates was provided. Several possible additional meeting dates were discussed as well. The first draft of the budget will be presented to the board at their January 28th meeting.  The BOE presentation of the finalized 2010/2011 budget to the Board of Finance will be on March 23rd. The town meeting for the budget will be on May 27th. There were other dates listed, but I will refrain from putting them in here because I had to leave the meeting (I get up at 4:45 AM) before the board considered their 2010 Schedule of Meetings.

There will also be a ‘Meet and Greet’ sometime in January, but those dates as well are not set.

So, there you have it in a nutshell. I’m sure there will be much more to come.

by Nary
 
The leadership of Woodstock’s RTC has successfully reinvented itself. Gone is the puffed up, chin out attitude that effectively saw Joe Breen drawn and quartered. Gone is their pal-ship with the CPS crowd along with whispered encouragement to recalcitrant Steve Rosendahl.

The RTC gave no public statement last summer regarding the referendum to unseat the BoE. Instead, they chose to sit tight, wait it out. Failing the results they were looking for, a new RTC platform soon emerged containing words like “environment,” “communication” and “Preservation.”  A kinder, gentler RTC is what we see now. Indeed, the new RTC is as sweet as a little lamb.
 
A few months back, ace Villager reporter Matt Sanderson wrote a charming piece that featured arduous work being done by one stalwart leader of the RTC. According to the article, the good lady is probably still out traipsing the wilds of Woodstock in her hip boots and waders with notepad in hand while she catalogues miles of historic stonewall. Thank goodness we’ve got such a prominent member of the RTC and PZC doing the hard work of preserving Woodstock. Keep mindful that this is the very same woman who was the strongest advocate for the complete removal of any and all stone walls (plus forest and wetland) that threatened to impede an Academy player’s ability to score a touchdown in a hoped-for, state-of-the-art Football Stadium. Does the RTC really think they are pulling the wool over our eyes?
 
Presently, a key administrator at the Woodstock Academy is “concerned,” about the good Preservation of the Woodstock Common. Parked cars are causing erosion! says the Official. Apparently, the Academy wants to “Preserve” this ancient common land that has progressed since its use in the 17th century of common grazing land to that of parkland then parking lot. Presently, it’s a sewer overflow basin. Naturally, the large Academy planned development now in suspension for over a year due to environmental risks is NOT a polite topic of conversation for it causes no one any concern. No worries either about the good Preservation of the Common. The Historic District Commission’s SWAT Team was dispatched immediately to quell the anxiety. They will begin by cataloguing all the plantings on the Common. Read the rest of this entry »

In typical fashion Mr. Richardson is advocating irresponsible management of town affairs as practiced by First Selectmen Neuman, Wetzel, Very, and Wholean. Because of their failure to address the salt barn problem, we have no choice but to deal with it now. We are now seeing signs of improvement in the housing market, so the picture is not as bad as Richardson has painted.

This article will appear in the Villager tomorrow.

by Kevin Ford 

I think it is important to recognize that the salt shed has become an ecological disaster and that it was a fully preventable one. It has contaminated the water supply, hurt the health and business of nearby landowners and may have long term impact on their land values. We, the citizens of Woodstock, collectively allowed this to happen.

Now that the problem has become so bad that the state has mandated that we fix the salt barn we are starting to hear the argument that we should just fix that and ignore the other facilities in the complex that are in a similar state. I cannot warn against that enough for many of the same reasons why it was harmful to ignore the problems with the salt shed in the first place. For example, if we can’t properly maintain and wash the salt off our vehicles what is the long term cost of replacing those vehicles on a more frequent schedule?

I understand why some people may be worried that groups may use this as an excuse to attack the education budget. However, from watching them for quite some time, they will do so anyway. They won’t need this excuse and their movement on the education budget will be the same either way. At the end of the day not voting to maintain or replace things of this nature because of apathy and fear of a minority interest is what caused the salt contamination in the first place.

We need to learn from that lesson; we should take a longer term outlook in our cost/benefit analysis. Not just in terms of finances but in terms of potential ecological harm, harm to land values, harm to the people who work in the facilities and harm to the people who depend on them. When overfed government can be dangerous but when starved the harm of neglected infrastructure can be just as great. Read the rest of this entry »

First published in December 2006

The front-page Villager article on the right side of the page (Dec. 15th, 2006) starts with “It remains uncertain as to whether there is a correlation between the contamination at Bennett’s farm and the sand and salt mixing at the highway facility.”

Hmmmm … doesn’t 1 plus 1 equal 2? Tons of salt have been stored several hundred feet away from the Bennett wells for decades. The next nearest pile of salt is several miles away at the State Highway facility on Route 198. It seems that anyone with a brain would conclude that the salt in the Bennett wells came from the tonnage a few hundred feet, not miles, away.

Let’s have a quick multiple-choice test to see how bright we are.

Question: Where did the salt in the Bennett’s four wells come from?
A. A giant undiscovered salt quarry underneath the Highway Facility or the Bennett Farm.
B. The story is completely made up by troublemakers.
C. The story is completely made up by the Bennett’s so they can cash in with a lawsuit.
D. The salt came from the salt facility miles away on Route 198.
E. The salt came from contamination of the aquifer by tons of salt stored several hundred feet away.
F. The salt was deposited in the Bennett wells by the Salt Fairy.

This is a toughie.  Let’s see what the evidence is. Read the rest of this entry »