Stake Your Claim

I can't wait for this Monday's Norwich City Council meeting. It will be a long, and possibly hard, slog starting at 7:30 PM in Council Chambers, and while there will be other business on the agenda, make no mistake the big item in the center ring is the approval of a city budget. Probably like your town, we've spent a lot of time in the last six weeks talking to one another (and too often at one another) and to our aldermen (I'd say alderpersons but all of them are actually men so (this time) it's not thoughtlessness on my part) on hopes, dreams, aspirations and concerns.

For a one hundred dollar a month stipend (a piece), all six of the aldermen have listened to every word we've said and to our silences as well, and, together with the Mayor on Monday night they'll refine and redefine the City Manager's budget and we'll all be happy and then they can move on to some of the stuff they told us last fall was very important while running for City Council....like reevaluating the City Charter with an eye on bulking up language and carb-loading actual meaning, like adopting an actual code of ethics for all who work, paid and volunteer, on behalf of those of us who live in the Rose City, like reviewing the morale and practices survey of the Norwich Police Department released this time a year ago with an eye on implementation, like eliminating the pouting and posturing of previous City Councils who had private agenda at the expense of the public good. Very exciting and exhilarating words at the time.

Yes indeed, there's quite a lot to get done once the budget is approved. Unless we allow those who are not especially keen to actually accomplish anything to continue to hide in a haze of glib generalities, in which case, we can just keep muddling along I suppose. Kind of like where you live, I imagine--it's pretty much the same movie, a different cast but the same movie. Lots of heat, not so much light--a lot of motion but not a lot of movement.

I, for one, very much like the way the rose has replaced the period under the exclamation point on the logo that's on the easel in the council chambers. We still have the 'old logo' on the web site, but that's old news as soon we're going to establish a steering committee to create an advisory that will establish a commission to sort out what our first step could look like. It's easy to confuse talking about change with actual change especially when that's all you really want to do. If they make the Motionless Glide an Olympic event, we'll have to build a bigger medals podium.

But make sure the new logo is on it because when you don't have a lot of specifics, the more generalities you have the better, and don't forget generalities are actually harder to disprove than specifics. For instance, Norman Voles of Gravesend claims to have written all of Shakespeare's plays while he and his wife wrote all of his sonnets. Specifically, Mr Voles is 43 and, as we all know, there are records of Shakespeare's plays being performed for hundreds of years and so.....you see? Let's just hope, charter review and revision, ethics, a police review commission don't all wind up like Mrs. Mittelschmerz of Dundee. Mainly because I fear we would more easily embrace an elephant than the consequences of our own actions.
-bill kenny