I was struck last Thursday afternoon at a 'special' meeting of the Sachem Fund Board that I see the same faces in the same places at Norwich meetings over and over again. It's interesting to me that I hear many other, and different, voices when I watch cable access shows in the early evening hours, or when I tune to the local AM radio station during the day (nice job updating the website, guys. Who'd ya get, the same folks doing the NCDC site?). Maybe I'm the only person with a totally empty life or maybe I, and the few of us who do talk up community involvement, are just not very good at persuading others to join us.
I hold the people I elect to the Norwich City Council and the Norwich Board of Education to impossibly high standards and I admit that. They have each in her and his own way sought my vote at Election time to be my surrogate and have my proxy on decisions affecting every aspect of my (and my family's) life here in The Rose City. So, yeah, I think I do have the right to insist they wash behind their ears and clean their fingernails, metaphorically and philosophically if not literally and to make a point out of watching them in action on a big stage, like a Council meeting as well as in a smaller venue, such as a committee or advisory meeting. Those in these elected positions are my neighbors, and yours, too, and it's a hard enough job when the milk and honey is flowing, not that it has around here in recent years, but when times get tough(er), the job of making the right decision is a burden sometimes much heavier to bear than at other times.
This week in Norwich is a quiet week for public meetings--not that the ones going on aren't significant, and more intelligently spaced and paced than they were last week (for instance).
To start, and it's not coincidental to me that as belts tighten, the buzz phrases 'regionalization' and 'cooperation' get used more often is a meeting this morning at eight of the Executive Committee of the Southeastern Connecticut Council of Government, SCCOG. There's no minutes of their previous meetings nor an agenda posted (which is, disturbingly more often than not the rule rather than the exception) though the argument might be made that since neither the Norwich City Manager nor the Mayor is on the Executive Committee, how much concern should I, as a resident of Norwich, have.
I was digging through my notes a moment ago and realized among the many things I never hear about at City Council meetings are reports by either the City Manager or the Mayor on their attendance at SCOOG meetings, which I presume to assume they do on a regular and periodic basis. It's hard to think globally if you don't work to see the world beyond the end of your nose. I wear glasses, so my world view is even more narrow.
The City Council meets tonight 7:30 PM and will conduct a public hearing on the possible purchase of the old Simon Ford property as the site for a new police station. The actual new station will cost millions upon millions of dollars and have to be bonded and in light of the current economic and emotional climate, good luck with that. It seems to me that buying the property is part of that project, as opposed to a separate piece which is what the Council is doing tonight and so we have the possibility of purchasing property currently on the tax rolls and removing it while we wait I have no idea how long for the money to drop from the heavens to build the police station. Not sure this is the best approach but will watch and see.
As a former member of the Baseball Stadium Authority, I'll be be curious to see what happens with an item on the Council agenda for Executive Session, 'Stadium Lease Negotiations'. The baseball team owes the Authority the better part of a quarter of a million or more dollars in past due rent payments--plus, in recent weeks, there's been reports of the team being wooed by an out of state ownership group who'd logically enough move the team but, there's a clause in the lease that requires the team to indemnify the city if they move before 2012 (when the lease runs out). The figure is pro-rated so that leaving at the end of this season is more expensive than next and etc. Considering how much the team owes the City already, I'd be (more) curious on how they might propose to pay off a future lease but already know who'll be doing their talking and he is quite persuasive (Tom Sawyer and whitewashing the fence persuasive.).
I'd stock up now on brushes if I were you, before the price goes up.
Tuesday morning at nine, the Housing Authority may be meeting (a local newspaper says yes, but the City of Norwich website says 'no'; ties goes to the runner, I suppose) but turnabout is fair play as there are two items on the City's website which don't surface in newspapers.
The first is at 6 PM Tuesday evening and is a Board of Public Utilities' Commissioners Special Meeting in their building on Golden Street and they, too, have an executive session slated, but it sounds way cooler than the City Council's: "To Discuss Confidential Trade Secret & Commercially Valuable Confidential or Proprietary Information Not Subject to Inspection or Public Disclosure Pursuant to Section 1-210[5] and 7-232a of the CT. General Statutes." Sort of like that moment in Catch-22 where you can get out of flying more missions, except it turns out you can't. (And people cannot understand my fascination with yo-yos...)
Simultaneous with the above meeting, in the same building, I think, is a Special Meeting of the Norwich Sewer Authority. Their agenda doesn't have anything as remotely cool as an executive session with 'commercially valuable confidential ... information' so if you have to pick one over the other, choose wisely and well.
Wednesday night at 7 in Room 108 of City Hall is a meeting of the Republican Town Committee. I don't think you have to be a member of the Republican Party to attend but I think you can't take part if you're not (which is only fair).
Thursday at seven at 23 Union Street (it's next door to City Hall) in the conference room in the basement is a meeting of the Inland Wetlands, Watercourses Commission--they didn't meet in February, so here's their agenda for Thursday night. Sidebar, sort of: all but one member's appointment has expired on this Commission, and not just expired, years ago. City Council, please do your job and rectify this situation.
Two things to watch for next week--neither on the calendar though one should be: Very possibly, on Monday, 9 March at 5:30 PM in room 335 the City Council will continue to work on the Ethics Review Commission report presented to them 51 weeks earlier and about which they had done nothing until two weeks ago. Wouldn't want to rush into anything, especially in terms of public perception of behavior. And who knows, maybe this time around, everyone on the City Council can make the meeting. Some of us live in hope....
The other meeting to plan on now is next Thursday, the 12th in the Otis Library at 6:30 PM when Alderman Bill Nash holds a constituents' meeting in the community room. He hopes to have the City Manager with him, but I can tell you, having attended his first one, it's an opportunity outside of a Council meeting to be engaged with an alderman. It was a good discussion that night as I remember it and if you have something to ask him, you should make it a point to stop by and speak up.
City government works as well as each of us wants it to work. If we lower our voices so we can hear one another, and our expectations so we can understand one another, as I've heard said in recent days, together we can build a better Norwich.
-bill kenny
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