My family and I have lived in Norwich a couple of weeks shy of twenty years. Sometimes it feels a LOT longer than that because of a sense of foreboding, a waiting-for-the-other-shoe-to-drop state of mind so many of us seem to have.
Too many residents, new and old, assume the worst from the moment any initiative is announced, perhaps to avoid the rush, or, more likely, because they've concluded the advantage of pessimism is you can only be surprised and never disappointed.
It may be time to reconsider that mindset.
For decades we've all listened to laments about missed opportunities, bad luck, poor faith, lack of working capital as the municipal Grand List puttered along at a rate of growth just above that of inflation which basically meant we've had no real growth at all.
Of course, if you've looked at municipal infrastructure from roads to sewers, class sizes and extracurricular offerings for students in public schools, manning and staffing of public safety agencies and, most immediately and importantly, your property tax bill, you already knew all of that.
The small businesses that quietly folded or relocated to another town, the forest of 'For Sale' signs scattered throughout every neighborhood and the families everywhere who just stopped being our neighbors from one day to the next and disappeared have all become part of who we are and how we live.
So how realistic is it that the Vibrant Communities Initiative by the Commission on Culture and Tourism, when added to the Norwich Downtown Revitalization Fund and funds from the Community Economic Development Fund could, not will by any means but could, be the fulcrum to leverage not just Down City and Chelsea, and not just Norwich, but the the entire region, south to the coast and north to Putnam and beyond?
First things first.
Last week, the Connecticut Trust for Historic Preservation (CTHP) announced it had awarded one of its $50,000 grants from its Vibrant Communities Initiative to Norwich to assist in developing an action plan for underutilized historic places and/or for a city wide preservation plan. The grants are intended to stimulate investment in historic preservation projects; for underutilized historic places/structures; and for developing town- or city-wide preservation ordinances.
For Norwich, with a wealth of historic buildings, the initiative combined with a nascent effort to update the next decade's city-wide Plan of Conservation and Development (the road map by which we should map the direction and route of our city for the benefit of all of its residents) all buttressed by an on-hand pool of nearly ten million dollars for downtown building owners and business owners, real estate brokers and anyone interested in locating a business in downtown Norwich, and we have some weight instead of wait.
By themselves, none of these initiatives do anything for anyone-and even combined, blended, melded, whatever word you want to use, nothing is guaranteed in and of itself. But this time a year ago, supporters of the downtown bond initiative spoke in terms of the importance of demonstrating that we, the residents, were willing to invest in ourselves, about the signal we would be sending and the tenor and tone we would be defining for ourselves and those whom we hoped to welcome.
Critical mass describes the existence of sufficient momentum in a social system such that the momentum becomes self-sustaining and creates further and future growth. One thing leads to another. Where we are in ten, twenty or fifty years is in direct relation to where we go today and how we choose to get there. We're starting to see a glimmer of what can be when we put aside the petty and personal private agendas and define a destination and work as one to get there. How far we go is, as it's always been, up to us.
-bill kenny
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