I started sitting and typing what passes for thoughts, hopes, and dreams (interspersed with the occasional invective, veiled threat, and innuendo) exactly ten years ago. Wow. I'm rarely at a loss for words, as you would well know if you've been reading this at any time during the last decade, but that's really all I have today, wow.
These are the ones that got it all started (plus some Grateful Dead just because).
Driving past Washington Street this morning, it looks like a growth industry is the hardware business-selling neighbors large plywood sheets and paint so they can erect signs to yell at one another on the issue of spot zoning.
New signs insisting on the right to do with their property what they wish, possibly from those who've sold options to developers, angry at 'the select few' (as their sign says) who insist this commercial endeavor be turned away.
Another sign boasts about the increase in tax revenues and the additional (service) jobs a new mini-sprawl, I meant mini-mall, will bring to Norwich (even though the pharmacy hailed as 'new' will be the existing one from across town.)
Jobs, much like Einstein's matter, can neither be created nor destroyed, at least in development models. If we take six inches from the front of the blanket and put it on the back, the blanket is NOT a foot longer. Let's hope we do NOT need a thirty-seven-minute PowerPoint slide show Monday night at Norwich City Hall for that to be understood.
Everyone's signs ignore, or seem to, our inability to look ahead and plan accordingly.
When you don't know where you're going, any road will get you there. Right now, most of us think any movement, even the circles in which we are turning, is the same thing as direction. Most don't know the difference between smart growth and economic development (all ducks ARE birds but not all birds are ducks) and until we learn that, we're fated to waste a lot of time thinking we're having a contest between 'property rights' and 'NIMBY'. It's not really what it's about.
Meanwhile, those whose agenda is not and will NEVER be that of advancement and enhancement of Norwich's economic basis will prosper while residents remain reactive instead of proactive.
-bill kenny
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