Getting from What Is to What If.....

I offered what follows just about a decade ago and here we are, coming full-circle again and so often, you'd think we would be dizzy by now.

I suspect though cannot prove it we here in Norwich like beginnings and endings a lot more than we seem to like all the stuff in the middle (explains those discarded Oreo cookies I see roadside, along with those tossed nips bottles). We correctly see elections as harbingers of change but don't always appreciate change is a never-ending process and not a product—a journey, rather than a destination. There is no Grandma’s House towards which we’re driving. And the road can and does often feel like it goes on forever. 

Every day, despite COVID concerns and public health precautions, city administrators and their professional staff, joined by, and with, volunteers on advisories, board, commissions, and committees, all of them our neighbors, begin again as every aspect of municipal government’s ability to deliver goods and services in response to our desires for a particular program (sometimes to complement another one and sometimes in competition with it), is balanced against the ability to afford the delivery of those goods and services.

Government at all levels shouldn’t be a spectator sport, but because of the pace of our lives, we sometimes do not or cannot choose to invest the time in much more than glancing at a headline about an issue, if we're lucky, or more often (and more, unfortunately) when someone posts an observation on a social media platform we treat as fact. Making informed decisions means evaluating actual and factual information. And that is NOT an opinion.

Most of us have a general sense this coming budget season in Norwich will involve hard choices almost pre-ordained to make no one happy. That's not exactly news, it's been happening for years so it's likely to continue. 

What shouldn't continue is our lack of interest. If politics is the art of the possible, then, without our informed opinions and observations, we’ll see elected and appointed officials attempting mission impossible and when the fog lifts and we look for someone to blame for results we don’t like, we should remember to look no further than the nearest mirror.

Almost every day and evening there are public meetings on the nuts and bolts operating issues and many of the spice of life aspects that define us as a city--be they Board of Education, the Historic District Commission, Public Safety, Commission on the City Plan, Public Works and so many others-usually without anyone from the public participating. Yes, I know, 'Jeepers, Wally, it's hard to understand how to use Zoom meetings,' except it's not. If you want something badly enough you'll find a way; if not, you'll find an excuse.

Check the city’s website, pick a meeting and settle down at your keyboard and monitor if you cannot personally attend. That's the blessing within the curse of COVID, the convergence of technologies that allows us to remain physically separated but intellectually engaged in how our city is run, from in-person, via the city's website, online meetings. or email conversations with elected officials and/or one another. 

We can do this because quite frankly we have to. We're all there is and we cannot leave decisions about tomorrow for anyone who is not ready and willing for today.
-bill kenny