I Smell Home Cooking

Suspect your house is a lot like mine in terms of activity and hours in the day to accomplish things. We’re already into February and it was just the other day we wished each other a Happy New Year. 

Of course, as we should know by now, it takes more than wishing to make happy happen. And for any number of reasons, ranging from meteorological to and through fiscal, this is seemingly yet another winter of our discontent. 

The challenge of change, here in Norwich as well as everywhere else, is to never lose sight that it’s 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, city administrators and their professional staff, joined by, and with, volunteers on advisories, boards, 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.

Governance at all levels shouldn’t be a spectator sport, but because of the pace of our lives, we sometimes do not choose to invest the time in much more than glancing at a headline about a state or local issue. That becomes our level of engagement but elevates the degree of difficulty in arriving at decisions.

We should have a general sense this coming budget season will involve still-more hard choices almost pre-ordained to make no one happy. If politics is the art of the possible, without our informed opinions and observations, we’ll watch elected and appointed officials attempt Mission Impossible. When that happens and we look for someone to blame for the results we don’t like, we should look no further than the nearest mirror.

Almost every weekday 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 the Board of Education, the Historic District Commission, Public Safety, Commission on the City Plan, Public Works and so many others-usually without (hardly) anyone from the public attending.

Check the city’s website and pick a meeting. You might want to take a look at the online posting of recent meeting minutes so you are caught up when you take a seat or click on a Zoom meeting link. 

Odds are you’ll know one or more of the volunteers on the board or committee, so the ‘them’ factor disappears immediately, which leaves only ‘us’ which is as it should be if we are ever going to reinvent ourselves and our city. And since we should strive to speak to, rather than at, one another, why not use this as an opportunity to practice listening as well as speaking.

-bill kenny