Brooms and Dust

The ladies and gentlemen of our City Council will, by the time you are reading this, have settled in, rolled up sleeves, sharpened pencils and started work on the many and varied tasks that will take and make up enormous amounts of their time and talents in the course of the next two years.

I used "our" deliberately in that description of the neighbors whom we have elected even if you, in particular, didn't vote for some, part or any of them. Neither did I. That's the beauty of our form of governance, freedom of choice-pretty grand idea, eh? And not too shabby in practice, either.

We fail and succeed as individuals, families, neighborhoods, cities, states, and countries (a bit reminiscent of "Our Town," or just me?) on the strength of our choices and the consequences of each choice we make or do not make.

That's as true for those serving on our City Council and Board of Education as it is with those whom we send to the state house or Washington D. C. I started to hear/read mutterings and murmurings about results the day after Election Day, but all of that is old noise now and does little more than distract us from giving full attention to this moment and its meanings.

We should turn to the challenges facing all of us, undaunted by the scale and scope of what is yet to be started but heartened by the efforts of those who came and who brought us this far and fast.

Those whom we've elected know we're a city in love with brave beginnings but whose interest flags when instant solutions take too long. Doubt me? Then please name five priorities that the previous City Council had when it assumed office. Between us, I'd settle for three. Yeah, like I said; that's our big problem, paying attention (and following through).

As a city, we have opportunities in all directions but while our aspirations are, and should be, high our wallets are flat and thin. The cliche about measuring twice before cutting once certainly applies to every aspect of operations in our city government, and to some extent for many taking seats as new alderpersons was the voter mandate that brought them to the City Council.

Unrealistic expectations can be a source of  later disappointments and resentments. We've done it before and I would hope we strive to NOT do it again. The only expectation we should have is that each of them will do their very best. Those we've elected deserve our full support now regardless of where the circles were filled in on November 3rd.

We do not have the luxury to stand and watch others work to rebuild Norwich. We have to take back ownership of our city for ourselves and our families. No one knows everything, but everyone knows something. That's the difference between knowing what to do and doing it. Knowledge is power but making a decision to act is the key.
-bill kenny

Take Back the City

I attended Saturday’s presentation on the thirty-five million dollar police station in what I’m told was the ‘old Sears Building’ in a then bustling, downtown Norwich that could have been a Norman Rockwell Saturday Evening Post magazine cover but had ceased to exist at some point in the Sixties.

To hear those times described by folks who lived here then and wore much younger persons’ clothes, those were the days of Big Cotton. If only the past could be the Present what need of a future would we have? As it turns out, the concern might be better phrased as what kind of a future will we have?  

Who among us ‘new residents’ hasn’t heard how downtown was so crowded on Thursday nights that the children, well-behaved (of course), attentive and ever-mindful on the hands of their moms and dads, had to walk in the streets around Franklin Square because the sidewalks were so jammed with shoppers there was just no place else to go.

Not that much later, we did figure out someplace (else) to go, thanks to the interstate highway system and away we went, leaving Chelsea with a morass of one-way streets that make sure you can’t get there from here, a lot of empty buildings in various states of disrepair and disrepute and misty-water colored memories of the way we were.

I’ve only been to half the meetings on the police station but there are two issues, in my opinion, at work here, joined at the PowerPoint slide but not actually sharing a common reality.

What I’ve come away with so far at two very poorly attended meetings is that people are  supportive and vocal in that support, of the Norwich Police Department, and agree with the Chief of Police when he very gently suggests the current station is less than adequate.

The descriptive used Saturday was ‘transform’ which led me to thoughts of Megan Fox, lots of thoughts (some salacious to be honest), but we didn’t mean those Transformers.

What was offered instead was the same rationale that created the Wauregan Hotel, the Mercantile Exchange, the Haymarket Building and half a dozen other public money projects-what I call the Single Building Conspiracy- at a total cost of close to one hundred million dollars but didn’t get enough people into downtown to fill a phone booth assuming those still existed.  

We are assured this time we can't miss (or at least we hope so). Just a little more patience is all we need and we’ll see downtown bloom again. This is a lot like Saul on the road to Damascus and suspending belief while helpful isn't necessarily hopeful. And that's the rub. Hope is always important but hope is not a plan and Norwich needs a plan more than downtown needs another transformative building.
-bill kenny