Safety in Numbers

I was on the Charter Revision Committee at the turn of the last century (that really does make us sound a lot older than some of us are), actually from the waning months of 1999 through the near summer of 2000. 

One of the things that fascinated me at that time, having (only) lived here for less than a decade, was how we chose to concentrate on the concerns we shared rather than the differences and distinctions each of us brought to the table. 

Admittedly we had the good fortune of having remarkable talented people, present story-teller excepted, with exceptional people serving in leadership positions and making sure we remained focused on the challenges we had been asked to examine and on the solutions we worked to propose to the City Council who had appointed us.

We had committee members from East Great Plains, Norwichtown, Taftville, and Greenville and a number of other places as well, as I recall (memories get a little hazy as you move along life’s highway), many of whom knew one another from other involvements and interactions around the city.

As not only The New Guy but also someone who had lived 5,000 miles away for a decade and a half, I was intrigued by how an abstraction, the City of Norwich, always took precedence and priority over the localized issues of the individual villages that constitute the city. I was also very proud to call “neighbors” people who could place a deserved emphasis on the greater good.

We recognized as a group at that time that our actions, and especially our inactions — sins, if you’re so inclined, of both commission and omission — jeopardized our chances of continuing our progress as a city, or of having any progress in the first place. It seems to me, at least, that we recognize this fact less and less often as our politics become more personal and petulant.

We lose sight too often that there's no confederacy of dunces keeping us, as a city, from becoming and remaining successful; we do it to ourselves, and we need to stop beating up one another for short-term (and short-sighted) gains in order to reap long-term benefits for all of us.

A previous Mayor, now the City Council President Pro Tempore, initiated Saturday meetings very early in his term, held in fire houses throughout the city on a variety of topics, but nearly as often with no fixed agenda at all. They were an opportunity for all of us, whatever our neighborhood or village, to remind each other ‘there are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.’

The meetings came to be called One City Forums and the number of residents who participated ebb and flowed with the seasons, but everyone who attended I believe felt their voices had been heard. I had always hoped the meetings were a roadmap to where we were going, not a souvenir postcard of where we once were.

-bill kenny

There's Safety in Numbers

With apologies to whomever's online post I stole this from, there are 10 kinds of people in the world. Those who understand the binary system and those who don't. And you wonder why I have trouble when things get all mathy on me. Read on, McDuff or McDuffette.

This past Saturday morning's workshop with the Norwich Board of Education and the City Council filled the conference room at the Central Fire House. That's good news until you realize it's a relatively small room (it can only accommodate 55 people and of all the places in Norwich we might be tempted to 'jam people in' I don't think it'd be the Central Fire House) and, aside from a Bulletin reporter, that there was hardly anyone in the room who was not working for the school system or for the city administration.

It's disheartening in a city that saw its population increase by over 12%, according to the 2010 US Census, with over 3,750 students in Pre-kindergarten through high school (that doesn't include Norwich Free Academy), so few parents and/or residents were able to attend a session that may well define the tenor, tone and direction of not only this year's city budget but the manner in which future municipal budgets are developed.

I'm not suggesting the published report wasn't accurate in portraying a renewed sense of cooperation between those members of both elected bodies on Saturday. On the contrary, I can remember years when City Council hearings on the school's budget requests were shifted to a middle school gymnasium because so many people wanted to attend you'd have thought Governor Malloy was speaking.

Those days seem to be over and, not surprisingly, no one mourns their passing. The expression 'think globally, act locally' works only if we are, indeed, willing to act and accept the responsibilities of our actions locally. Let's face it, when we look to Hartford and Washington D.C., there's a lot more confrontation and a lot less collaboration on almost every issue we can imagine.

At the state and federal level, the attitude seems more 'for me to look good, you (the other side) need to look bad' always forgetting the dangerous part of the phrase 'zero-sum' is the former. And then we wonder why our national debt is at over fourteen trillion dollars and climbing.

To acknowledge we can't afford to do business in Norwich the way we always have is a blinding glimpse of the obvious, but based on the low turnout for so many public hearings on issues ranging from the City's Plan of Conservation and Development, through suggestions on improving the downtown revitalization programs to budget workshops like the one held Saturday, we have to do better at owning the future.

We have to get comfortable with the realization that we are the ones who make the final choices on our future and the paths we walk to get there. These are our children, our downtown, our neighborhoods, with our businesses, schools, police, streets and sidewalks (and the thousands of other moving parts that make Norwich, Norwich). No one else will care for them they way we should. We must stop waiting for someone to step up and, instead, become the someone who does. -bill kenny

There's Safety in Numbers

I had someone explain to me last week, as if I were not aware of it, that 'Norwich is not ...' (a town in this region known for having Julia Roberts work in a pizzeria). The person making that observation looked nothing like Carmen San Diego who would know these things, but I've lived in southeastern Connecticut long enough to recognize the truth in that statement. As a matter of fact, the list of other places that Norwich is NOT is longer than my arm, but I think that's part of the problem that residents, old and new, have with our city and with one another.

"How can we be in if there is no outside?' We need to agree on definitions of who we are, as residents and neighbors, and why we are here. I will concede there are people who have settled in Norwich as a result of losing a bar bet; we can probably remove them from this discussion; but everyone else, old, young, male, female, whatever color in the rainbow you choose to be, all the rest of us are in this together, some more so than others. And if I may, let's define ourselves in positive terms.

As a parent of two young children when my wife and I settled here in the fall of 1991 neither we nor Norwich are the same as we enter early August of 2011. What we are looking for now, a small city with interesting places to meet and restaurants in which to eat, is different from what those with school children seek, or those working shifts at one of the casinos or those who lived their lives here and are looking forward to a quiet retirement. And all of look to those who lead the city to deliver to each of us what we want.

Those who have been here for decades have memories and meanings that those who've arrived more recently can't comprehend or understand. Long-time residents look at downtown and see the ghosts of Norwich past and fear that none of what once was can ever return. Others, driving through the same downtown to work beyond the city, see potential and promise all along the route even if it's not 'textbook downtown' while still others see only empty storefronts and defeat. Our challenge is not that we each see a different Norwich but that each of our visions of where we live shares a common theme that has us as victims who are powerless to change our own story.

That's where we need to accept that change begins with us and moves from house to house, street to street and across every neighborhood. We've tried countless variations of "help needs to come from Hartford or Washington or from the lone developer on the grassy knoll." And when all is said, nothing is done. 

Some of us seem to think we must do everything ourselves and wait, somewhat aloof, until the world is ready to find us. Except when you look at the history of here, Norwich has always been at its best when it has been a part of the bigger world. It's when we've retreated into our separate villages and eyed those approaching from beyond our borders with suspicion and distrust that we have failed. We've spent so much time waiting for a moment that we cannot even define, much less recognize.

It's what we do in the space between our birth and death, choosing to be an exclamation or an explanation, that matters. We have become a city of cynics who know the price of everything and the value of nothing. Every new idea, every different proposal, is examined to see what benefit 'they' derive at 'our expense.' How about this, who cares? 

There's a long time yet until the City Council's public hearing on the Economic Development Bond proposals on August 16th and a great deal more to learn on every side of that discussion. When we talk to one another, not at each other; when we choose collaboration over confrontation; when we seek to be inventive rather than hurl invective, no matter who we have been until that moment, we all become citizens of the same city, the city we each call home, no matter our language, culture or color.
-bill kenny

Safety in Numbers

It's been an intense, if not productive, fortnight here in The Rose City as we creep towards a decision on the next municipal operating budget for the fiscal year starting 1 July. Last week, two City Council members asked Norwich Public Utilities for $202,000 to fund the salary and benefits of two school resource officers the Board of Education eliminated from their budget as part of their financial reorganization that included closing two schools and reallocating students and functions.

A day later, underscoring the pain throughout the state as revenues continue to fall short of both projections, and actual expenses, the State Police announced they would be removing nineteen troopers from schools across Eastern Connecticut to save an estimated 1.2 million dollars.

Meanwhile the Norwich Police Department received a federal grant of over $230,000 for a river patrol boat that some have wondered if it's necessary, without ever defining what the present posture is or asking what the true needs are. I keep seeing Crocker and Tubbs speeding across the Harbor in a cigar boat with Jan Hammer in the background and hope, really hope, there's more involved here than that.

The Norwich Teachers League was the subject of a LOT of on-line commentary from local readers for not offering contract concessions to the city without assurances the City Council would fully fund the Board of Education's budget. Many home-owners across the city feel they are at the end of their financial rope and insist the City Council hold to its own vow of a flat budget while suggesting those who live here with school-age children, as renters and not homeowners, are not carrying the same amount of the tax burden as they are. Not just they see public education, and the percentage of the municipal budget needed to fund it, as an expense rather than an investment.

We're a funny lot, we really are (though it's probably hard to see the humor right now through the pain). We prefer problems that are familiar (and the more general the description of the problem, the better) rather than risk solutions or ideas that are not. I listened and read as people argued about the costs of policemen in classrooms as if it were the most normal expense in the world, except in the world in which most of us grew up, there were no police in our classrooms.

Twenty-first century schools have more metal detectors than our airports, for, sadly, very good reasons. Instead of expending the time, talent and resources, to understand the underlying causes and mitigating them, we've expanded our notion of 'the cop on the beat' to include the hallways between the school cafeteria and the library. We're arguing about the price of gas instead of wondering why we got into the clown car in the first place. An argument I heard debated how nineteen state troopers can cost 'only' 1.2 million dollars while two Norwich police persons are over two hundred thousand dollars. I think that ignores the larger question: how did we become people who need to do this to our own children?

Some of our Brave New World looks a lot like the old one that technology, access to tools, equality of opportunity and enhanced diversity were all going to change. The gap between the promise and the performance has grown not only exponentially but obscenely. We've got more children having free or low-cost breakfast in schools than ever before because how we live with one another has shifted from when you and I were school-age. We have health clinics in schools because we've concluded we need to have them someplace and can't figure out where else they could be located.

We've spent, literally as well as a figuratively, a generation using government to accomplish programs that have little to do with why we created government in the first place, offering the argument to one another that 'someone has to do it!' Unless and until we can agree to define and then refine those tasks our government should be doing and which ones are our responsibilities, we can hold budget hearings until the cows come home (and guess who'll pay the dairy subsidy?) and never fix the fundamental problems. We'll continue to put out fires with gasoline and take solace that our mileage may vary, but sadly, never the outcome.

-bill kenny