Vacuuming up the leaves

Is there anything more ridiculous than the West Hartford Taxpayers Association?
It demands that we cut, cut, cut and then, when cuts are made, it screams NO! NOT THAT!
For Judy Aron, its vice president, to tell The Hartfor Courant that eliminating curbside leaf  vacuum truck pickup is “a direct hit on our senior citizens” is both [...]

The budget debacle

There’s something seriously wrong if taxpayers have gunned two straight budgets by wide margins.
So what is it?
One could argue that the problem is that town leaders are simply trying to spend more money than residents are willing to support. This clearly has some truth to it, but it’s simplistic.
Another alternative is that people are struggling [...]

Judge says no to dogs

Walbridge Road dog lover Faith Kilburn, who has 21 Shih Tzu dogs in her home, lost her appeal of a town order requiring her to get rid of nearly all of them, according to a story in today’s Hartford Courant.
Kilburn has 20 days to appeal — which she’ll no doubt do — and then the town [...]

Slashing services the only option

The choice that our town leaders face is clear: they can either slash education more deeply or they can dump long-established services that town residents value.
Today’s story in The Hartford Courant devotes too much space to debunking the misleading numbers used by the West Hartford Taxpayers Association — old news, guys! — and not enough to [...]

Blue Back Square cited as model for growth

 Blue Back Square now
Developer Richard Heapes was heaping it on in Maryland this week, according to a  story in The Gazette, which covers the DC suburbs.
Pushing for more developments like Blue Back Square, Heapes “pointed to a project his company, Street-Works, is building in West Hartford, Conn., as an example. West Hartford gave his company $50 million [...]

School board’s budget goals this year

Way back in January, the Board of Education approved its goals for this year’s budget:
The Budget Priorities are:
 1.      The budget will provide support for continued planning and implementation of the -2007-2011 four-year district goals as established by the Board.
2.      The budget will support student and teacher educational needs, growth in student enrollment and diversity [...]

Taking an ax to education

In the wake of the town council’s awful decision to slice $1.8 million from the proposed school budget, something has to give. Now we know what it might be, and it’s terrible.
The Board of Education has posted a list of potential cuts to reach the new budget goal that it never wanted. You can see [...]

Why don’t we have a skatepark?

This morning, I was sitting in my car and looking at the field beside Asylum that’s being transformed into more ballfields. It’s a good spot for some fields. I have no problem with them.
But it got me thinking about how decisions get made about what to fund and what to ignore.
I assume that Little League [...]

Should we be mad about the town’s proposed budget?

An overview of the budget in today’s Hartford Courant provides a taste of the increasingly bitter debate about the spending plan town leaders are going to adopt next week. It’s must reading for anyone who cares.
Although it’s written backwards — correcting misinformation before telling the story itself (an obvious favor to town officials) — it’s still [...]

Let’s integrate West Hartford’s schools

It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that something’s dreadfully wrong with the racial balance in West Hartford’s schools.
In a town where minorities make up a third of the student population, Smith School’s minority enrollment is just shy of two-thirds of the total and Charter Oak counts four out of five students as minorities.
Those numbers [...]