Happy new year!

We should see the results of Blue Back Square start to roll in 2007. Let’s hope that it proves half as helpful as promised.

And let’s hope that revaluation doesn’t kill us on taxes, create a fight over school funding or make us forget that we’re all in this together. Wise leadership at town hall and a little help from Hartford would make a difference. Pray that we get it.

Bye, bye, drunken Evelyn

St. Joseph’s College announced today that Evelyn Lynch, who got caught driving drunk after bashing into a parked car in a quiet residential neighborhood near the school, is leaving as of Dec. 31. Of course, she’s been gone since her arrest so she’s really already history.

Let me be among the first to say good riddance.

There are rumors floating around that Kevin Sullivan, our lieutenant governor, could be hired to take her place. Now I’m no great fan of Kevin’s — he’s a little too pompous for my tastes — but he’d make a fine choice. He’d restore the school’s ties to the community, perhaps grab some state cash for it, and be the perfect guy to lead the college into a co-ed future that seems inevitable.

I love having St. Joseph’s in town. It’s a good school and a beautiful campus. I want the place to thrive.

Getting rid of Lynch is a terrific step forward for the college.

Dog-gonnit, the town must act

Look, it’s not that I don’t have sympathy for Walbridge Road resident Faith Kilburn, who wants to keep her 22 little Shih Tzus until they’ve gone to the great dog park in the sky. “They are my children,” she said, according to today’s account in The Hartford Courant.

But much as those of us who have dogs hate to admit it, dogs are not childen. They are, in the end, dogs.

So the town’s planning and zoning commission was, if anything, too kind in giving Ms. Kilburn two full years to reduce the number of dogs down to three in order to comply with land use laws. She did nothing, of course, and now the deadline’s at hand.

I’m not itching to see the little pooches hanging outside a Korean market or something. But they need to live somewhere other than a residential home on a quiet street in a quiet town.

If Ms. Kilburn really wanted to keep all the dogs, she could have moved to any number of places where the authorities don’t much care what you do on private property, whether it’s having a 101 Dalmations or firing shotguns at the UFOs that fly over. West Hartford is not one of those kind of places. We’re the kind of place that doesn’t let you shine a light skyward because it contributes to light pollution (another good rule, by the way).

Ms. Kilburn can have all the dogs she likes. She just can’t have them in heavily regulated West Hartford, where the only thing we love more than Starbucks is a new ordinance or two to keep everybody in line. It’s my kind of town.