West Hartford-based Colt could lose contract

 From a forum on www.militaryltd.com:

“The debate over the Army’s choice to purchase hundreds of thousands of M4 carbines for its new brigade combat teams is facing stiff opposition from a small group of senators who say the rifle may be inferior to others already in the field.
“In an April 12 letter to acting Army Secretary Pete Geren, Oklahoma Republican Sen. Tom Coburn said purchase of the M4 – a shortened version of the Vietnam-era M16 – was based on requirements from the early 1990s and that better, more reliable weapons exist that could give Army troops a more effective weapon.
“Coburn asked the Army to hold a “free and open competition” before inking sole-source contracts worth about $375 million to M4 manufacturer, West Hartford, Conn.-based Colt Defense – which just received a $50 million Army contract for M4s on April 20.
“I am concerned with the Army’s plans to procure nearly half a million new rifles outside of any competitive process,” Coburn wrote in the mid-April letter obtained by Military.com.”

Anybody know whether this would have any impact one way or another on our town?

Stupid guy from Bristol

Stealing a car with a bad muffler was 25-year-old Samual Ramos’s first mistake, but hardly the biggest.

Ramos, a Bristol resident, stole the 1984 Buick LeSabre in Bristol but came to the attention of West Hartford police when he refused to pull over after officers noticed the loud muffler, according to a weekend story in The Hartford Courant.

He dumped the car near Trout Brook Drive and vanished – until the next morning when he tried to force his way into a Trout Brook home.

That was mistake number two.

The ex-military homeowner managed to fight off Ramos and “had no trouble” subduing the guy until police arrived, the paper reported.

Ramos had spent the night sleeping in a car outside, and apparently wanted to make a phone call to help him escape the area.

Instead, he’ll be sleeping in a cell for a long, long time.

It doesn’t pay to mess with us here in West Hartford, as Ramos learned. We’re not about to let some punk from Bristol get away with anything.

You know Ramos is a loser anyway. I mean, who steals a 23-year-old LeSabre? Jeez….

New hi-def studio for Channel 30 in West Hartford

Good news from the Hartford Business Journal.

West Hartford’s Conservation Commission is likely to give the nod Monday for the television station “to construct a new, approximately $20 million state-of-the-art television studio,” the weekly reported.

A groundbreaking is scheduled for August.

 Hartford Business Journal story link

Webster Hill intruder may be ID’d

Channel 30 is reporting that police “have identified a ‘person of interest’ who may have approached a 10-year-old fourth grader in the bathroom of Webster Hill Elementary School on Friday. ”

The school went into lockdown mode Friday afternoon after the student told a teacher what the man said to him.

“It was something inappropriate,”  Lt. Donald Melanson told the television station. “[We] really can’t say the words, but it was nothing. He didn’t touch the child or make any physical contact.”

Police said the man fled the school through a side door and jumped a fence leading into the surrounding neighborhood, according to Channel 30.

I’ve been in our schools enough to know that it’s easy to gain entry and walk around. That’s mostly because we have chosen to make the schools reasonably accessible to the community so that parents can come and go, participating all the time. It is one of West Hartford’s strengths.

But it only takes a single incident like this to call the whole long tradition into question. It’s so easy to see how things could have gone much worse.

Yet it’s important to keep in mind that what did happen is relatively minor. And it’s encouraging that the student wasted no time reporting the incident.

I hope we don’t have to make security our most important aim in school. That would be deeply sad.

I also hope that the police act swiftly.

Corporate polluter: The Hartford Courant

I felt sick this morning to find that the oh-so-sanctimonious Hartford Courant had seen fit to seal a square of plastic across a portion of its front page in order to attach yet another annoying ad, this time for a Berlin “active adult” development. Much as I hate front page ads like this — it sure proves how desperate newspapers are to make money — today’s is a new low. In recent months, they’ve put Post-It note ads, which are at least removeable, though still ridiculous.

But by sealing a piece of plastic onto the front page, they have effectively turned a paper that can be recycled safely and efficiently into one that harms the environment. It is short-sighted and the move of an awful corporate citizen to attach permanently these plastic squares to a newspaper. It’s an environmental travesty, a screw-you to every subscriber who cares about our planet.

I hope that every municipality and green group in Connecticut will speak out against this change before it becomes accepted practice.

Perhaps the Courant’s publisher might want to read its editorials sometimes. Live up to your own ideals, Courant, or the shut the hell up.

West Hartford Holocaust survivor tells his story

Danbury News-Times link

Our “fair share” of ECS funds

In one of the comments to another post, Joe Visconti echoes a claim that’s made by nearly every politician in town: that West Hartford deserves more state education aid.

Much as it hurts my own wallet, I disagree.

If the state has the money to pump more aid to schools, West Hartford should probably get some of it. But, really, the places that need help are not West Hartford and other rich suburban towns.

The schools that truly need more cash are in Hartford, Bridgeport, New Haven, Waterbury, New Britain and a couple of dozen other struggling communities where students live in impoverished conditions and have a hard time learning, for lots of reasons.

The future of our state — and our country — doesn’t rest on whether West Hartford can buy some more Smartboards. What really matters is that we find a way to educate students who face much bigger problems than the vast majority of kids here can even imagine. That takes expertise and money.

We all know that, however much we gripe about the waste so intrinsic to larger, more crooked communities.

I’d love to see my taxes go down because ECS aid rises. But what I’d love to see even more than that is a generation of kids in our troubled cities graduating with something close to the skills that West Hartford’s students possess. That’s how we’ll bequeath a better world to our children.

The General Assembly and the governor need to keep their focus on improving the worst schools, not fussing about how to give a little more to the state’s best schools.

Shame on West Hartford’s council

The last-minute decision to wipe out $1.8 million in school spending without public debate is atrocious, from any perspective.

First off, major policy shifts such as slicing into education should be the result of careful, public deliberations, not the result of panic at a looming tax hike. The eight town council members who went along with this deserve our scorn for their refusal to let us all in on the secret before they took an ax to the school spending plan that had already been carved down carefully by the Board of Education.

But more important is that we have now, as a community, chosen to put less money into our schools than we know they need.

Superintendent David Sklarz told reporters that the reduction could mean larger classes, fewer teachers and other hits to classroom education.

No doubt.

If there’s $1.8 million worth of fat in the school budget, then by all means cut it. And fire the officials who gave us this spending plan to begin with.

I strongly doubt there’s much to be saved without targeting all kinds of necessary programs and services for our students.

Even worse, this fly-by-night decision sends an awful message to everybody: that we don’t care enough about education to make sure it’s fully funded.

Once we start down that road, we’re doomed.

I find it detestable that town council members did this without prior notice and without giving us any better reason that it made this year’s tax hike a little lower.

Our schools are the pride of this town. Our council, I’m afraid, is nothing to brag about. 

“I’m the zookeeper,” says West Hartford zealot

AJ Gutman’s Steele Road chalet has become an animal sanctuary, according to a fawning, ridiculous story in today’s Hartford Courant.

Gutma’s got 30 iguanas, “a turtle, two tortoises, several geckos and other lizards, some frogs, a few parrots, and a ‘genetically diverse’ dog named Tali, between 50 and 60 animals in all. She doesn’t keep a precise count.” the story reported.

Clearly, the piece was written because Gutman is trying to get $15,000 annually in donations to keep her menagerie fed and content in her 9-room home on a quiet residential street.

I haven’t looked up the relevant statute, but can it be possible that you can’t have two dozen little dogs in your home but you can have the Bronx Zoo? I hope not.

There’s a place in the world for kind-hearted souls like Mrs. Gutman. But it’s not in the middle of densely populated West Hartford. It’s out in the country, where animals in this quantity belong. We can’t have people operating private zoos in their homes like this or there’s no point to regulating what owners do at all.

I trust that a zoning enforcement officer will be knocking on Mrs. Gutman’s door tomorrow morning.
 

Jonathan Harris goes on Food Stamps

For the past three weeks, I learned from The Associated Press, West Hartford’s own Sen. Jonathan Harris has been limiting his intake to what he can afford on Food Stamps.

Here’s what he said:

“On the spiritual side, when I did eat, I was more present,” said Connecticut state Sen. Jonathan Harris, D-West Hartford, who just finished three weeks on food stamp funds. “Usually I’m watching TV, shoveling things in, not thinking that I am blessed.”
Harris said he’s lucky to have a car to get to a grocery store and a kitchen in which to prepare food. And like {Oregon Gov.] Kulongoski will have to do, he had to resist the free goodies at state receptions and business lunches.
The experience has helped him as a policy maker, Harris said, in discussions such as whether to expand the earned-income tax credit in Connecticut.
“I personally felt how a few extra hundred dollars in the bank to supplement my nutrition would make a major difference in my life,” he said.

Now this is fascinating. I suggest we put the whole General Assembly on Food Stamps, and keep doing it for a few months. It’d be eye-opening, except for Fairfield County’s delegation, who would all cheat.