Click above to read the current "About Town" column;  unofficial information ONLY found on this webpage. ANNOTATED BIBLIOGRAPHY FOR THIS SITE HERE.
T O P I C S   O F   I N T E R E S T   -   M E E T I N G S    -    C O M M E N T A R Y 


Lachat Upper Field 2013.
Margaret Wirtenberg

TAXES:
LIFE IN GENERAL:
Annotated Bibliography and Research Source Page Link...

FOR YOUR CONVENIENCE (WHEN "GOOGLING" WITHIN OUR SITE DOESN'T REALLY SATISFY YOUR NEEDS):  a page summarizing all internal links by topic!



FINE ARTS PROJECT '09  "With a little bit of luck" WestonArts has played its part finding $$ to renovate the high school auditorium in 2008.  

CHRONOLOGICAL ORDER:  AGENDAS FOR MEETINGS OF BOARDS, COMMISSIONS, ETC. IS IN THE TOWN CLERK'S OFFICE: Town Clerk's room reservation shorthand names

SELECTMEN'S MEETING SCHEDULE 2013
Schedule of Selectmen’s meeting for 2013 (which will be at 7:30pm in the Town Hall Meeting Room, and we assume, all televised) - Revised

January 3rd and 17th
February 7th and 27th (was February 25th)
March 7th and 21th
April 4th and 22nd
May 2nd and 16th
June 10th and 20th
July 8th (July 4th on Thursday)
August 1st and 15th
September 3rd (Rosh Hashanah on the 5th) and 19th
October 3rd and 17th
November 7th and 18th
December 5th and 19

Revised 11/15/12
Please note that "regular meetings" in 2013 are not all on the first and third Thursday!  In fac0t, half of the months include an exception!  There are 6 non-first/third Thursdays this year, two of which come because a national or religeous holiday falls on Thursday (July 4th and September 5/6).


About Town still relying only on Town of Weston website (go to "meetings calendar" on dropdown menu) for this month's MEETING CALENDAR);  below, meetings we plan to attend in the near future, or those that are worth watching on Town TV.  Non-Town of Weston events in italics also not in bold face.


ALL MEETINGS ATTENDED:  our action notes, in reverse chronological order (link directly to those taken at the Board of Selectmen here)
NOTE:  Posted in the Town Clerk's Office September 8, 2004, the following memo to Town Employees from the Office of the Town Administrator..."Due to the increase in Freedom of Information requests and the time involved in copying audio and video tapes, the Town will no longer provide copies in house.  All tapes will be sent to an outside vendor for duplication.  Cost for audio tape is $10.00 per tape with a $15.00 round trip delivery charge.  Cost for a video tape is $25.00 per tape with a $15.00 round trip delivery charge."  Check out meeting videos online at Town of Weston website.

Notes for these meetings previously attended are organized in reverse chronological order:  Also, WILDTHINGS webpage here.

Our Selectmen's notes RECENT; and as far back as May 30, 2002, click here. 
Building Committee
Board of Finance
Board of Education
ANOTHER link to our notes including other Boards, Commissions and Committees:  Capital Planning Committee, Board of Ethics, former Cemetery Committee, Charter Revision Commission 2003 and 2011-2012
ALL MEETINGS ATTENDED BY ABOUT TOWN WITH LINKS TO AGENDAS/NOTES - 2009-2011

GOVERNMENT:  

CONNECTICUT GENERAL ASSEMBLY:  
Who are YOUR government representatives?  Weston now represented by John McKinney and Toni Boucher in the Senate and John Shaban of Redding took over the 135th District seat in the House.

Ken Dixon: Surviving the Capitol floor's midnight hour
CT POST
Published 3:44 pm, Friday, June 7, 2013

Here's your Legislature in its death throes the other night as the five-month-plus 2013 legislative session bumped up against its midnight witching hour.  I'm standing in the House, watching the sausage factory get even more primitive. It's loud, with the distressed noise of dying legislation.  The decibel level is way up. First-term House Majority Leader Joe Aresimowicz, D-Berlin, is surrounded by deputies who are combination gatekeepers/bodyguards at this point.

Across the chamber, veteran House Minority Leader Larry Cafero, possibly plumbing his Italian roots, is more like an opera conductor, his arms crossed, scanning the room, shooting a cuff every couple minutes to look at his watch.

With a half-hour left, I'm humming Howlin' Wolf's "Killing Floor," which is written ambivalently enough to think it's either about a guy being murdered over a woman, or about romantic rejection forcing a man back to work in the old Chicago stock yards, where he's killing cattle.  I can practically hear an undertone of "moo ... moo" coming up from the lawmakers, as five months of work, as thousands of bills, hundreds of hours of public hearings and countless deals, come to a crescendo. There have to be close to 300 people here in various stages of stress, amusement, rage, befuddlement or impending relief.

"I'm down here on the killin' floor," I hum to myself in a Chicago blues cadence, happily watching the panorama, with Democrats over on the right and the Republicans in front of me. After all, anything waiting this late in the legislative session probably deserves to die of neglect.

Earlier in the day, Democratic gremlins tried to sneak language into a budget-related bill that would have accelerated the controversial drivers' license program for undocumented immigrants from 2015, as voted upon a week earlier, to July 1 of this year.  It wasn't a great time to be caught doing that, because Cafero's 52-member caucus never has more power against the 98 Democrats -- one vacancy -- than on this last day. At noon, Cafero, R-Norwalk, told Democrats that business in the House could essentially end in hours ... of ... slow ... questions ... and ... amendments, unless the language were taken out, pronto.

"This is one of the most reckless, irresponsible moves I've seen in my decade-and-a-half-long tenure in the Legislature," said Rep. David Scribner, R-Brookfield, ranking member of the Transportation Committee.

Busted, Democrats, who conveniently could not find the culprit, agreed and later admitted it was supposed to have given the DMV some flexibility in starting out on its effort to give licenses to about 54,000 immigrants. But the nearly hidden insertion didn't exactly set the right tone for the day.  Sure, the vast majority of the big stuff had been completed. The budget was mostly finished, with its record spending levels and its controversial shifting of $6.4 billion from the $44 billion spending package to avoid a losing vote in the Democrat-controlled Senate over blowing through the Constitution State's constitutional spending cap.

But the 508-page legislation triggering the budget -- called an implementer -- was the last chance for legislative losers and lobbyists to get a piece of the action. The bill was needed if Democrats could continue to brag that they completed their budget on time and the part-time legislators could go back to their real jobs back home.  They had been at it since before the Newtown shootings, grappling, in a bipartisan manner, with a nasty budget deficit, which they finally bridged in a bipartisan deal at the end of December.

On the killin' floor of the House, it's now 20 minutes to 12. The 36-member Senate had packed up, finishing their work without the need for Sen. Eric Coleman, D-Hartford, an iron man who came in earlier in the week to vote for the budget just days after gall bladder surgery.  After Democratic leaders and Mark Ojakian, Gov. Dan Malloy's chief of staff, made nice with Cafero, House Republican deputies got together with their Democratic counterparts to agree on a list of bills that could win unanimous approval before the clock ran out.

The deal was, the bills would get called by House Clerk Martin Dunleavy as fast as he could read them. Lawmakers would move for their passage and inclusion on the Consent Calendar. There would be no discussion. First-term Speaker of the House Brendan Sharkey, D-Hamden, would then add the bill to the list, which would be voted on just before midnight.

Rep. Kim Fawcett, D-Fairfield, scoots over on the Republican side, trying to save a bill for her deskmate, Rep. Diana Urban of Stonington, who earned eternal enmity from the House GOP a few years back when she switched parties. When the bill is called a few minutes later, Cafero grabs the microphone and asks Sharkey to kill it.  Cafero is standing on the rug, next to his aisle seat halfway up the tiers of GOP desks. He looks at the clock over Sharkey's head and notices it's a couple minutes fast. He walks down to the front of the speaker's podium and announces it to staff.

He walks back up the tiers to his desk, where he's confronted by a representative from Cheshire named Al Adinolfi. Adinolfi's a short, older character who often looks as if he just took a big bite out of a lemon. A member of the Judiciary Committee, he once said that marijuana use caused someone's ear to fall off.  Adinolfi is standing on a tier above Cafero, face-to-face and pointing a finger at his leader. He wants to speak on one of the bills. This is not in the agreement with Democrats, Cafero replies, adding that Adinolfi should be happy that his bill will win passage. Depending on various accounts, Adinolfi says that he'll vote against the consent calendar if he's not allowed to speak.

Cafero, the maestro of political opera, at this point angrily steps up toward Adinolfi as if he might like to grab his neck and shake him for a while. Fortunately, Rep. John Piscopo of Thomaston stands between them.  Adinolfi scuttles up to his back-row seat. He's ashen-faced as various colleagues and staffers try to cool him down. The clock rolls up to a minute before midnight.  Sharkey calls for the vote on the consent calendar. Adinolfi, avoiding infamy, casts his vote and the two roll-call screens go all green.

The 2013 session is finished and a huge cheer of relief replaces the mooing on the legislative killin' floor.


PEOPLE:
According to the U.S. Bureau of the Census...it is simple to use U.S. Census 2000 or the new one, Census 2010: click HERE for SAMPLE OF WESTON DATA AND BLOCKGROUP MAP, and for more:


ENVIRONMENT:
Excellent I-BBC series on global water crisis - HERE.
Link HERE to Connecticut Fund for the Environment;
WOODLANDS COALITION...click HERE to join or just read of their reasons for being concerned about the future...345kV old power lines articles.

FROM THE UNIVERSITY OF CONNECTICUT:
Basic groundwater link: http://nemo.uconn.edu/

Update of Unofficial Weston Land Use Map in the works:

 
l
Imperviousness...what is it?
Click on the picture of Connecticut to the upper left.  What about installing more impervious surfaces on School Road (is the Sports Complex proposed surface and drainage any less permeable than the existing "Great Swamp" natural drainage system) ?
Should we start looking at this report again - especially since it addressed the issue of limitations regarding watering fields?  We did!  And now the School Building Committee has retained the firm which did the report (below) to draw up a working plan for water supply for our School Project.

NEMO visits Weston January 2005 and agrees with P&Z regarding need to care for groundwater resource;  FIRST (EARLY) GROUNDWATER FEASIBILITY STUDY OF WESTON PUBLIC SCHOOL CAMPUS: summary, conclusion and recommendations--click here.

And do you remember this from YR2000?
Wastewater Public Hearing Notes--May 25, 2000 continued to June 13, 2000 (by now some "old news"):
From the first night:  Weston resident Christopher Plummer, who attended the meeting on May 25, spoke for us all in a letter to the Editor of the 5-31-00 Westport NEWS, part of which is quoted below:

"We live in America because she allows us the freedom to improve and protect our land according to the rules of nature.  In short, she allows us privacy in cohesion with nature."
 

CT. D.E.P. "CONSENT ORDER" SIGNED, SEALED AND DELIVERED (as announced at Special Town Meeting 5-24-01);
WATER COMPANY LANDS, WATER QUALITY...REMEMBER THE DROUGHT?  HTTP://www.drought.state.ct.us/
Go to the links below for H20 Quality and Quantity Data:
USGS in Connecticut...the best there is when it comes to mapping, etc. The "umbrella agency" for hydrologic data as well.  Please find the "estimated use of water" 1995 report along with the chapter on "Wastewater Release:  Wastewater Treatment" which shows that States with heavy return of treated wastewater to surface water are Illinois and Ohio...but the big reclaimed wastewater States are Florida, California and Arizona.

Connecticut ranks in the middle in terms of amount of public water treatment release to surface water.  But in 1995, in CT Publicly Owned treatment facilities, there was zero--none-- re-use of treated wastewater ("reclaimed").

WESTON has plan for water recycling for high school and middle school...and the voters approved water conservation plan for high school and middle school at machine vote on June 28, 2001.  PROGRESS:  Nettleton contractors finishing up summer '02 on this job.  Connecticut SURFACE WATER conditions are reported (click below).  Nearby monitoring points are: the Saugatuck River (in Redding) and Sasco Brook (in Fairfield):

Surface water news to think about...red tide next?
USGS Surface Water Information--State Maps
Click below for USGS graphs measuring flow status in current "historical" period:
Average Daily Streamflow Conditions Plots for Connecticut
For future reference:  Ridgefield Water Company (part of Kelda/Aquarion) taking out water from the Saugatuck--December 7, 2000 Board of Selectmen's meeting discussed this matter.




Police Now Advise Assertive Response to Mass Attacks
By ERICA GOODE, NYTIMES
April 6, 2013

The speed and deadlines of recent high-profile shootings have prompted police departments to recommend fleeing, hiding or fighting in the event of a mass attack, instead of remaining passive and waiting for help.

The shift represents a “sea change,” said Chuck Wexler, executive director of the Police Executive Research Forum, which recently held a meeting in Washington to discuss shootings like those in Newtown, Conn., and Aurora, Colo.

The traditional advice to the public has been “don’t get involved, call 911,” Mr. Wexler said, adding, “There’s a recognition in these ‘active shooter’ situations that there may be a need for citizens to act in a way that perhaps they haven’t been trained for or equipped to deal with.”

Mr. Wexler and others noted that the change echoes a transformation in police procedures that began after the shooting at Columbine High School in 1999, when some departments began telling officers who arrived first on a scene to act immediately rather than waiting for backup. Since then, the approach has become widespread, as a succession of high-profile shootings across the country has made it clear that no city or town is immune and that police agencies must be prepared to take an active approach.

“We used to sit outside and set up a perimeter and wait for the SWAT team to get there,” said Michael Dirden, an executive assistant chief of the Houston Police Department. “Now it’s a recognition that time is of the essence and those initial responders have to go in,” he said, adding that since the Virginia Tech University shooting in 2007, the department has been training first responders to move in on their own when they encounter active gunfire.

Research on mass shootings over the last decade has bolstered the idea that people at the scene of an attack have a better chance of survival if they take an active stance rather than waiting to be rescued by the police, who in many cases cannot get there fast enough to prevent the loss of life.

In an analysis of 84 such shooting cases in the United States from 2000 to 2010, for example, researchers at Texas State University found that the average time it took for the police to respond was three minutes.

“But you see that about half the attacks are over before the police get there, even when they arrive quickly,” said J. Pete Blair, director for research of the university’s Advanced Law Enforcement Rapid Response Training Center and an author of the research, which is set to be published in a book this year.

In the absence of a police presence, how victims responded often made the difference between life and death, Dr. Blair said.

In 16 of the attacks studied by the researchers, civilians were able to stop the perpetrator, subduing him in 13 cases and shooting him in 3 cases. In other attacks, civilians have obstructed or delayed the gunman until the police arrived.

As part of the research, Dr. Blair and his colleagues looked at survival rates and the actions taken by people in classrooms under attack during the Virginia Tech massacre, in which Seung-Hui Cho killed 32 students and teachers before killing himself.

In two classrooms, the students and instructors tried to hide or play dead after Mr. Cho entered. Nearly all were shot, and most died. In a third classroom, Prof. Liviu Librescu, a Holocaust survivor, told his students to jump out the second-story window while he tried to hold the classroom door shut, delaying Mr. Cho from coming in. Professor Librescu was killed, but many of the students survived, and only three were injured by gunfire. In another classroom, where the students and teacher blocked the door with a heavy desk and held it in place, Mr. Cho could not get in, and everyone lived.

“The take-home message is that you’re not helpless and the actions you take matter,” Dr. Blair said. “You can help yourself and certainly buy time for the police to get there.”

Kristina Anderson, 26, who was shot three times during the Virginia Tech attack, said that every situation is different but that she thinks it can help for people to develop a plan for how they might act if a mass shooting occurred.

“Everywhere I go now, I think about exits and doorways and potential places to hide and things to barricade and fight back with,” Ms. Anderson said. “Some person has to take action and lead.”

Two instructional videos, one produced by Houston’s Office of Public Safety and Homeland Security and the other by the University of Wisconsin’s police department, recommend that civilians fight an attacker if options like escaping or hiding are not available.

Dennis Storemski, a former executive assistant chief in Houston’s police department and director of the public safety office that produced the video, called “Run. Hide. Fight.,” said the decision to produce it emerged from a realization that while first responders were “fairly well prepared” to deal with mass shootings, the public was not. The video has received over two million hits on YouTube, and the office gets requests every day from other police departments and government agencies that would like to use it, Mr. Storemski said.

He said initially, the suggestion that victims should fight back as a last resort stirred some controversy.

“We had a few people that thought that was not a wise idea,” Mr. Storemski said, but that in some cases fighting back might be the only option.

Susan Riseling, chief of police at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, said the Virginia Tech episode changed her thinking about how to advise students because it was clear that Mr. Cho had “one goal, and that seemed to be to kill as many people as possible before ending his life.”

The department’s video, screened during training sessions around the state but not available online, tells students to escape or conceal themselves if possible, but if those options are not available, to fight. In the video, students are shown throwing a garbage can at an attacker and charging at him as a group.

“If you’re face to face and you know that this person is all about death, you’ve got to take some action to fight,” Chief Riseling said.

What she worries about most, she said, is that spree shootings are becoming so common that she suspects people have begun to accept them as a normal part of life.

“That’s the sad part of it,” Chief Riseling said. “This should never be normal.”



REPORT OF 9-11 COMMISSION.


Some newly released September 11, 2001 photos (above)...

NOTE:  A few pictures, immediately above, are worth remembering after the Presidential Election year 2008 - guess the Wall Street meltdown and global sub-prime mortgage contagion over-trumped all other issues!

In Shanksville, Thousands Gather to Honor Flight 93 Victims
NYTIMES
By KATHARINE Q. SEELYE
September 10, 2011

SHANKSVILLE, Pa. — The dedication of a memorial here on Saturday to the 40 passengers and crew members who died on United Airlines Flight 93 on Sept. 11, 2001, provided an opportunity for two former presidents to appeal for unity.

Neither George W. Bush nor Bill Clinton specifically mentioned the fractured state of relations in Washington. But their sharing of a stage and their comments here in a field where Flight 93 slammed into the ground stood in sharp contrast to the current discord.

“We have a duty to find common purpose as a nation,” said Mr. Bush, who was president during the terrorist attacks of 9/11. In a warning that seemed aimed at his fellow Republicans, including presidential candidates, some of whom are calling for the United States to limit its footprint overseas, he warned that “the temptation of isolation is deadly wrong.”

Mr. Clinton thanked Mr. Bush — and President Obama — “for keeping us from being attacked again,” and the audience, previously somber and silent, applauded.

He also drew applause when he announced that he and the Republican House speaker, John A. Boehner, who was in the audience, had agreed to host a bipartisan fund-raising event in Washington to help raise the $10 million needed to complete the memorial here.

Their comments seemed an attempt to recapture — if only briefly — the unity that prevailed in the country after the terrorist attacks 10 years ago, which killed nearly 2,700 people at the World Trade Center in New York, 184 people at the Pentagon and the 40 people who were aboard Flight 93 when it plunged into a field here.

Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., who also spoke, echoed their sentiments. He acknowledged Mr. Bush as “the man responsible for bringing our country together at a time when it could have been torn apart, for making it clear that America could not be brought to her knees.” He said that Mr. Bush’s leadership “helped us find our way, and for that you deserve our gratitude for a long, long time.”

But the heart of this nearly three-hour ceremony was honoring the response of the passengers and crew on United Flight 93 as they were hijacked. When they realized from phone calls that a broader attack against the United States was under way, they voted to rebel against their captors and tried to seize control of the plane.

They understood that doing so would be likely to cause the plane to crash, but the alternative was to allow the terrorists to continue to Washington, just 20 minutes by air from Shanksville, on what appeared to be a suicide mission aimed at the Capitol building.

The ceremony here drew thousands of people, so many that the National Park Service, which owns the 2,200-acre site that includes the memorial, had to turn people away.

As the sun broke through heavy clouds on Saturday afternoon, bells in front of the crash site tolled 40 times as the name of each passenger and member of the crew was read. A soft white cloth was peeled away to reveal the new memorial: 40 polished marble panels etched with each name.

“Of course we saw 9/11 on the TV,” said Geraldine Lattanzi, 78, of Ambler, Pa., who drove across the state with her daughter to attend the ceremony. “But until you see it, and all these names, you don’t know how sad it really is.”

Again and again, the speakers called the actions of the 40 passengers and crew extraordinary, astonishing and heroic. Mr. Clinton drew an analogy between them and the Spartans in ancient Greece as well as to the Texans at the Alamo; the difference, he said, is that the Spartans and Texans who opted for certain death were soldiers, while those on Flight 93 “just happened to be on a plane.”

Mr. Clinton said: “With almost no time to decide, they gave the entire country an incalculable gift. They saved the Capitol from attack, they saved God knows how many lives, and they spared the terrorists from claiming the symbolic victory of smashing the center of American government.”

The ceremony was held one day ahead of the 10th anniversary of Sept. 11, bringing considerable attention to this remote spot in southwestern Pennsylvania before the world’s gaze fixes Sunday on New York. A second ceremony will be held here on Sunday, when President Obama is scheduled to visit. He is also attending events at ground zero and the Pentagon.

The opening of the memorial here offered the public its closest glimpse of the crash site since it was closed on 9/11. The actual site, accessible only to family members, was once a smoldering crater filled with debris; it is blanketed now by wildflowers at the edge of a forest of hemlocks and maples. A 17-ton boulder marks the point of impact. Family members are holding a private funeral service there on Monday to bury three coffins containing some human remains at what has become a cemetery.

NYC light beams marking 9/11 paid for through 2011
The Associated Press
Updated: 12/17/2009 10:53:20 AM EST

NEW YORK—The agency responsible for ground zero redevelopment will spend $695,000 through 2011 to fund the twin beams of light that pay tribute to the World Trade Center victims.

The Tribute in Light memorial has been projected into the night sky from lower Manhattan around the anniversary of the 2001 terrorist attacks every year.

The board of directors of the Lower Manhattan Development Corp. voted Thursday to pay for the lights through the 10th anniversary of the attacks in 2011.

The board also voted to fund an oral history project and a documentary about the rebuilding of the trade center site.