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 


"Turn of the Screws" the first production in the Audtorium, starring members of the Building Committee, architects, engineers, construction firm and manager!
Margaret Wirtenberg

LOCAL GOVERNMENT:
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!



"With a little bit of luck" WestonArts has played its part finding $$ to renovate the high school auditorium in 2008.  A new production - "WestonArts and the 599 Chairs" to debut this Fall/Winter?  
What makes Weston Weston?  Caring for animals, public schools, home, fields, nature, culture, SOFT BALL - WILD THINGS champs in 2008), land use,  H.R., and MAGIC, too!
COMING UP...

SYSTEM OF RECORDING MEETINGS ON SCHEDULE BOARD IN THE TOWN CLERK'S OFFICE CHANGES: click here for room and board codes.

ALL QUIET ON THE WESTON FRONT...SCHOOL BEGINS (AND SUMMER VACATION ENDS) AUGUST 28th!
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."
Meetings attended most recently by "About Town" (below); and for more...as far back as May 30, 2002 (click here). 


GOVERNMENT:  

CONNECTICUT GENERAL ASSEMBLY:
Who are YOUR government representatives?  Did you know that these offices will be up for election this year?  Links to info:  http://www.firstgov.gov/

Scenes from a changing of city's political guard
KEN DIXON
Article Last Updated: 08/15/2008 09:01:09 PM EDT

The moon was waxing toward full, like a street lamp, over Auden Grogins' left shoulder as she scribbled voting results on paper ripped from my reporter's notebook.
Instead of a chip on her shoulder — or maybe in addition to it — she had a mobile phone cocked under her chin.

A minute earlier, Grogins had emerged — miffed, anxious, fatigued and maybe slightly numb — from Bridgeport's Black Rock School, where a dozen witnesses had shared the few minutes before state Rep. Bob Keeley's quarter-century Capitol career got its eviction notice.

After the final vote was cast at 8:02, Joe Valentino, the polling place's young, tattooed moderator, who had been at the school since 5 a.m., briefly engaged in some physical comedy, theatrically jamming his key toward the tally machine.

"Oh, oh, the key doesn't work!" he semi-shouted, teasing, enjoying the moment. Grogins' team grumbled.

"Be nice, children," he said before reading the numbers off the tape that had emitted from the machine: Himes, 380; Whitnum, 73; Musto, 223; Moore, 243; Keeley, 231; Grogins, 282. She tilted her head, acknowledging the light applause and flushing slightly red. A 51-vote margin in her neighborhood stronghold — with the highest turnout in the city — was acceptable, because if she lost here, Grogins probably couldn't hold off Keeley in Longfellow and Central High schools in the district of about 20,000 residents. Now, the aggressive 46-year-old attorney was leaning against a school-refuse Dumpster, writing down numbers from field operatives. Of the 10 people or so, family and close friends, I was probably the only one enjoying the image of her writing vote totals on a garbage bin.

"I only beat him by 50 votes in Black Rock," she said into the phone. "What about the other school? I'm only down 12 votes at Central." Then Longfellow came in: 154 to 108, Grogins. "I'm up by, like, 80."

She had made it back to the 75-foot line at the sidewalk along Brewster Street and a few more supporters materialized, including her bearded de facto campaign manager, Dave Bosco, looking like a smaller version of Bridgeport school board chairman Max Medina, only with a potty mouth, firing up a $10 victory cigar. "I'm very happy with the results," she offered as a quote for the newspaper, but backed away from anything more definitive, since about 150 absentee ballots were still extant and, being a good Democrat, she feared that the party's traditional sin — ballot fraud among the mail-ins — could come back to bite her. "I'm not celebrating yet."

She said the then-apparent victory was the result of a six-month effort and she visited every house in the district twice. "I lost 12 pounds," the challenger offered. "I feel good, but you never know until the end." She raised the phone.

"It looks really good, but I don't know," Grogins spoke into the phone as she and her friends started to walk down toward Matty's Corner, the bar presided over by district leader Dan Roach, who would lead the celebration 90 minutes later. "When this is over, we'll all get massages together," were the last words I heard as the victors sauntered toward the watering hole, where she would vent and naively, yet aggressively, proclaim: "I'm going to do more for you in two years than you've gotten in the last 25 years" to a few dozen cheering supporters, a TV camera and two reporters.

That's a tough promise to make, given the millions of bucks Keeley secured for the city as the chairman of the legislative Finance Committee's bonding subcommittee. Six miles away, at 3651 Main St., in a first-floor office shared by Keeley, Rep. Chris Caruso and Marilyn Moore, the state Senate candidate, people from upstate, wearing purple Service Employees International Union shirts, were drifting down the steps of the converted house and spilling onto the sidewalk.

They looked as if they were trying to walk away slowly from a police bust without being taken in for questioning themselves.

Jim Himes, of Greenwich, this biennial's great Democratic hope to oust U.S. Rep. Chris Shays, was open-collared and looking for his car, as if maybe Keeley's imminent loss — the only primary defeat among incumbents in the General Assembly — was contagious.

With Himes was his wife, Mary, and George Jepsen, the former state Senate majority leader, Democratic state chairman and failed lieutenant-governor candidate, who decamped urgently for Norwalk and points west.

Caruso, who beat the city Democratic machine's challenger by more than two to one, was already at the Sportivo Italian club on Park Avenue.

Inside, the failed brains behind Keeley's campaign were still going through a kind of charade of denial, behind a closed door that had a handwritten "candidates only" sign.

The big aluminum tray of ziti, so full and warm at 5:30, was now cold and nearly empty. Someone was pouring out the last of the salad into the trash. Someone else was disconnecting phones from their roots.

Everyone else, maybe 15 people, was standing around awkwardly at a political funeral.

At about 8:50, nearly 40 minutes after Keeley must have known it was over, the newly departed came out, dressed in a suit and off-white sneakers.

By his side stood 9-year-old Ryan Keeley, a promising little basketball, baseball and Irish football player, who learned a lesson about losing gracefully and now will have a father who doesn't have to make the hour-plus ride to Hartford all the time. The 54-year-old Keeley worked the room, exchanging hugs with nearly everyone. "We'll be back," he said a couple times. "We're starting a new chapter," he said to someone else. "It's alright. Thank you."

Next door was a darkened, empty house that symbolizes Bridgeport's needs as much as the Dumpster outside Black Rock School foreshadowed Keeley's ouster.

Tacked on the yellow front door was notice of a foreclosure sale.

It was 9 o'clock.


PEOPLE:
According to the U.S. Bureau of the Census...it is simple to use U.S. Census 2000: 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.



REPORT OF 9-11 COMMISSION.



NOTE:  A few pictures are worth remembering in this Presidential Election year 2008