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 sing along.  Les Feuilles Mortes.
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.  
SCHEDULE FOR MEETINGS OF BOARDS, COMMISSIONS, ETC. IS IN THE TOWN CLERK'S OFFICE: Click here for shorthand titles for Town Clerk's room reservation list

Schedule of Selectmen’s meeting for 2012 which will be at 7:30pm in the Town Hall Meeting Room.  And  schedule of official Town Hall vacation days for 2012
Town-side Budget FY'13 review schedule here

POSTED IN THE TOWN CLERK'S OFFICE OR FOUND ONLINE:
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."

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:   2011 LONG SESSION OVER...SPECIAL SESSION JUNE 30,2011 TO BALANCE THE BUDGET.
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.


D-SNAP probe intensifies
Ken Dixon, Staff Writer, CT POST
Published 01:02 a.m., Sunday, December 11, 2011

The point was to get the federal disaster relief into working people's pockets as quickly as possible...

Maybe the luckiest of state employees were those who tried to apply for D-SNAP benefits, but under focused questioning from DSS screeners, admitted they made too much money and abandoned their attempts to gain the D-SNAP cards and walked out of the offices empty-handed.

The screeners, doing their jobs as overworked state employees in stressful conditions, may have saved the jobs of the would-be applicants whom they rejected.  Full story here.


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.



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.