When I was a reporter many years ago when newspapers made a profit (that is because I WAS WRITING FOR THEM), my tactic was to try to go to as many meetings of the different boards and commissions as possible. Why? because no matter how innocuous it seemed, a lot of interesting things occurred. And it sort of put the pieces of the puzzle together on how a municipality operates.
It takes many people to make a town or city run. Things happen, problems arise, they get resolved, sometimes they don’t. But one does get a feel for how a municipality really operates by going to these various meetings.
Besides, people love to read about drama. You don’t have to make it up–every town has it–Cheshire notwithstanding.
Now I was doing some researching and happened to come across the Oct. 21st public hearing minutes of the Cheshire Inland Wetlands Commission.
Most people think Inland Wetlands is boring. WRONG!!
Inland Wetlands is the most important commission any town or city could have. God knows what more would go on without them. They rank right up there with Planning and Zoning.
I remember YEARS AGO, when I was a reporter for my love paper the Norwich Bulletin, I covered a very very tiny town near the Connecticut/Rhode Island border in the late 70′s and at that time, they had NO ZONING laws!!
People were going apes–t. Developers were coming in, buying up land.
I remember this tiny town struggling to put together zoning rules and regulations. What a mess. It was at that time that I really appreciated and respected Zoning. They, like Inland-Wetlands, are akin to the Patriot Act in keeping terrorism at bay.
I am going to provide a link to these Inland-Wetland minutes, but the big story was some “unknown” person or persons dumping asphalt into a wetlands behind a private property located on Sindall Road in Cheshire.
I guess when town officials walked the private property of the applicants, they discovered this activity just beyond the private property owners boundary.
Apparently, these wetlands are on the Cheshire/Meriden border because the minutes state that the asphalt is evenly dumped betrween the two boundaries. That was considerate.
You know, now that i think of it, this sort of reminds me of what I discovered at the Lock Park off Cornwall Avenue in Cheshire over the late summer. Remember? Someone had cleared out brush several hundred feet from the pedestrian bridge on the Lock Park trail. It was cleared from the left hand side abutting the private property owners land.
There again–NO ONE KNOWS who did this either!! Isn’t that STRANGE?? You see the drama? This would have been a great story for the Herald or any of our other local papers.
Dumping any sort of fill in a wetlands area is SERIOUS BUSINESS. But thankfully, our town officials discovered it. I remember when I covered Easton, there was an elderly woman, whose name now escapes me, who was a member of Easton’s Inland Wetlands Commission. And boy, she took her job BEYOND SERIOUS.
She literally used to drive to every construction site that was on or near a wetlands EVERY DAY to insure nothing was going amiss. She was the best!! I remember many times when she let me into her home so I could peek out her window and see her neighbor, Dan Rather, get into his limosine to take him to CBS News!!
Cheshire Inland Wetlands Minutes of Oct. 21st
Now, onto my favorite topic: THE POLICE DEPARTMENT.
Well as most of you know, I do keep up on those Monthly Reports. The October report had a lot of drama. Too bad the local paper did not pick up on it. I, and I am sure you, like to read what really goes on in this town, not the whitewash press releases.
Now, we all know about the Coleman Road home invasion that resulted in three arrests.
But, I don’t recall reading about the theft of the big screen television from the Senior Center or the theft of SEVERAL THOUSAND DOLLARS of gift cards from an undisclosed local business or the theft of several hundred gallons of oil DO YOU!!
DRAMA!!
I do commend the Police Department in Cheshire. They ARE getting better at disclosing these incidents. BUT AGAIN, WE NEED TO KNOW WHERE THESE INCIDENTS ARE OCCURRING!! We don’t need an actual street address, but we the public, should know what business these thefts occurred from. MAYBE SOMEONE SAW SOMETHING!!
On one hand, the police department is thanking people for getting involved, and on the other hand, they provide skimpy information on the oil and gift card thefts. I am going to go down to that police department maybe in a few weeks and show them how I wrote up the burglaries and thefts when I was a reporter. And believe me, many of the towns I covered were smaller than Cheshire and VERY PROTECTIVE OF THEIR IMAGE!!
I remember several years ago, seeing a photo of our solar system taken by that Voyager spacecraft that had been sent out to take photos of Uranus (GOD, will they PLEASE change the name of this planet) or Saturn, I can’t remember.
Well, Voyager had performed its duties and was left to the voids of space, when it snapped one last photo. It showed the planets of our solar system. I remember looking at that photo and seeing a tiny blue speck. And I mean TINY. Like a point of a pin.
The article said that was EARTH!! I will never forget to this day, what impact that photo had on me. How insignificant we all are in the vast realm of outer space.
So, how important is our towns IMAGE compared to this photograph??
You will have to click on “Monthly Reports” on the left hand column
And speaking of Police, I have a link to a report by the Wallingford Police Department discussing their “space needs assessment.”
I have a link to more outrageous things people do with cars–SOME of it is funny–
