Looking Back At ‘09—

Transparency Takes Precedence In Local Planning, Budget, Elections, Fairfield Hills

By John Voket

The ability to help Newtown residents see, identify with, and understand everything from goings on at Fairfield Hills to the local budget process, from long-range planning to the election of much of the community’s top leadership positions took the lead in 2009.

The Legislative Council’s Communications Committee worked with volunteers from the Newtown High School Technology Club to provide video broadcasts of several key Board of Finance and council budget meetings. And throughout 2009, the committee’s volunteers worked with construction managers to ensure the new Municipal Center was properly outfitted with state-of-the-art equipment to not only broaden video streaming capabilities, opening more meetings to the community, but to provide unprecedented information access to disabled, visually and hearing-impaired residents.

Responding in part to challenges put forth by residents who banded together under the Independent Party of Newtown, it appeared that many of the town’s lead boards and commissions acted to open their processes to enhanced community consciousness.

From the Board of Selectmen, holding three open (albeit poorly attended) agenda-free meetings to entertain comments, concerns, and questions from residents; to the finance board, which openly welcomed council members to ask their own questions during the earliest stages of the capital request process, local meetings in 2009 reflected a more collaborative — almost collegial — atmosphere.

While many elected and appointed leaders set about improving access to their public processes locally, many officials from the town, region, and even the state affirmed that concerns expressed by critics about an apparent lack of long-range or strategic planning were generally unfounded.

From Newtown’s recently hired finance director to a municipal bond consultant who works with dozens of municipalities to the Connecticut Conference of Municipalities, most sources agreed that Newtown engaged in some of the most proactive long-range planning practices in the state. And whatever the town may have been lacking in 2009 was on the agenda for improvement in 2010, with a comprehensive overhaul of both the community’s Plan of Conservation and Development and the Fairfield Hills Master Plan slated to commence.

The year found a shift in Newtown’s leadership in Hartford, with Democrat Christopher Lyddy taking his seat in the statehouse, having been elected to replace longtime Republican Representative Julia Wasserman the previous November. He joined GOP Rep DebraLee Hovey and Senate Minority Leader John McKinney on the front lines representing Newtown, deliberating issues from mandating green cleaning supplies for schools to debating a contentious state budget that was finally passed by his fellow Democrats in the final days of 2009, only to be subsequently vetoed by Governor M. Jodi Rell.

Locally, the political process heated up as Democrats, Republicans, the IPN, and an unaffiliated petitioner all pitched for the town’s top elected seat. The IPN, along with local Democrats and Republicans, also tendered candidates to compete for virtually all open positions on the November ballot.

And with a completely new Board of Selectmen in place - led by GOP First Selectman Pat Llodra - more than half the council replaced, along with members of several other boards and commissions, elected leaders set about figuring the best way to open vacant positions and the political appointment process to all town residents interested in making Newtown an even better and nicer place to live.

Some of the significant Newtown Bee stories readers and residents were following in 2009 included:

Margot Hall Retires

A birthday forced Probate Judge Margot Hall to retire in mid-September. Until her last day in office, the affable official not only maintained a brisk schedule of court business, but acted as Newtown’s most motivated lobbyist supporting ongoing attempts to make Newtown the hub of a regionalized Probate Court District.

On September 12, Judge Hall attended her husband’s 50th high school reunion, celebrated her 70th birthday, and enjoyed her first day of retirement.

In the November elections, Mrs Hall was replaced by Republican Moira Rodgers, an attorney and former member of the Fairfield Hills Authority and Hattertown Historic District board.

While the decision about leadership at the local court level fell to voters in November, issues regarding the very future of the centuries-old locally based court system were being deliberated statewide.

A June 12 release from the governor’s office stated that effective January 5, 2011, the current court revenue system will be replaced with one based on population and workload in which the judge’s compensation will be paid directly from a Probation Court Administration Fund, overseen by the State Treasurer’s Office.

As the year drew to a close, newly elected First Selectman Pat Llodra was working with Ms Rodgers and continuing to lobby the state to make Newtown the hub of a regional Probate district also encompassing Ridgefield, Redding, and Bethel.

Lyddy Arrives In Hartford

State Representative Christopher Lyddy (D-Newtown) was sworn as the new representative serving the 106th General Assembly District in Newtown January 7. He won the seat about a month earlier in a race that pitted the former Legislative Council freshman against council chairman Will Rodgers.

Upon arriving in Hartford, Rep Lyddy was appointed to serve on the Education, Human Services, and Public Health Committees. He joined state lawmakers opening the 2009 Connecticut legislative session, which promised to be one of the most difficult in recent memory given the state’s worsening financial situation.

Lawmakers at the time expected to face a state budget deficit that was estimated at $343 million for this fiscal year and $6 billion for the two years that begins July 1. But those deficits began growing exponentially as the year wore on.

While Gov Rell’s budget chief said her initial biennial proposal covered the deficits projected for the two fiscal years starting July 1, her administration’s estimates differed from the legislature’s deficit projections — which posed challenges as the Republican governor and the Democratic-led General Assembly spend the next several months trying to reach a budget compromise.

In one of his first public statements on the issue, Rep Lyddy said the governor’s budget package was still billions of dollars out of balance, and it was going to have some impact back at home. “Since the deficit continues to grow, it’s premature to speculate on the full impact to Newtown,” he told The Bee.

By early February, Rep Lyddy reported that Legislative Democrats found millions of dollars to help cover the current fiscal year’s budget shortfall. He stood among a bipartisan contingent that supported a $1.23 billion deficit mitigation initiative that aimed to eliminate the projected deficit through a series of cuts and other adjustments without any tax or fee increases.

While budget issues remained on Rep Lyddy’s front burner, he also became engaged in several other high profile initiatives in 2009 including:

*An Act Concerning the Use of Long-Term Antibiotics for the Treatment of Lyme Disease. The bill sought to free doctors from treatment constraints by permitting physicians to prescribe, administer, or dispense long-term antibiotics for therapeutic purposes to patients clinically diagnosed with Lyme disease.

*An unsuccessful attempt to open the state employee and retiree health insurance plan to municipalities, small businesses, and nonprofit agencies.

Rep Lyddy also weighed in on the matter of the Housatonic Railroad’s proposal to greatly expand its solid waste transfer capacity in Hawleyville. He pressed for a Department of Environmental Protection public hearing on the permit application for the expansion and continues to monitor the situation closely.

Town Budget Tops $100 Million

For the first time in history, Newtown taxpayers approved a combined municipal and school budget that topped $100 million. The proposal, which passed on its first referendum, approved local spending in the amount of $103,516,694.

That spending plan was achieved in part through a historical and in some cases unprecedented process, which saw all town departments except the school district being mandated to come to the table with zero-increases over the current year.

Throughout the Board of Selectmen’s budget process, officials set out to find a way to cut each department’s budget line below the current funding level to achieve as much as a further five percent reduction. Republican Selectman Paul Mangiafico said at one point with diminishing revenues from fees, assessments, and state sources, the selectmen were doubly challenged, pushing for most departments to bring forward budgets at five percent below the current year’s spending.

In the end, the approved budget bumped a 2009 tax increase up by 0.99 percent.

Newtown’s Federal Stimulus Morsels

Based on mid-March estimates provided to Public Works Director Fred Hurley, Newtown was expecting to receive enough federal economic stimulus funding, designated for transportation infrastructure, to complete three road projects.

The latest update Mr Hurley received through the Housatonic Valley Council of Elected Officials (HVCEO), a regional planning agency that was coordinating the projects locally, indicated Newtown was scheduled to receive $634,997 in the first round of funding — just short of the total estimates for the three projects Newtown requested funding for, which were estimated to cost $705,657.

But by the time August rolled around, Mr Hurley was matter-of-fact when asked about the status of local road projects being underwritten by state budget and federal economic stimulus funds.

“There aren’t any; next question,” Mr Hurley stated. The public works chief said he had met with state Department of Transportation officials August 12, and as a result of updates he received in that meeting, he has nearly completed “reassembling the federal application for the stimulus funds.”

As a result of the restructured and fast-tracked federal application, the town eventually learned through the state DOT that a combined project involving Castle Hill and Castle Meadow Roads was still slated for the federal stimulus funds.

As the year drew to a close, Mr Hurley was reviewing final plans for the planned work, and was expecting to put the projects out to bid in the first few weeks of 2010.

Candidates’ Long Road To November

In a twist of fate, local Democrats who were first out of the gate in March announcing top of ticket contenders for first selectman and Board of Selectmen, ended up being the biggest losers at the polls when November 3 rolled around and one of the most contentious and active local campaign seasons in memory drew to a close.

In an advance notice ahead of a March 12 Democratic Town Committee meeting, former selectman Gary Fetzer told The Bee that he and councilman Joseph Hemingway expected to be the sole endorsed Newtown Democrats seeking the respective seats. Within a week, Republican First Selectman Joe Borst announced that he would not seek reelection.

Previously, Democratic Selectman Herb Rosenthal said he would not seek another term, and he had no designs on seeking any other elected position at the time. The Democrats enjoyed nearly six weeks in the spotlight as local Republicans and the Independent Party of Newtown kept any candidate announcements close to the vest.

By the final week in April, however, another shoe dropped with the Republican Town Committee’s (RTC) unanimous endorsement of Councilwoman Pat Llodra to be the party’s first selectman candidate, and Legislative Council Chairman Will Rodgers as her running mate for the Board of Selectman.

In a statement to The Bee, Mrs Llodra said she wanted to help Newtown determine “what kind of community we want to be, and how we are going to work together to realize it.”

The major parties’ announcements were followed in early May by a bid from an unaffiliated voter, Patrick Heigel.

Early on, Mr Heigel said he would campaign on plans to reexamine how the town plans commercial development with a focus on revitalizing the village centers of Hawleyville, Botsford, Dodgingtown, Sandy Hook, and even Fairfield Hills.

Mr Heigel said he favored limiting further development clustered along Newtown’s main corridor of Routes 6 and 25, and concentrating economic development zones that would bring commerce and increased walking traffic to the century-old areas of town that once thrived as village centers.

Two days after a July 16 town committee meeting, the IPN issued a release detailing its slate of candidates for the November 2009 municipal elections, which was topped by IPN chairman and Police Commissioner Bruce Walczak for first selectman, with former Public Building and Site Commission chair Bill Furrier as his running mate for the Board of Selectmen.

Their party’s revised platform, dubbed “The Declaration for Independents 2009,” provided for strategic focus on “better government, fiscal responsibility, and meaningful revenue development.”

In back-to-back sessions the last week of July, Newtown Democrats and Republicans held their respective caucuses, confirming their full respective lineups of candidates who were expected to occupy the local ballot in the fall’s elections.

This year’s local caucuses were not concluded without some political drama, and a couple of surprises.

First and foremost was the unprecedented cross-endorsement of the entire incumbent Board of Finance by both major parties. While Democrats announced their intent to support Republicans John Kortze, Harrison Waterbury, and Joseph Kearney with little fanfare and no opposition, several Republicans questioned the reasoning and were provided with ample opportunity to field a fourth GOP candidate for the fall ballot before eventually cross-endorsing Democrats James Gaston, Michael Portnoy, and Martin Gersten.

Appearing together for the first time since their traditional debut in the town’s Labor Day Parade, all four candidates for first selectman took to the stage of Edmond Town Hall October 19 for a debate hosted by The Newtown Bee.

When all was said and done, local voters ushered in a substantial number of Republican contenders, including Mrs Llodra and Mr Rodgers, while the IPN overtook several Democratic challengers, giving it the town’s new second party status led by Mr Furrier, who won the remaining selectman’s seat.

Democrats lost all but one council seat, which was retained by Daniel Amaral, and retained only one seat on the school board. Many of the newly elected candidates subsequently joined together November 23 in the recently opened council chambers at the new Municipal Center to be sworn in by Governor M Jodi Rell.

All those who won elected seats officially took office by Charter directive on December 1.