Thank you!
Your support is sustaining the future of local news in our communities.

Grants roll in, project work begins

FALLS VILLAGE — First Selectman Pat Mechare reported to the Board of Selectmen that the town just received the first grant payment for the downtown streetscape project.

The board met for the first time in 2015 on Monday, Jan. 12.

Mechare said she was pleasantly surprised to receive a payment of $310,355, three weeks after submitting the paperwork to the state.

The new year will be a busy one in terms of construction in town. Bid packages for the new emergency services center on Route 7 are available. Mechare said there have already been eight inquiries.

She added that the bid packages for the joint project with Salisbury to replace the Amesville iron bridge should be ready later this month, and the work should begin in the spring.

And there is still some work to finish up at the D.M. Hunt Library. Mechare said she is waiting on a final approval from the state before that can move forward.

The restoration of the South Canaan Meeting House, yet another state project, will move forward in a modified form. The steeple will be repaired, the bathrooms fixed and the ceiling reinforced but the wheelchair lift in the rear of the building has been taken out of the plan for budgetary reasons.

Mechare reported that Reverse Polarity will begin work on a technology upgrade at Town Hall in the next couple of weeks. Last month the Board of Finance voted  to move $11,000 from the town’s environmental account to the computer account, and to recommend to town meeting the expenditure of up to $16,000 for a computer system upgrade at Town Hall.

The discussion of selling a parcel of town-owned land on Page Road continued. There is some confusion about where exactly the parcel is, but Highway Department chief Tim Downs did take a look at what seems to be the right spot, Mechare said, and found a large hole that could conceivably be the remnants of a foundation. It was hard to tell, because the hole was full of water.

Mechare said that Lou Timolat remembered a 1980s law about building lots that wind up being in areas subsequently classified as wetlands (and subject to inland wetlands regulations and protections). She said there might be a time limit after which such a lot cannot be developed.

She said she would find the law because, “If that’s true our decision will be a lot easier.”

On another town-owned parcel, this one a landlocked piece on Canaan Mountain,  she said that someone (through an attorney) has expressed interest in buying the parcel. Mechare said she would prefer that people who want to buy a piece of town property come directly to the board, and Selectmen Chuck Lewis and Greg Marlowe agreed.

The board set three dates for budget meetings: Wednesday, Jan. 28, 10 a.m.; Wednesday, Feb. 4, 10 a.m.; and Wednesday, Feb. 11, 10 a.m. (all at Town Hall). These will be warned as special meetings of the Board of Selectmen.

The board unanimously passed a set of resolutions relating to the roof repair project at the Lee H. Kellogg School (LHK). Mechare said the resolutions (to authorize the school board to apply for and accept a grant; to form a building committee; and to authorize creation of project plans) might not be necessary, and if they are not, “no harm, no foul.”

The members of the roof repair building committee are Mechare, school board chair Lara Hafner, Lou Timolat and Karen Lindquist, with LHK Principal Jennifer Law, Region One Business Manager Sam Herrick, and Kellogg Custodian Bill Beebe as ex officio members.

The board appointed Yaakov Reef to the Recreation Commission. Mechare said that Reef, a rabbi and the program director at the Isabella Freedman Jewish Retreat Center, came to Town Hall and said he wanted to get involved in town government in some way. 

“That’s good enough for me,” Mechare said.

Lakeville Journal

Latest News

Cornwall Historical Society celebrates Connecticut’s Black patriots

Cornwall Historical Society celebrates Connecticut’s Black patriots

On Saturday, Oct. 24, at the Cornwall Historical Society, author and genealogist John Mills will breathe new life into the stories of some of Connecticut’s more underappreciated patriots. The reason these heroes were forgotten? They were Black.

At a time when white colonists were fighting for their own liberty and political independence, many Black men who fought alongside them remained enslaved. Some risked their lives only to return to bondage. Though enslaved people were promised freedom from both sides of the Revolutionary War in exchange for their service, Great Britain, too, was still deeply dependent on slavery. For Black people in America, the war presented both extraordinary risks and uncertain paths to the freedom that white colonists were demanding for themselves.

Keep ReadingShow less
education

A sanctuary for second chances

A sanctuary for second chances

Stephanie Saetta runs Charlie Chicken Bones, a sanctuary in Salisbury.

Madi Long
You only get one or two of these soul connection dogs, so I do this in his honor.
— Stephanie Saetta

Stephanie Saetta has spent much of her life caring for others. A physician at White Plains Hospital, she has another calling at home in Salisbury — one that has four legs and a wagging tail. She runs Charlie Chicken Bone Sanctuary, a nonprofit dog rescue that brings dogs from overcrowded pounds and the streets of Texas to foster homes in northwestern Connecticut, where they can begin again.

The sanctuary is named for Charlie, the dog who taught her how special a bond between a person and rescue animal can be.

Keep ReadingShow less
our community

Big ideas come to Lenox for inaugural field festival

Big ideas come to Lenox for inaugural field festival

Hunter Runnette, founder and board chair of field, has spent years fostering arts and cultural programming in the Berkshires.

Provided

What do joy, gardening, artificial intelligence, the American experiment and the creative process have in common? Quite a lot, as it turns out, at least when some of the world’s most compelling thinkers get together to talk about them.

From Friday, Oct. 23, through Sunday, Oct. 25, Lenox, Massachusetts, will host the inaugural field festival, a three-day gathering of writers, artists, scholars and cultural figures at Shakespeare & Company. Billed as a festival of ideas, entertainment, learning and discovery, field brings together an impressive roster of voices to explore everything from the deeply personal to the profoundly political.

Keep ReadingShow less
community
google preferred source

Want more of our stories on Google? Click here to make us a Preferred Source.

The Pink House AM is serving up community

The Pink House AM is serving up community

Mare Rubin and Maggie Levine of the Pink House AM.

Madi Long

It all started with a yoga class. Mare Rubin was working on her second act after leaving the Upper West Side, where she’d raised a family and worked in corporate marketing. Newly empty nesters, she and her husband decided to move to the wilds of northwestern Connecticut, where they had spent 15 years as weekenders, to see what life in the woods had in store for them.

Rubin started teaching yoga classes at the Union in West Cornwall, a space designated by the town of Cornwall as a community hub with couches, Wi-Fi, occasional events and a growing yoga class schedule. She was adjusting well but missed one important thing about city life: a casual coffee shop.

Keep ReadingShow less
business

Sons of Astro are musicians, friends and bandmates — in that order

Sons of Astro are musicians, friends and bandmates — in that order

The Sons of Astro will be at the Common Pub in Housatonic on Oct. 24 and the 2nd Home Lounge in Winsted on Nov. 14.

Provided

No matter where they are in the world, musicians seem to find other musicians. There’s a shared language, a shared experience of being on stage and performing, and a shared enthusiasm for making those melodies by themselves or together. Such is the case with Norfolk and Brooklyn-based cosmic Americana band Sons of Astro.

That magnetic musicians’ bond drew Brooklyn-based singer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Mike Cobb into the orbit of singer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Matt Statler. The two neighbors took to each other right away and were soon playing open mics together. As an ethics professor at NYU’s Stern School of Business, Statler made the case that if he sat in for Cobb’s set and Cobb sat in for Statler’s, they could play together and double their stage time. Clearly, these men wanted to make as much music as possible. That became a little harder when Cobb and his family moved up to Norfolk, Connecticut.

Keep ReadingShow less
concerts

One more weekend to get inside the art at ArtEast

One more weekend to get inside the art at ArtEast

The participating artists in this year’s ArtEast open studios.

Provided

ArtEast’s annual October Open Studio Tour is already underway, but there’s still one more weekend to step inside the creative worlds of artists working throughout eastern Dutchess County. On Saturday and Sunday, Oct. 24 and 25, artists will once again open their studio doors, inviting visitors to see where the work happens, meet the people who make it and perhaps discover something worth taking home.

Now in its 21st year, the ArtEast October Open Studio Tour offers a self-guided journey with participating studios in Holmes, LaGrangeville, Hopewell Junction, Pawling, Patterson, Poughquag and Wingdale. Visitors can explore painting, photography, sculpture, mixed media and other artistic practices, and get some leaf-peeping in at the same time.

Keep ReadingShow less
open-studio
google preferred source

Want more of our stories on Google? Click here to make us a Preferred Source.