Letters to the Editor - The Lakeville Journal - 12-3-20

Obey the law for a stopped school bus 

A young mother, who is a colleague of mine on our local board of education, stunned all members of the board into silence when she reported she routinely witnessed vehicles passing the stopped school bus as her children got on or off the bus. Astoundingly, she has observed this even when the bus lights are flashing and the stop signs on the bus are fully extended and visible.

This news left us incredulous. The negligence and lack of responsibility on the part of the drivers of those vehicles is difficult to ignore, and hard to understand.  It left me wondering what would possibly compel anyone to think it was a reasonable, rational choice to take such a risk. Clearly, the gain of less than a minute in their commute by illegally passing a school bus holds absolutely no merit.

As school boards tend to do when confronted with any risk to the children under their care, they discuss and explore reasonable solutions. Our board is in communication with the bus company that transports our students. The company will look into the installation of high speed, high resolution video cameras with the capability of recording the license plate of the vehicle and the physical appearance of the driver.

The second solution is more fundamental to addressing this problem, and at no cost. Embedded in this letter is a hard poke at our collective conscience as drivers, and an appeal of reason. Please consider that taking an unwarranted risk to pass a school bus illegally carries with it an enormous consequence from which there is no redemption. It has the extraordinary cost of a lifetime of loss and grief for a family whose child is killed by a driver’s negligence.

Hugh Cheney    

Member, Board of Education,  

Cornwall Consolidated School

Cornwall

Why affordable housing is important

Kudos to Pat Hackett for the professional and thoughtful analysis of the parking situation in Lakeville that he submitted to the Planning & Zoning Commission early in November. And double thanks for his letter in last week’s Lakeville Journal, defending his work and debunking several other specious obstacles to affordable housing championed by the “Concerned Neighbors in the Salisbury/Lakeville Community”.  

In 1986 I came to Salisbury as a temporary resident, a refugee from a gentrifying housing market in Boston. Housesitting for friends in Amesville, I had no trouble finding work in the building trades while I figured out where to go next. Then I stumbled on an affordable rental in Salisbury. When tragedy derailed my life six months later I was astonished by the kindness and unsolicited aid offered from both my employer and my landlord. I returned to Salisbury seven months later, my rental and my job waiting for me. I had found my community. 

Trying to give back to this community in as many ways as I could, I gravitated to affordable housing, and so jumped at the invitation by the late Anna Whitbeck to join the Salisbury Housing Committee. Over the last 34 years I have worked with the most generous and remarkable people one could ever imagine: Sally Ellsworth donated land, practically in her front yard, to Habitat to Humanity; George Vincent maintained a house, also practically in his front yard, that he rented below market rates to young families so they could save for a down payment to eventually buy a house. Those are just two of many examples. I also witnessed countless hours of volunteer work, by blue and white collared people alike, to provide rental housing for those less fortunate.  

But the times they are a changing and we can’t keep up. The ever-increasing volume and intensity of NIMBYism in Salisbury is most disturbing. The above-mentioned group of concerned citizens stated in a recent full-page ad in the Lakeville Journal: “We embrace making Lakeville/Salisbury a more affordable place to live, and welcome the addition of affordable housing to our area, including to Holley Block.” (Underlines are mine).  

Sadly, this cannot be true because instead of offering help to address their concerns, they list at least eight reasons, almost all baseless, affordable housing essentially cannot be built anywhere in Lakeville. The same statement and list was submitted to the Planning and Zoning Commission in an 18-page letter, including seven pages of signatures. Some do not surprise me and some do. I have never encountered any of them supporting the cause of affordable housing. 

Whatever they are spending in time and treasure could be used cooperatively for a mutually beneficial outcome. Come on people, do the right thing, join us in the hard work. You’ll feel better and be remembered with kind thoughts and smiles. 

Al Ginouves

Lakeville

Connecting the dots, all the way from Region One to Tigray, Ethiopia

Sometimes global events remind us of how small the world is. The recent civil war in the Tigray region of Ethiopia is one of those events. Thirteen years ago, artworks from hundreds of Tigrayan middle school students hung in the hallways and gyms of all the Region One schools. These tenderly drawn works were done in the form of triptychs, a common format used in Ethiopian Orthodox art. I carried them back from Mekele, Tigray, in two large suitcases after a three-week-long art ambassadorship there (Thank you, Project Troubador). The works were entitled, “Welcome to My Life.” Before I left for Ethiopia, I guided all Region One seventh-graders in the creation of their own triptychs, packed them into the two oversized bags, and carried them with me to Tigray. The Tigrayan children marveled at them! Our children’s triptychs often featured photos and drawings of houses and cars and ski trips, and pets, and yards with tire swings. I was struck by how strange the images were to the Tigrayan children. The memory of the challenge of describing snow, and skiing, to these wide-eyed bright sparks will stay with me forever.  

The Tigrayan children’s triptychs showed drawings only, since there are no photographs or magazines to cut-up there. Thoughtfully drawn were their prized possessions: a clay coffee pot, a goat, a camel, a thatched hut. I remember being moved by their artistry, their ability to “see” these simple objects, and render them with accuracy and sensitivity. 

“Impoverished” is a word that comes to mind when I think of Tigray and of Mekele. I have been there eight more times since that first trip in 2006. I founded a non-profit, www.mekeleblindschool.org, to support the children of the Mekele Blind School there, and to bolster The Blind Mothers’ Union and their sighted children. The grass-roots organization is called Friends of Mekele Blind School. Many wonderful, caring people here in the Northwest Corner have played key roles in helping me to kick this can down the road all these years. I was there in Tigray last year. There was no sign of what is happening now. No struggle, no whispered messages of discontent or potential strife. 

What a difference a year can make. I have not been able to contact any of my dear friends and associates there who help with our efforts, as Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed has shut off all telecommunications and blocked all the roads going in and out of the province of Tigray. I try not to spend too much time thinking about our beloved blind students and our courageous blind mothers. 

If you were in seventh grade in 2006, I hope you can remember these greetings and messages drawn by Tigrayan children just for you. There was a lot of love put into them. I saw it with my own eyes. 

Find more at www.mekeleblindschool.org.   

Christina Hanley

Art Teacher, CCS and Kellogg School

Norfolk

The reason?

Regarding the affordable housing efforts and pushback in Salisbury and Lakeville, it is my experience that, whenever opponents offer several successive reasons why something would not be a good idea, it is usually the case that the real reason for their objection is the only one they are not including.

Molly S. Fitzmaurice

Sharon

Make affordable housing a reality in Salisbury

In the spirit of gratitude on Thanksgiving weekend, I would like to offer my profound thanks to the men and women of the Salisbury Housing Committee, who have been working to address one of our town’s biggest issues, it’s lack of affordable housing.  I was saddened to see their proposal for the Holley Place development withdrawn and I hope that they will bring it back in a new, even better version. But they have called all of our attention to Salisbury’s pressing need for homes that people can afford.

 The opponents of the plan say that they believe it will “change the nature” of Salisbury. But they are ignoring the ways in which the town has already changed over the years. The population has gotten older: According to the website TownCharts.com, the median age is now 57.7 years, compared to 40.8 years statewide. The proportion of people who don’t live here full time has gone up (until this year when many second home owners took refuge from Covid-19 in the Northwest Corner). The number of children in the local schools has been on a steady decline (again, until this year). And, most significantly, the price of housing has skyrocketed. Mary Close Oppenheimer in a recent column in this newspaper cited a truly stunning statistic: Between Oct.1, 2018, and Oct. 1, 2020, the average sale price of a home in Salisbury was $778,750. Meanwhile, the median income per worker according to TownCharts is a little more than $54,000.

 Someone making $54,000 cannot afford a $700,000 home, never mind that many people in our area make far less than that. For Salisbury to stay vibrant, people of all incomes need to be able to live here, and young people (not to mention people of varying ethnicities and races) need to be able to live here. They need to be able to raise their families here. The Salisbury Housing Committee has stepped up and addressed those issues with the Sarum Place and Faith House developments, and with the proposal for Holley Place.

 The plan’s opponents have taken pains to express their support for affordable housing in Salisbury, though they spent quite a lot of effort and money (including a full page ad in this paper) fighting it. I have a modest proposal: To show your support, make a donation equal to what was spent fighting the Holley Place plan to the affordable housing group of your choice, whether it’s the Salisbury Housing Committee, Habitat for Humanity or the Salisbury Housing Trust. Those of us who support the project should do the same, and together we can help make affordable housing a reality in our town.

Amy Virshup

Salisbury

Please pay attention to safety and cleanliness

I have noticed for quite some time a number of people walking, jogging, bike riding on the sides of the roads either wearing black, or dark clothing.  

Please be safe and wear the brightest, most obnoxious colors you can if doing any of these activities. If you don’t have any bright clothing, any hardware store can sell you a bright yellow/green safety vest for around $10.

If you are not concerned with your own safety, think about how terrible a driver would feel if he or she were to hit you.

On another note, if you plan on visiting loved ones at the cemetery this holiday season, please do not discard your summertime plastic flower pots in the surrounding woods. Cemeteries are not garbage dumps.  

If you absolutely cannot put a flower pot in your vehicle, leave it on the side of the cemetery driveway and either myself, or someone else who cares will pick it up. 

Keep America beautiful!

Bruce Valentine

Millerton

Fighting Bittersweet, the relentless tree strangler

A big Black Walnut tree grows on our property. Some evenings in fall a few hundred grackles and blackbirds find it a convenient stopover to hold their noisy crackling and cackling end of day meeting before dropping into the reeds where they roost for the night. But not before they relieved themselves of undigested seeds of bittersweet berries.

Once they must have had a real feast, because one spring, under said walnut tree, the ground was covered by a blanket of bittersweet seedling, all about one inch tall. Probably 1000s of them, I could grab them by the handful. Even years later I still pull some, but with a little more effort. Ten years on — I would need heavy equipment.

Not too long ago the orange berry masses of mature bittersweet plants, visible in fall from far away, were appreciated as a Thanksgiving décor and for giving color to a drab landscape. Now, for anyone who loves our native trees, they are a depressing sight. Mature bittersweet can be huge. I have sawed stems with 4in diameters. At that stage the tree it has strangled and overtopped has already collapsed and is probably doomed to die as a cripple. In winter these broken-down tree ruins are a sad sight, especially those isolated rows of trees which often separate meadows and fields. 

It is unlikely that mature bittersweet survives long in a private garden. Who likes his favorite tree wrecked?  The damage is on untended public lands, roadsides, on agricultural lands with hedge and tree rows and forest edges. Apples fall close to the tree, but bittersweet seeds in bird stomachs travel many miles and can end up under anyone’s tree or in an as yet unspoiled neighborhood.

With ownership comes responsibility; we can’t just blame the grackles. There are landowners who are aware of invasive shrubs and vines and invest money, time and heavy equipment to kill them off, or at least prevent them from going to seed. The Land Trust and the Nature Conservancy do their best, but their lands and resources are limited.  Bittersweet is dioecious, (meaning “two-housed”), that is male and female organs are on separate individuals, as on holly and winterberry (and animals for that matter). In fall only the female plants are highly visible, and just killing them off  (“cut and paint” using concentrated Roundup) will eliminate, if not the ugly sight, at least some of the orange glow next year and slow the spread.  

Fighting invasives is a socially distanced activity, could even become a new out-door sport; equipment needed: lopers, hand saw, “buckthorn blaster” or similar Roundup applicator, heavy pants, gloves. What could be more rewarding than saving a big tree? A warning though:  it’s an activity that can become an obsession. I know someone who became so obsessed with pulling Garlic mustard that he was shunned as a hiking companion. 

Fritz Mueller

Sharon

New meaning for holiday

Turkey day has come and gone 

The turkey just goes on and on

Turkey sandwiches turkey soup

It seems we’re in a turkey loop

And when you think you’ve seen the last

We’ll serve that dreaded turkey hash

This was my ode in days gone by

But now can only say that I

Wish you all good holiday cheer

And just look forward to next year

And meantime hope that you will be

Safe and well and keep healthy

Peter Fitting

Salisbury