Letters to the Editor July 21

Kent belongs in different district

For almost 40 of my 49 years, I have lived fewer than 9 miles from my present home in the village of Kent: 10 years in Sherman, two years in Gaylordsville, and nearly 28 years here in Kent.

Consequently, I have an intimate knowledge of the towns of the 108th General Assembly district: Kent, Western New Milford, Sherman and New Fairfield.

From my boyhood until now, I have always realized that the towns of the Candlewood Lake Valley and the towns of the Upper Housatonic River Valley form two very distinct communities, with very different regional atmospheres. Every Kent resident knows this.

I graduated from the Sherman School and from New Milford High School and grew up to see my daughter graduate from Kent Center School and Housatonic Valley Regional High School. I scarcely need to emphasize to any longtime resident of this area that the Region One School District and the New Milford School District are two very different educational environments with distinct challenges and needs.

For more than 25 years I worked in New Milford at a stone fabrication shop. Now my wife and I are owner-operators of a small business here in Kent. Do I need to reiterate to any citizen of Kent how very different are the business climate and economy of Kent from those of New Milford?

The plain fact of the matter is that in the pursuit and protection of those interests which are vital to the town of Kent — governance, education, economic development, tourism, preservation of regional character — Kent is already working in constant cooperation with the neighboring towns of the Northwest Corner, our natural regional allies, and not with New Milford, Sherman and New Fairfield. Anyone who cares to know the facts can verify this statement with a little rudimentary research.

What possible benefit can accrue to Kent from being isolated in a legislative district with towns that do not share our character or our concerns? Towns that form communities of interest ought to be able together to command the attention and service of a mutual state representative who is dedicated to their common needs. That is why some of the residents of Kent will be petitioning the State Reapportionment Committee to move Kent into a legislative alliance with the towns of the 64th District: Salisbury, Sharon, Cornwall and Goshen.

If this move seems as sensible and desirable to other Kent residents as it does to us, I ask them please to write a line or two to that effect, and send it by Aug. 31 to the Connecticut General Assembly Reapportionment Committee, Legislative Office Building, Room 5300, Hartford CT, 06106; or email them at redistricting@cga.ct.gov. Thank you.

Tod Jones

Kent
 

Eat only organic meat

Do you know where your beef is coming from?

In mid-May, I interviewed several people at the Grand Union grocery store in Millerton. When asked this question, most of them said: “A slaughter house in the Midwest.”

But what none of them knew was that the cows before being slaughtered spent six months knee deep in their own manure, a breeding ground for bacteria. The cows’ only food: several bushels of corn — which is hard for cows to digest and is also coated in pesticides, each day laced with antibiotics and hormones to stop disease and hasten their weight gain.

This is meat that is not natural and it is being eaten by families across the country. Even though this is a USDA-approved process, studies have shown that the beef can be contaminated with metals and bacteria.

“In 2008, Mexican authorities rejected a shipment of U.S. beef because the meat exceeded Mexico’s regulatory tolerance for copper.” (Ari LeVaux, “Meat Is Even Grosser Than You Think.”)

Many of the people who were interviewed knew that the beef they were buying was full of chemicals, but they didn’t know what to do about it.

“I have three small children and a tight budget,” one woman said.

Organic meat is expensive, because it takes a couple years for one cow to be ready for slaughter, but it’s worth the price.

Instead of putting themselves at risk, consumers can find local, organic beef at farmers markets and farms right here in the Tri-state area. Starting Memorial Day weekend, the Millerton Farmers Market operates every Saturday morning and offers meat free of hormones.

Another farmers market is in Sheffield, Mass., every Friday afternoon during the summer. Also, Whippoorwill Farm, right outside of Lakeville, and Moon In The Pond Farm in Ashley Falls, Mass., both sell beef from cows fed only with grass.

Grass is a natural food for a cow’s digestive system. I encourage consumers to pay attention to where their beef comes from. Your health is worth it, and the health of the animals that we take the liberty to raise and eat are worth the added expense.

Marion West

Lakeville

Love the smooth roads in Sharon

Congratulations to Sharon First Selectman Bob Loucks.  Sharon has always been a beautiful town to drive through but suddenly, it seems overnight, everywhere our patched, pot- holed, frost-heaved, cracked and generally degraded roads are being fixed.  Now driving over their smooth surface is safer, easier on our cars, and the scenery seems even more beautiful.  

Bob ran on a platform promise of fixing our roads and unlike most politicians, he has fulfilled his promise. It took courage and determination to fight the long-term Town Hall attitude of denial and neglect that created this rapidly accelerating problem.  

Yes, it is costing a lot of money but it had to be done. Not doing it now would result in dramatically more expensive work in the future and interest rates are abnormally low right now.  Hopefully, the finance committee will allot money each year so the roads can be properly maintained and massive work won’t be necessary in the future.

Larry Power

Sharon

Chore Service Garden Party

The Chore Service celebrated its 19th year of operation with a party at Ann Goodbody’s spectacular Sharon gardens. We are grateful to Ann, to our more than 400 guests and to Jam Food for catering the delicious event.

We also thank the following generous sponsors: Bain Real Estate, Beardsley Gardens, Becton Dickinson, Best & Cavallaro Real Estate, Café Giulia, Darren Winston Bookseller, Ed Herrington, Inc., Elyse Harney Real Estate, Founders Insurance Group, Geer Village, Jam Food Shop, Johnnycake Books, Kent Greenhouse and Gardens, Klemm Real Estate, Moore & More Printing, National Iron Bank, Old Farm Nursery, Salisbury Bank & Trust Co., Salisbury Pharmacy, Salisbury Wines, Serevan, Sharon Hospital, Sharon Pharmacy, SKINtastic and Union Savings Bank.

Because of their generosity, most of our fundraising will go directly to benefit our 250 clients and the dedicated local workers who help them stay safely and affordably at home.

Thank you all!

Ella Clark, Director, and Lea Davies, Board President

 Sharon

What a night for Habitat

Beautiful evening plus exquisite setting equals wonderful results. What a fitting way to celebrate the 20th anniversary of our local Habitat for Humanity affiliate!

This past Saturday, hundreds of faithful Habitat supporters, along with many new faces, joined in the festivities at the home of Mrs. Rees Harris, “Four Winds,” to recognize an important milestone in our organization’s growth.

We are indeed grateful to our hostess, our organizing committee, our corporate underwriters, patrons, local restaurants, Louise Baranger, our auctioneer, our many dedicated volunteers and the faithful guests who joined in this grand event.

Jane Pinckney and John Pogue

Event co-chairs

Salisbury

Town’s ‘magnum flopus’

Selectmen Dresser’s and Riva’s ill-considered affordable housing plan is a dystopian masterpiece of everything wrong, bad and unnecessary. It is the classic busybody government usurpation of the natural societal flow that has served our town and nation so well since their inception. One is tempted to simply say, “mind your own business.”

Their language of altruism sounds nice in the telling — it certainly makes the selectmen sound and feel self-righteous, but in reality I believe it only serves their private interests at the expense of the taxpayer public.

It is such governments who are the 21st century robber barons; the looters who inflict upon us higher taxation to pay for more government planning, government spending, government ownership (they have already made us landlords in the real estate business), regulation and redistribution. This is irrefutable. Deny it at your peril and future penury as we are already witnessing and suffering.

I have attended most of the meetings of the Salisbury Affordable Housing Commission (SAHC), which I believe are consistently overlaid with a repellent crust of hypocrisy. At three separate sessions, the selectmen and others have repeatedly stated, “I understand that the Salisbury Land Trust [a private philanthropic organization] has about $150,000 in their treasury—why don’t we get together with them and access some of that money?”

So much for these self-appointed paragons of virtue who run the SAHC, which in fact is competing for land and funding against both the land trust group and Habitat for Humanity, who have already demonstrated their skills and successes in providing affordable housing at no cost to the taxpayers.

I am astonished that these gentlemen who have always appeared to me to be intelligent people could embrace such tendentious schemes and attitudes to trump the welfare of our town. I know not what ambition is at work here. Maybe it is my own myopia, for in our past dealings, I found them to be honorable men; “so are they all, all honorable men.”

Their initial and immediate efforts to date consist of a $75,000 startup cost to all taxpayers and produced no more than addlepated mischief. If history and personal experience would allow a brief walk-on part of agnostic realism: Government-subsidized housing is a spent force, proven defective and self-destructive save for units dedicated for elderly occupants.

I would only hope that the commission would abandon its approach, whereby they want to create hundreds of units to import and house multiple hundreds of young people to do their difficult and dangerous dirty work of putting out their fires and other crises when they occur. Such altruism!

At this instance, Salisbury, as we know it, is the perfection of a small New England town personified in diversity, tolerance and sophisticated individualism — a veritable cornucopia of pluralism and beauty.

Their only ultimate remission would be for the entire commission to voluntarily abandon itself and pretend that it was a midsummer night’s dream/mare.

Alfred Nemiroff

Salisbury