WINSTED — The Board of Selectmen approved a method for the town to potentially fund its minimum budget requirement (MBR) shortfall during its regular meeting on Monday, Sept. 19.The motion was originally made by Selectman Ken Fracasso during a special meeting of the selectmen on Aug. 22.Fracasso’s motion is to direct the town’s finance manager to place all discretionary and unrestricted grants and revenues received from or through the state’s Department of Education into the town’s unencumbered fund balance for future use as the selectmen may authorize.Fracasso’s motion added that: “For the avoidance of doubt, discretionary and unrestricted grants and revenues include but are not limited to excess cost grants and related revenues, transportation grants and related revenues, health and welfare grants and related revenues and school construction reimbursements and related revenues.”The motion passed by a vote of 4-3, with Selectmen Fracasso, Glenn Albanesius, Karen Beadle and Lisa Smith voting for it.Mayor Candy Perez and Selectmen Michael Renzullo and George Closson voted against the motion.“When the [money] goes into the general fund, how does it come out to pay the costs that have been incurred?” Perez said. “If all the revenue for, let’s say, transportation, goes into the fund balance, how does it come back out to pay for the buses that are transporting the kids right now?”“When they submit a bill for payment,” Fracasso told Perez.“But when they submit a bill for payment it [is not] under their appropriations, so they don’t have it because it’s not appropriated anywhere,” Perez said. “How will it come out of our fund balance?”“According to [Department of Education chief financial officer Brian Mahoney], it is our prerogative and our discretion to dispense those funds,” Fracasso said. “[Finance Director Henry Centrella] said this is the best way that it can be done.”Perez said that, despite Fracasso’s explanation, that she still had issues with the motion.“What we are doing right now by transferring all of these grants into the fund balance is creating a revenue line item that has no expenditure line item within the town’s budget,” Perez said. “If you wanted to have grant money to come into the general fund, then in the school budget in March or April you have to put corresponding lines in there.”“They have no school budget,” Fracasso said.“I’m just saying that if you put money into the fund balance right now, there is no line item to move it out,” Perez said.Beadle said that the procedure has been approved by the selectmen in the past and that the money would be allocated to the school district.Fracasso, who has been a very outspoken critic of the Board of Education during this year’s MBR battle, did not relent in his criticism at Monday’s meeting.“If they could handle their money over there in a proper way we wouldn’t need to approve this,” Fracasso said. “Unfortunately, that is not the case. They don’t have any idea how much money that they have spent and we don’t have any idea of how much money they are spending. What has been happening in the past few years is [Centrella] has been taking the back of the check, endorsing it and giving it to the Board of Education, then we have no clue where it has gone.”Closson told the board that he did not feel that Fracasso’s motion was “the right way” to fund the MBR.Renzullo wanted to wait to hear from both Centrella and Town Attorney Kevin Nelligan before the board voted on the motion.“The way the motion reads, we’re talking about all kinds of grants, whether it’s limited to roads and bridges or anything else,” Renzullo said. “I would like to hear from [Centrella and Nelligan] to know it this is legal. I’m not willing to get grants taken back because we were not doing the right thing. I am not comfortable doing anything like this.”After the vote on Fracasso’s motion, the selectmen voted unanimously to direct Town Manager Dale Martin to research and develop plans to make up the MBR shortfall.
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Meg Sher, executive director of the David M. Hunt Library in Falls Village.
“I was a library kid. I walked to the library after school,” she said.
For Sher, the library is as much about the people as it about the books.
“Part of the job I love so much is that running the library is such a community,” she said.
She treasures the relationships she has built, whether recommending books, celebrating accomplishments or helping patrons through difficult times.
“I am thankful that our community is so supportive of the library, unlike what is happening in some other places where librarians are villainized,” Sher said.
Sher takes pride in the Hunt Library’s reputation for being “open and welcoming to everyone. People come in and see things and get pulled into things they weren’t expecting. Our library is seen as a positive force.”
Sher came to Falls Village after being awarded a fellowship at Adamah Farm, then a program of the Isabella Freedman Jewish Retreat Center. She worked at pickling, in the greenhouse and later in the development office. She also worked as a nanny.
At the same time, “I was in the library all the time,” she recalled. “I’m a voracious reader. The library is where I met a lot of my first friends in Falls Village.”
She became assistant librarian at Hunt and worked in that position for almost a decade before becoming the executive director four years ago.
Meg Sher, executive director of the David M. Hunt Library in Falls Village.L. Tomaino
Sher met her husband, Adam, while working at Adamah. They had their wedding there in 2012. He now emcees many events which she co-organizes with the Falls Village Recreation Commission.
Sher and her family live near the library.
“It’s an easy commute,” she said with a smile. “My kids run back and forth. I can go home to walk the dog if I need to.”
“My kids have grown up here.” Her oldest son, Eli, “loves volunteering. He helps with Augustfest and often helps set up chairs for ArtWall gatherings.” Her younger son, Noah, is often at events and was eager to taste cookies at last year’s holiday cookie swap.
When she is not at the library, Sher likes to hike with her family. Bella, their Portuguese water dog, often accompanies them.
Sher enjoys seeking out people to offer events at the library.
“I do a lot of different community programming. It is one of my favorite parts of the job.”
Augustfest, featuring food, music and an auction, is the library’s biggest fundraiser.
“This summer we had a record 152 attendees, which was pretty incredible.”
Yonah Sadeh, a filmmaker from Falls Village, inaugurated the VideoWall this year, Sher explained.
“I’ve known Yonah since he was two. It’s wonderful to work with him as an adult.”
The VideoWall complements the library’s ArtWall, which showcases a new artist each month. Sher praised the ArtWall committee for its work and highlighted December’s popular “12x12 Show,” featuring works by local artists, each measuring 12 by 12 inches and priced at $150.
Sher added that some of the artists who exhibit at the ArtWall offer workshops to students at Kellogg School, next door to the library. In September, artist Danielle Mailer worked with the children. Vincent Inconiglios taught a class last November.
Being next to the school, said Sher, is a great advantage.
“Kids are coming after school, to see friends, work on projects, find a great book. Kids that love the library end up using the library as grownups.”
This past year, in partnership with Adamah, the library and school created a garden, with excess produce made available at The Center on Main.
This year is Sher’s second year participating in the Troutbeck Symposium in Amenia with James King, director of the library at Salisbury School. The Troutbeck Symposium is “a gathering of a year of student historical inquiry across the region” in which students “uncover stories that have been overlooked, forgotten, or never recorded.”
Last year, Sher and King began a project with a group of students researching Irish immigrants in Falls Village, exploring ancestry and creating small magazines about their findings.
They continued this year, visiting St. Patrick’s Catholic Cemetery on Dublin Road, cleaning seven gravestones and even righting one with the help of stonemason and gravestone restoration expert Karl Munson. Paul Kozeazny, a representative of the Catholic archdiocese, helped secure access to the site.
A film documenting their activities will be shown at the symposium in spring 2027.
A full schedule of programs and events, ranging from tech help to ceramic mug-making, can be found on the library’s website.
Despite spending her days surrounded by books, and a busy schedule of programming, Sher still loves to settle in with a book at home.
For more information on library programs and events, visit huntlibrary.org
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Touré was born in northern Mali in 1981. His father, the renowned guitarist Ali Farka Touré, came from a family of soldiers and wanted his son to join the army. The younger Touré studied drums and the calabash and practiced guitar in secret. He earned his father’s blessing to pursue music shortly before Ali died in 2006, and they played two tracks together on Vieux’s debut album.
Touré is known for his deft, polyrhythmic playing, and his songs grow out of riffs that repeat and layer to hypnotic effect. He draws on rock, blues, Latin music and various African traditions. This distinctive blend builds on his father’s work adapting the sonic traditions of Mali’s arid north to the guitar.
Vieux’s album “Mon Pays” (“My Country,” 2013) honored Mali’s culture after Tuareg separatists and extremist groups seized the north in 2012. “Samba” (2017) was recorded before about 50 listeners in Woodstock, New York. In 2022 came “Les Racines” (“The Roots”), a return to his father’s desert blues, and “Ali,” on which he and the trio Khruangbin reworked eight of the elder Touré’s songs.
Touré leads the Ali Farka Touré Foundation, which focuses on cultural and educational work in Mali. Around the anniversary of Ali’s death, it holds a festival in Bamako, Mali’s capital. Bamako has been under blockade for much of the past year, besieged by JNIM, an al-Qaeda affiliate. Against this backdrop, Touré continues to carry the music of Mali to audiences abroad.
At the Nov. 5 concert, Touré’s desert blues will share the bill with Gnawa, the music LanGus plays, which developed in Morocco among West Africans who were brought north across the desert as enslaved people. Gnawa is religious music traditionally performed at all-night healing ceremonies called lila, intended to carry participants into trance.
Samir LanGusProvided
LanGus was born and raised outside Agadir, Morocco, and began learning Gnawa from its masters at age 8. He plays the sintir, a three-stringed bass lute made of wood and camel skin. The player strikes a low string with the thumb to create a deep, resonant pulse. Iron castanets clatter over the sintir’s bass line, and vocalists trade call-and-response refrains.
LanGus infuses the tradition with jazz and improvisation. In New York, he founded the ensemble Innov Gnawa. His first solo album, “Gnawa Love,” came out in February.
Touré and LanGus’s Nov. 5 concert is one of the last public events at Race Brook Lodge, which is for sale and ended full-service operations at the end of 2025. The lodge’s final scheduled event, on Nov. 6, is an evening of Rumi’s poetry with translator and vocalist Haleh Liza Gafori, cellist Isabel Castellvi and ceremonial bard James Bird.
For tickets, visit rblodge.com.
James FitzGerald is a student at Yale Law School, where he focuses on ecological restoration and international environmental cooperation. He splits his time between Lakeville and New Haven.
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