The Sharon Farm Market grocery store is a centerpiece of the Sharon Shopping Center, which was proposed as the town’s “uptown” commercial hub during an April 22 meeting.
SHARON – Town officials are moving forward with an update to Sharon’s Plan of Conservation and Development (POCD), a state-mandated document that will guide land use and growth over the next decade. At an April 22 meeting, the Planning and Zoning Commission focused on economic development – one of three core priorities identified for the update, alongside conservation and farmland preservation, and housing.
Officials and residents centered their discussion on the importance of preserving the unique tranquility of the downtown, with plans to accentuate the existing infrastructure and improve walkability. Some even proposed the creation of a farmer’s market at Veterans Field.
The POCD, which is required to be updated every decade, is due at the end of this year. It was last updated in 2006.
Janell Mullen, a local land use professional, has been consulting with the Commission, and meeting with local interest groups since last fall to gain input on how to modernize the plan.
The April 22 session focused on walkability, commerce, culture, infrastructure and safety. These items were selected based on results from a public survey distributed by Mullen and the P&Z Commission last winter. The town received 190 responses representing approximately 7.5% of Sharon’s population.
Mullen asked the Commission to propose terminology to describe the economic hubs in town. Stanley MacMillan Jr., longtime building inspector and fire marshal, proposed the distinction of an “uptown” and “downtown.” Uptown, a term he used for the area when he was growing up in Sharon, would be the shopping center and surroundings on Gay Street. He posited a “downtown” district as the stretch of Route 41 between the intersections of Hilltop Road and Route 4, including the Sharon Playhouse.
P&Z Vice Chair Betsy Hall stipulated that the residential homes along the Sharon Green should be largely protected from conversion to commercial ventures. “We don’t want to be Salisbury, we don’t want to be Kent,” she said.
Mullen said the survey results indicated a desire to preserve what residents see as the tranquility of Sharon’s village life.
She said that spurring “vitality,” a key word in the survey results, doesn’t necessarily mean more business, but “accentuating” existing businesses via walkability and community infrastructure that promotes people being out and about amongst the town’s various hubs.
Safety, she said, is a key aspect of vibrant town life, which spurred conversation about parking issues on West Main Street and speeding through the center of town.
Several commissioners brought up the robust arts and crafts community in Sharon, and how to promote cultural programming. Mullen brought up the possibility of a farmers and makers market in Sharon, similar to seasonal fixtures in nearby Northwest Corner towns like Kent and Cornwall. Veterans Field was suggested as a possible location for such an event with access to restrooms, parking and children’s play facilities.
Mullen and the Commission will resume the conversation at next month’s planning session, scheduled for May 27, with a focus on conservation and farmland protection. As with all planning sessions, the meeting will be open to the public.
Lakeville Journal
Grateful for community on National Day of Prayer
Our hearts are filled with thanks to our wonderful Salisbury/Lakeville community for sharing the goodness of the Lord as we celebrated the 75th National Day of Prayer.
Windy, cool conditions didn’t keep you hearty New Englanders from turning out to pray, a hundred strong.It was a privilege to have an eighth grade Eagle Scout lead us in the Pledge of Allegiance with such clarity, an Army Sergeant and his daughter praying for our military and veterans and a family all delighting in praying together.There was a warmth of fellowship and spirit in singing patriotic songs interspersed with prayer that nourished our souls.
As this is the 250th celebration of our country’s founding, we thank Town Historian Lou Bucceri for joining us as narrator giving historical vignettes of how prayer has played an important role in our country from its inception. Sharing quotes from our CT governor Trumbull and Noah Webster and our own Congregational church Minister Jonathan Lee, he brought us up to the recent past with quotes on prayer from FDR and Martin Luther King, all reminding us of the integral part prayer has played in our nation.
Thank you to all participants, Salisbury Town Hall, National Day of Prayer team and all of you who attend and make this day so special each year.
With grateful hearts,
Newt and Barbara Schoenly
Salisbury
Mac Gordon
Most of us tend to take food supply for granted.Our grocery stores and supermarkets are full of most everything we might wish to eat except for the occasional out-of-season fruit or vegetable---and even these have become more available. But there are someincreasing signs that our food complacency may be short-sighted, that there may be trouble down the road.
Over the past eighty years, the world’s human population has quadrupled and still continues to grow. Just providing food for people in the less affluent regions is more and more difficult. All over the world forests are being torn down to make way for economically viable but strictly for export crops like palm oil trees. In many parts of the U.S., clean, fresh water, a basic requirement for agriculture is becoming scarcer thereby making agriculture considerably more expensive and food scarce.Drought caused by climate change is making more land around the world unsuitable for growing crops. Over-harvesting can devastate land; 2,000 years ago most of North Africa was forested and fertile but largely through poor management it became over the centuries nearly desert.
President Trump’s war in Iran has disrupted global commerce beyond expectations. The predictable closing of the Strait of Hormuz has limited trade of most everything coming to or going from the Middle East, the most obvious commodities being oil and gas which run most industrial (and agricultural)operations worldwide. The Middle East also supplies a major portion of the world’s fertilizer, both the finished product and the raw materials and that is for most of the world not just Europe and America. A significant reduction in world food supply is expected.
Currently before the U.S. SupremeCourt is a case regarding the legal liability ofMonsanto, now a subsidiary of Bayer, for its herbicide, Roundup, the country’s most popular weed killer. The suit concerns whether product liability warnings issued by a state agency are overruled by a differing federal ruling. While the state has a warning label on the container saying that the contents are “probably carcinogenic” to humans, the federal Environmental Protection Agency has said Roundup is not carcinogenic.Countless lawsuits and billions of dollars of possible settlements await the Court’s verdict.
To help diminish future lawsuits, a homegardening version without glyphosate, the key ingredient, has recently come on the market. Should standard Roundup actually be banished, the effect on conventional industrial agriculture would be huge. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., who has campaigned repeatedly for organic farming, has backtracked, speaking out forcefully against a ban on glyphosate saying that such a move would be “tooabrupt” (thereby infuriating most of his “MAHA” supporters). But a banning of Roundup’s glyphosate with no proven successor and a swift return from industrial agriculture to basic organic farming techniques would raise food prices enormously and probably cause a lot of political dissent.
Another looming problem comes from PFAS, often referred to as “forever chemicals” because of their inability to break down. In 1946, DuPont introduced nonstick cookware coated with Teflon. Today the family of fluorinated chemicals that sprang from Teflon includes thousands of non-stick, stain-repellent and waterproof compounds called PFAS, short for per- and poly-fluoroalkyl substances.
Back in the 1970s I was involved in the creation of several community parks and gardens on vacant lots in New York City. To cover the crushed rubble ground surfaces, we located a large supply of special compost soil from a drug company’s corporate campus in the suburbs---free but for the trucking.Composed of company dining hall food waste, sewage sludge, mycelium from drug manufacturing, and other organic waste. The compost proved to be fertile, humusy soil, an excellent growing medium, a good prototype for rich planting soil (without chemical fertilizers).
Over the decades more and more farm fields have drastically cut back on their use of expensive chemical fertilizers and, at the same time and are providing disposal for municipal sewage and other composted waste. But a few years ago, a New York Times environmental reporter discovered that compost from many sewage treatment plants across the country were contaminated with high levels of PFAS and other dangerous contaminants. Subsequently, this widespread use of sewage sludge fertilizer is being restricted in many instances and will continue to be discouraged until the federal Environmental Protection Agency follows through on its earlier promises to mandate cleaning up public water facilities of PFAS and other contaminants.
In 1935, the Dupont Corporation came up with one of the most famous advertising slogans of the era:“Better Living Through Chemistry”.But the naive optimism of the original slogan now carries a more sardonic tone. Modern science has made great strides in agriculture as in so many fields but our problems feeding ourselves and keeping healthy are not behind us.The Green Revolution that came into being after WW2 doubled world food production but also left us with perhaps insolvable medical problems.
Architect G. Mackenzie Gordon, AIA lives in Lakeville.
Want more of our stories on Google? Click here to make us a Preferred Source.
Peter Riva
I have been increasingly concerned over AI and questions of originality of journalists’ work, authors’ manuscripts, plagiarism.A new manuscript submission an agency made to a publisher was rejected because they ran the author’s text through an AI detector and claimed it was mainly AI generated.
The manuscript was an anthology of short stories and true histories the author had written and compiled (about the history of dogs) over more than 10 years. The author claimed that most of the text was written before AI was around. The only editing he has done has been within the confines of MS Word (grammar and spell check). He has “NEVER used AI, ever.”
So I ran portions of the dog book text in Grammarly and Pangram and it came back “42% appears to be AI-generated” and “49% AI-generated,” respectively. Incredible.
So, as a test of these and two other AI detection systems, I ran 15,000 first (unedited) words of a manuscript I wrote in 2018 and was published in 2022 (Elephant Safari) and this was the result in a third AI checker: “75% of your text has signs of AI.” Considering I wrote this thriller on the dining room table in the dark of night without any copy and paste whatsoever, I knew this AI plagiarism was misleading, to say the least.
So I went further back and chose text from a book written in 1990… delivered in Nov. 1990, edited by Victoria Wilson at Knopf and still in print: Marlene Dietrich: By Her Daughter Maria Riva Result? On “JustDone” AI checker: “82% AI content.” This manuscript was handwritten on yellow legal pads.
So, the question we all have to ask is this: If AI memory already contains many of the materials, texts, of published books in AI memory… are they all now considered AI owned/generated? Or is AI actually saying that the material is not new to AI and therefore labels it as plagiarized?
The issue here seems to me to be a definition of “original” – original to whom? If an author sends a Gmail with a manuscript to an editor, Gmail (Google) has the file and their AI can presumably read it. Also, if Google or other AI platforms have scanned a previously published magazine article or a book, I believe the very familiarity of what is in the AI memory will give the result that “AI is familiar with this text” and therefore leads to accuse an author of plagiarism.
As for me, I have no faith whatsoever in these so-called AI detection systems. They provided complete nonsense on something I wrote in 2018 and an author delivered in Nov. 1990! To further illustrate the point, I ran Act 1 of HAMLET: “Most of your text is AI/GPT Generated,” so Shakespeare is also a plagiarist? Teachers, professors, and editors everywhere are relying on these false readings and contributing to fake literature appraisal.
Peter Riva, a former resident of Amenia Union, New York, now lives in Gila, New Mexico.
Norma Bosworth
125 years ago — May 1901
NOTICE. All persons are forbidden dumping rubbish or anything on our land. Especially on Lands between the Bradley and McDuffie farms. M.H. Robbins.
SALISBURY — Three forest fires have started thus far this season in this section. The woods near the town farm in some way took fire last Sunday. A force of twenty or more men soon had the fire extinguished.
100 years ago — May 1926
Once more we wish to allude to the sounding of the fire siren. Paste this in your hat and remember it if you have occasion to sound the alarm: Within the fire district limits- one continuous blast; outside the fire district- three blasts. Simple enough if remembered.
Peter A. Kisselbrack, who has been at the Town Farm since last fall, has become mentally deranged and has been taken to the Middletown Insane Retreat. Peter for the past two years has been steadily losing his eyesight and became unable to follow his trade as painter, and his old friends in this section feel very sorry to learn of his further misfortune.
50 years ago — May 1976
SALISBURY — A proposal for a 300-member “very high-grade residential country club” on the site of Fair Acres Farm at the foot of Smith Hill was brought before the Planning and Zoning Commission Monday night. The plan, as outlined by associates Florence and Andelmo Ortiz, owners of Fair Acres, calls for an 18-hole golf course, indoor and outdoor tennis courts, indoor and outdoor swimming pools, a stable and indoor riding ring and a “health facility.”
Paul Schmitt, a Housatonic Valley Regional High School senior from Canaan, won national recognition this week for his original work in computer programming. Schmitt was named one of 59 students from across America whose projects will be displayed at the 1976 National Computer Conference June 7-10 in New York City.
A joint effort by the towns of Salisbury and Sharon was initiated Monday morning in the official opening of a solid waste transfer station on Route 41 in Salisbury. Sharon First Selectman William Wilbur threw the first bag of garbage into the compacting unit while Salisbury selectmen looked on. The $120,000 facility can be used by Sharon residents now and by Salisbury residents beginning July 1.
LAKEVILLE — The state Public Utilities Control Authority has denied a request from the Lakeville Water Company for a 34.4 per cent across-the-board rate hike for all types of customers, but will allow the company a smaller increase. The exact figure has yet to be determined, Lakeville manager Edward Kipp said Tuesday night.
Debbie and Bruce Bennett will officially open their new greenhouse in Kent this Saturday. Guest speaker for the occasion will be Elvin McDonald, garden editor of House & Garden magazine. Kent Greenhouse was located for three years in Railroad Square in Kent. The all-new complex on Route 7 south of Kent enabled the Bennetts to “expand everything.”
CANAAN — Becton-Dickinson plant manager Daniel O’Donnell this week cited the company’s excellent second quarter performance, saying that his firm has been hiring and expects to continue hiring. In recent months B-D, which manufactures disposable plastic hypodermic syringes, has re-hired all of the 50 employees laid off during the 1975 recession. The plant manager refused to comment, however, on reports that increased production at the plant is the result of a national program to inoculate the United States populace against swine flu. Company employees have reportedly been working overtime schedules since Easter.
Canaan brothers Mark and Stephen Clarke are among the performers who appear in the movie “American Years,” the feature presentation at Philadelphia’s Living History Center. The movie sweeps the viewer through 200 years of American history through a series of vignettes,
CORNWALL — Clarence Meier — artist, ceramicist and retired Cornwall postmaster — will have on sale at the Town Hall on May 31 the pottery collection which he has accumulated over his past years as a resident of Cornwall. The birds, animals and designs which he originated and created, are the result of Meier’s lifetime interest in nature. Besides being a ceramicist, he is also the designer and creator of the wall murals on display in the Cornwall Post Office and the National Iron Bank in Cornwall.
CORNWALL — When the Bicentennial Committee met Friday night to review plans for the celebration of the nation’s 200th birthday, chairman Paula Holmes reported that the ladies of St. Bridget’s Church are moving ahead so rapidly with squares for the Bicentennial quilt that there may be enough for two quilts. The first will be a gift to the Historical Society. The second will be offered at a raffle.
KENT — Jeanne Howard is the first woman member in the 65-year history of the Kent Fire Department. She was elected to membership at the department’s monthly meeting last week.
25 years ago — May 2001
CANAAN — Bicron Electronics, a certified global manufacturer of solenoids and transformer products, has acquired SMA LLC, a solenoid manufacturer in Concord, N.H. All manufacturing operations have been transferred to the Bicron Canaan plant. This acquisition broadens Bicron’s solenoid product offerings, technical expertise and sales coverage, customer service, engineering and manufacturing organization.
These items were taken from The Lakeville Journal archives at Salisbury’s Scoville Memorial Library, keeping the original wording intact as possible.
Want more of our stories on Google? Click here to make us a Preferred Source.
Want more of our stories on Google? Click here to make us a Preferred Source.
The death of dignity in leadership
James Speyer
The concept of dignity encompasses many traits of a virtuous person. It speaks to seriousness of purpose, gravitas, reserve, and self-respect. Throughout our nation’s history, we have considered it indispensable to effective leadership. Our two greatest presidents – Washington and Lincoln – were avatars of dignity.
Donald Trump’s utter inability to conduct himself in a dignified manner, and the follow-on effects that has created, has to rank as one of the most pernicious ways in which he has coarsened and degraded our society. Certainly this is not the worst of his misdeeds. But it is nonetheless important to understand, because it sets the tone for his administration and his followers, and tears at the fabric that binds us together, or used to.
His lack of dignity has been clear for decades. He infamously bragged that he could “grab [women] by the p****” without consequence. He posted an AI video of himself in a fighter jet dropping payloads of excrement on No Kings Day protesters. He gave a worker the middle finger during an auto factory tour. He wrote “Good, I’m glad he’s dead” about Robert Mueller, a decorated war hero. After a hammer-wielding Trump supporter bashed in the skull of Nancy Pelosi’s husband, he sneeringly asked a crowd “how’s her husband doing by the way, anybody know?” One could roll out literally hundreds of similarly graceless and appalling examples.
Try to imagine Washington or Lincoln behaving this way – impossible. Actually, try to imagine any human being with the slightest sense of decorum or decency acting this way – also impossible.
The dignity deficit extends to his Cabinet – that collection of hacks, nonentities and bootlickers who periodically assemble before him to compete to see who can degrade themselves the most by showering him with absurdly over-the-top praise (actual example: at one of these gatherings the (since fired) Secretary of Labor said “Mr. President, I invite you to see your big beautiful face on a banner in front of the Department of Labor because you are really the transformational president for the American worker.”). In what can only be understood as a self-inflicted humiliation ritual, male Cabinet members beclown themselves by sloshing around in oversize dress shoes because Trump has bestowed them without regard for the proper shoe size, and they fear offending him by not wearing them. Former Attorney General Pam Bondi displayed all the refinement of a feces-flinging baboon when in a Congressional hearing she bizarrely told Congressman Jamie Raskin “you don’t get to tell me anything, you washed up loser lawyer. You’re not even a lawyer.” (Raskin is the foremost constitutional law scholar in Congress). Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche said that if Trump fired him he’d say “thank you sir, I love you sir.” He actually said that.
Republicans in Congress are similarly afflicted. On January 6, 2021, Trump exhorted his supporters to march on the Capitol to stop the peaceful transfer of power, and then sat by and refused to lift a finger for hours as they ransacked the building and viciously attacked Capitol police while members of Congress – of both parties -- hid and cowered in fear for their lives. Instead of forsaking him for this – the most traitorous act ever committed by an American president – within a few weeks Congressional Republicans embraced him as the leader of their party once again. The degree of self-abasement it must take to support a man after he has sicced a violent mob on you (and refused to apologize for it) is off the charts. No one with a shred of self-respect could act that way.
Stripping other, less powerful people of their dignity is also a hallmark of this administration. Former DHS Secretary Kristi Noem flew to El Salvador for a photo op in front of dozens of caged, half-naked deportees deployed as props – a shameful, dehumanizing spectacle. Trump regularly demeans and degrades all Somali-Americans as “garbage.” ICE detains thousands of undocumented immigrants in inhumane and filthy human warehouses.
We used to expect more from our presidents. In this way, as in so many others, Trump has broken the mold.
James Speyer is a lawyer and a volunteer with Lawyers Defending American Democracy. He lives in Sharon, CT.