Latest News
Curious cub
Jul 30, 2025
Danella Schiffer
The black bear family, recently captured through the window of a Salisbury home as Mama watched her three cubs climbing a tree, returns regularly to the Schiffer backyard in search of grubs and insects. Here, one cub steals a look inside. What do you see outside your window? Send photos to editor@lakevillejournal.com
Call to reform Connecticut’s tax on hospitals
In reading the LVJ headline “Study says Medicaid cuts put Sharon Hospital at risk of possible closure,” I asked myself “How does our State decide to properly support community hospitals?”
Is it virtuous conduct by the hospital, lower rates, safer patients, higher civic responsibility? It seems all of these characterize Sharon Hospital in national ratings.
Regular readers of The Lakeville Journal may recall a story about the Lown Institute Annual Report of the most socially responsible hospitals in the nation, for 2025.
The Lown Institute is a legacy of Dr. Bernard Lown, an inventor of direct current defibrillators, a pioneering cardiologist, and also winner of the Nobel Peace Prize on behalf of the group he co-founded, International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War.
The Lown Institute studies social responsibility, with an index that measures the performance of hospital across the nation, on fair pay, community investment, the avoidance of unnecessary procedures and patient safety and satisfaction.
Out of 2717 acute care hospital examined, Sharon Hospital ranked eighth in the nation, and was ranked first in Connecticut. It turns out, however, that the problem (“risk of possible closure”) is not in our hospitals, but in ourselves. Fifteen years ago Connecticut began using a hospital tax to balance the state budget rather than support hospitals and patient care.
Recently State Senator Heather Somers (R-17) drew attention to this “rob Peter to pay Paul” strategy adopted by Connecticut and other states to augment Medicaid payments, and to use Medicaid
funds to balance the general fund budget. The future of these hospital taxes and their use to balance state budgets is now in question, by virtue of one of many sections of the “Big Beautiful Bill” cutting Medicaid expenditures.
Senator Somers wrote “For years, Connecticut used hospital tax revenue as a budget mechanism—drawing down federal dollars, then diverting the funds elsewhere. The result: consistent net losses for hospitals, which eventually led to a lawsuit and a 7-year settlement that ends in 2026.”
Government at the State and Federal level depends on patients with private health insurance making up the difference between Medicare and Medicaid rates and the cost of providing hospital care to all.
For more than 116 years, the community has helped to create a socially responsible institution, Sharon Hospital. The State has to do its job. We can bemoan the Federal actions, at least until the mid-term and Presidential elections, but Connecticut can also clean up its act—by reforming a hospital tax that places smaller and more rural hospitals at a disadvantage, especially when hospitals like Sharon are showing the way as leaders and responsible community citizens.
Deborah Moore
Sharon
Federal funding for libraries must continue
The Scoville Memorial Library in Salisbury, Connecticut, is the oldest free public library in the United States.
It started in 1771 when Richard Smith raised money to purchase two hundred books in London, which were put into the community collection where they could be borrowed and returned.
Today public libraries are the center of every community. Students without internet at home come after school to do their homework. People use the library to search for jobs and home rentals on their phones or library computers. There are many community events and classes offered.
In many libraries, volunteers help seniors with their taxes and teach computer skills. Authors come to talk about their books, and mothers and young children come for story time. And of course, there are books, magazines and eBooks to borrow, and if the library does not have a book, they can get one through the interlibrary loan.
Libraries are the dynamic center of every town, so why is this administration cutting funds for our public libraries?
The IMLS, or Institute of Museum and Library Services, was created in 1996 to distribute Congressionally approved funds to support our museums and libraries. The Trump administration wants to eliminate the IMLS.Already the proposed funding cuts have caused staff layoffs and more than 1,000 IMLS programs funded by federal grants have been targeted for elimination. This could affect access to the internet, eBooks, audiobooks and databases for research in our public libraries. The courts currently have halted the President’s plan to eliminate these services, but Trump is determined to make the cuts.
These are our treasured libraries, one in almost every town in America, and they are invaluable.
Library funding must continue.Contact your Congressional representatives to demand it.
Lizbeth Piel
Sharon
When President Trump wins, we the people lose
I’d like to suggest Mark Godburn is correct to argue in his July 17 letter to the editor that “Trump keeps winning” — just not in the way Godburn thinks.
At its essence, the Trump administration, to modify Lincoln’s turn of phrase, is a government “of the billionaires, by the billionaires, and for the billionaires.” Since Jan. 20, Trump has been selling the American state for parts, firing masses of federal workers while destroying regulatory agencies designed to check the power of billionaires like himself. His cynically named Big Beautiful Bill will cut $1 trillion from Medicaid and throw as many as 17 million off of health insurance. It will gravely endanger rural healthcare, putting even the existence of our very own Sharon Hospital at risk (see Lakeville Journal cover story from July 17). And it will do all this for the sake of slashing the taxes of the very richest Americans. So yes, Trump is indeed winning — and over 99 per cent of the rest of us are losing.
Naturally, this sort of economic politics isn’t exactly popular. Unfortunately, however, Trump has had a fair amount of success distracting from his pro-billionaire agenda with grotesque spectacles of cruelty against migrants, which apparently resonate with certain Americans. But let’s not be fooled: the real problem facing us today is not migrants (it remains to be seen whether anyone will even want to immigrate to this country in a few years given the ongoing war on our quality of life). Rather, the real problem is a ruling class bent on sowing the seeds of hatred and division in its ever more rapacious pursuit of profit and those politicians — including plenty of Democrats — who are either of this class themselves or eager to do its bidding in exchange for millions in campaign donations.
Fortunately, there are stirrings of resistance. The most encouraging current example is the New York mayoral campaign of Zohran Mamdani, who aims to address the cost-of-living crisis through policies such as rent freezes and free preschool. By proposing to fund this agenda through taxes on major corporations and the rich — not on “white neighborhoods,” as Godburn writes in tellingly racialized language — Mamdani has given us a blueprint for a politics that mobilizes the masses not through hatred but solidarity. This kind of politics spells genuine danger for Trump’s project. No wonder our billionaire-in-chief, true to his authoritarian tendencies, is now spreading lies about the immigration status of Mamdani, a naturalized U.S. citizen since 2018, and even threatening to deport him.
For the moment, Trump is winning. But he’s clearly scared, as he should be.
Adam Rashkoff Baltner
Lakeville
Thanks Sharon Hospital
I am an old man and yesterday I lost my balance and fell. My wife called 911.The ambulance arrived and the medical staff tended to me and took me on a stretcher to the Sharon Hospital. How fortunate we are to have a hospital staffed with such dedicated, skilled and caring people. They are a treasure. Thank you, thank you,thank you.
Harry Kramer
Lakeville
Keep ReadingShow less
loading
Complex calculus: Climate migration
"From our window, we could see the distant flames glowing in the dark,” recalled novelist and poet Barbara Quick of the Tubbs fire that broke out in the Northern California wine country in October 2017. Burning at the unprecedented rate of an acre per second, the fired killed22 people, destroyed more than 5,000 homes, and devastated the city of Santa Rosa. “It was terrifying,” she added. The following day, the air still darkened by soot, Quick and her husband Wayne Roden, a longtime violist with the San Francisco Symphony and owner of Roden Wines, packed up their family photos, mementos and Quick’s notebooks, and relocated to an Airbnb until the smoke cleared. Soon afterwards, the couple sold their house in Sonoma and moved to the leafy, cooler community of Sherman, Connecticut.
Brittany Morris, Elyse Harney Morris’ daughter, has a similar story to tell. She and her husband and their 20-month-old had been living in California when the Los Angeles fires—and their aftermath—prompted their family’s move back to the seeming safety of Litchfield Country.
Harney Morris, co-owner of Harney Real Estate explains that her firm has been selling homes to an increasing number of buyers from California and Texas moving here, at least in part, to escape the increasing frequency and ferocity of western wildfires, droughts, floods and other climate-change-driven natural disasters.
While Quick and Morris would seem to reflect a growing trend of “climate migrants”relocating to the safer and cooler climes of the northeast—including Litchfield, Fairfield and Dutchess counties— the reality is much more ambiguous. As Quick observes, “the calculus that makes people decide to leave their home of many years is quite complex. We did what we did for lots of reasons. It wasn’t only that we were traumatized by the fire. My husband had retired from the symphony, and we wanted a change.”
For many people, the forces driving so-called climate migration are economic. As ProPublica reporter Abraham Lustgarten, author of “On the Move: The Overheating Earth and the Uprooting of America,” noted in a recent Fresh Air interview, “people move when they find that changing environmental conditions affect their economic standing and their economic security— their jobs, their income, the cost of living.”
It should come as no surprise that a recent National Institutes of Health study found that lower-income households moved at higher rates overall, but migrated less across state lines, while higher-income households moved intentionally towards popular migration destinations.
The other reality of US climate migration is that while 64 percent of Americans say they are at least “somewhat worried” about global warming, the country’s fastest growing cities are still in the Arizona, Texas and Florida sunbelts, regions that are most at risk of significant climate change-driven impacts, such as the recent fatal flooding in the notorious “flash flood alley” of the Texas Hill Country.
That’s because lower costs of living and relatively strong economic growth—along with the fact that people may not understand the extent to which their new properties are exposed to climate risk—are still luring transplants.
Despite the fact that the US National Vulnerability Index—a tool to help at-risk communities plan for the future—ranks our region in the relatively low 14th percentile, making our neck of the woods a potential “climate haven,”there’s no need to worry about an influx of climate refugees overwhelming our quiet corner of the country just yet.
As the Lakeville Journal reported in March, a recent report issued by the Northwest CT Community Foundation, which analyzed our region’s converging demographic, economic and educational makeup trends, revealed the sobering reality thatConnecticut is one of only seven states whose population is simultaneously declining and aging.
More sobering still is the unfortunate fact that even while our temperate region is more climate-secure than many others, we are far from out of the woods. A climate modeling projection by First Street shows that Litchfield County faces major risk from flooding with 13,786 properties or at risk of flooding over the next 30 years. And according to the interactive platform Future Urban Climates, in the next sixty years, Litchfield County will be 10.6 degrees warmer on average and 8.7 percent wetter during summertime and 10.9 degrees warmer and 26.6 percent wetter in winter. So long snow.
As today’s temperature hovers near a balmy 80 degrees and I prepare to take our dog Willis for his ritual romp through shady Barbour Woods, I’m still parsing the complex calculus that landed my husband and me in the Land of Steady Habits one blustery March day four and a half years ago. Like Quick and Morris, we moved for a complex cluster of reasons. Not that we were aware of it at the time, but looking back, climate was among them. After rejecting the Connecticut coast—too congested; mid-coast Maine—too far and the Penobscot Bay, we learned, was warming faster than any body of water on the East Coast, we decided on our tiny town, ironically nicknamed the Icebox of Connecticut.
Writer and communications consultant Carol Goodstein lives in Norfolk.