Don Lowe First Selectman Column 01/20/2025
Our regularly scheduled monthly Board of Selectmen meeting for January was moved a week forward to Thursday, January 30 at 7pm in Mallory Town Hall. An agenda will go out this week onto the website. Much of the agenda will be updates on current capital projects along with progress reports on two ordinances requested by the Sherman Volunteer Fire Department. One concerns tax exemptions for retire SVFD members and the other deals with forming a policy to better correct open burn violators.
In February our board will begin the budget hearings. The first meetings are often called “intake” meetings as each budget entity presents its budget to the board. This meeting isn’t so much about deciding what does or doesn’t go into the budget as it is more about listening to the reasonings as to why boards, commissions, and organizations ask for what they ask for. In other words, in these initial meetings, the BOS mostly asks questions for better understanding.
The budget this year – both the Town and the Education budgets -- will be affected by significant insurance cost increases along with other inflationary effects. On the Town side, we will be looking at every line item with the hope of trimming or keeping it flat. I know that the Board of Education will be doing the same thing with its budget. As the budget meetings get closer, I will offer some specifics as to what we are looking at.
I am very excited to announce that a collaboration between Happy Acres Farm and the Sherman School is likely to take place in the near future. This educational programming will start slowly, but it might begin as early as this spring. Our farm manager, David Jellen, and I met with the school’s administration and we shared a series of ideas that were greeted enthusiastically by all parties. I greatly appreciated David’s sincerity to help this happen and I also was thrilled by the Sherman School’s eagerness to add some element of agri-science to the curriculum. In my opinion, there’s no limit as to what this could develop into. If this educational aspect to Happy Acres Farm works out – and it will – then we will have completed what I have always called “Phase Three” of the farm.
A town-owned farm presents (has presented) many challenges and itis easy to recognize the potential problems in an unorthodox arrangement like this. However, I prefer to see the advantages of a town owning a farm and I think we are just scratching the surface for the upside of this arrangement. Phase One of the farm involved forming a management plan and finding a way to sustain it. We did that. Phase Two involved reclaiming the farm, fixing what was broken, organizing what is there, and sustaining it. We have done that. Now, in collaborating with the Sherman School, we have a foothold on the final phase – Phase Three: where the farm holds public purpose.
A successful model, for me, of a Town-owned and subsidized farm has been the Ambler Farm down in Wilton, CT. I spent a fair amount of time there analyzing how they do what they do so well. They have a very successful entity now with numerous ways in which the public benefits from the municipality subsidizing Ambler Farm. At one point, I asked them how long it took to get everything lined up. The answer was, “About 20 years.” Well, we are way ahead of that schedule!
