Don Lowe First Selectman Column 05/06/24
Both the Town and the Sherman School budgets passed easily on last Saturday. The final count was Town Budget: 413 YES, 91 NO. School Budget: 343 YES, 159 NO. Thank you to the 500-plus citizens who voted. That looks like a small portion of our possible voters (around 20 %) – and it is -- but it’s actually almost double what we have been having in the past few years. I think holding the Town Organizations Expo in the Green that day helped matters as far as vote count. Big thanks to our registrars and our poll workers for another seamless referendum. They make it look easy and it’s not.
Speaking of Saturday’s Town Expo, what a terrific success that was! Big thank-you to the Conservation Commission and the Commission for the Arts for hosting and organizing the whole event. Thank you Linda Hubbard, Lauren Weber, Denise Schlesinger, and Bill McCann for your leadership here. I’m sure I have left out many others who deserve thanks; but suffice to say, it was a wonderful Sherman event. We even had music! I hope we do this event every year.
We will hold a Town Meeting this Saturday, May 11 at 10am in Mallory Town Hall. The two main items are a capital request of $17,000 for HVAC and AC repair in the Sherman Volunteer Fire Department’s ESF Building. The other is a $135,000 capital request for roof repair at the Sherman School. Two other items are also on the agenda, both standard expenses that we approve every year for Happy Acres Farm. They are a $20,000 dispensation from cell tower revenue for farm related maintenance expenses and repairs for the new fiscal year, and $35,000 from the Happy Acres Restricted Fund to pay for the coming fiscal year of contracted services that maintain the farm.
You may have noticed that we now have YOUR SPEED signs on Route 37 as drivers enter Sherman from either direction on that State highway. I was able to secure a permit from the State DOT that allows us to place these machines, which indicate a driver’s speed. We are hopeful that they will slow drivers down as they pass through the center of Sherman. They are computerized so we are able to quite easily gather statistics about average speeds and the amount of vehicles. Thanks to Selectman Joel Bruzinski and our Treasurer Andrea Maloney for identifying a program through UCONN and the DOT wherein we obtained these machines on loan at no cost. This means we get to use them for two months free and if people can’t stand them, then we won’t purchase them ourselves. However, if they seem to be helping and complaints are minimal, then we will expend the nearly $10,000 for the two units after our loaner period ends.
Now that the budget is passed I just want to say how grateful I am to all entities that helped shaped the budget. Thank you Board of Education for your good work. Thank you to each organization for your thoughtful budgeting as we considered your requests. Thank you to our treasurer Andrea Maloney who did a splendid job of managing the budget process in conjunction with a property assessment revaluation. Huge thanks to my associate, Liz LaVia, who is our Town business manager extraordinaire. Liz is an absolute pleasure to work with and I can’t say enough about the how well she serves this town. Finally, I must say I am the luckiest First Selectman ever to have the two board members that I sit with – fellow Selectmen Bob Ostrosky and Joel Bruzinski. Both serve Sherman at a profoundly high level and I am most fortunate to be on the Board of Selectmen with them. They make this work easier and more enjoyable.
