The Editor's Notepod, Wed., Dec. 17 2008

Meriden: Glad to see that Wilcox is assisting the Quinnipiac River Watershed Assoc. in the renovation project. There’s a good synergy in getting the high school kids something real to do for a non-profit.

Meriden: Problem with HUD compliance on lead abatement programs. There’s no question that HUD regs are complicated, but with lead paint abatement . . .? This is not a new issue. If HUD changed something, you might think they’d make a point of letting grantees in on the change.

Cheshire: mill rate/revaluation issues. With revaluation now taking place every 5 years, to avoid the sort of sticker shock people used to receive on learning of 10 years of change, the situation still seems to confuse people. 1) it is natural that taxes will go up some each year. Been that way for decades. Maybe the recession will change that, but it’s not likely. 2) Revaluation is more likely to result in shifts in the tax burden among different types of property – commercial, residential, rental, industrial – as properties change values unequally. Most of any increase in value is offset by decreases in the mill rate, but not all, so taxes rise. And, as the town manager says, in this case, although values have all gone down recently, they remain higher than they were five years ago. Of course, it never does seem to happen that a revaluation is made during a property low — or perhaps no one complains when it does.

Wallingford: town becomes the 5th of the 5 to approve the Covanta contract . . . which now seems not to matter, since CRRA may go ahead and decide to pay fair market value for the plant itself instead of letting Covanta exercise its $1 option. And no one still knows the value or what would happen if it does so. That is the most bizarre set-up. Would this be a demonstration of the craziness of quasi-public corporations?

Wallingford/Durham: another bullet strike, another study planned by Durham. Look, if every gun used at the Range is not registered and checked for ballistic markings each time it’s used, there’s just no way that any bullet discovered down range can be identified — or shown to be NOT from the Range. And that is what is needed.