Nelson gets backing from Malloy, Wyman and Ward

Press release from Elliot Nelson, the Democrats' endorsed candidate for registrar and the party chair in Bristol:

Elliot Nelson kicks off his run for Democratic Registrar of Voters with being endorsed by three prominent Democrats-Gubernatorial Candidate Dan Malloy, Lt. Governor Candidate Nancy Wymann and Bristol Mayor Art Ward. Nelson who received the Democratic Party endorsement in May by a nearly 3 to 1 margin has pledged to work closely with the elected officials in Hartford to ensure that the changes that need to be made in the Registrar’s office are implemented to create a much more user friendly environment that the people of Bristol can be proud of. He will now face his opponent in an August 10^th primary.

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Copyright 2010. All rights reserved. Contact Steve Collins at scollins@bristolpress.com

City Council to vote Tuesday on charter ideas

City councilors agreed to vote Tuesday on the Charter Revision Commission's report. Catch the story here.
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Copyright 2010. All rights reserved. Contact Steve Collins at scollins@bristolpress.com

Dog park opens at Rockwell Park

The first time anyone mentioned a dog park in Bristol in my memory was back in 2001. By 2006, a committed group of volunteers was raising money and pushing for a site. Yesterday, the new B.A.R.K. Park at Rockwell Park officially opened. You can read about it here.
It's kind of a a neat spot for an off-leash dog park, with lots of trees in the middle of the woods. That's so much nicer than most dog parks, where shade is either non-existent or paltry.
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Copyright 2010. All rights reserved. Contact Steve Collins at scollins@bristolpress.com

Route 72 extension to open in November

I wrote a handful of stories about the Route 72 extension for today's paper. Here they are:

Route 72: You've come a long way, baby

Traffic on Route 72 will face 'some challenges'

Bristol plans for development of new corridor

I don't see this little piece online so here's another:

How much will it cost?

Pegging the cost of the new Route 72 extension is inherently problematic because so much has been spent over the course of decades that’s not figured into the bottom line from the state.

Manafort Brothers, the New Britain-based general contractor, won the right to build the road three years ago with a $39.7 million bid.

But the state has also spent millions acquiring rights of way, moving utilities, making plans, holding hearings and more.

During groundbreaking for the project, transportation officials guessed that the total tab probably amounted to $61 million over the course of decades. It may even be more, they admitted.

There isn’t a solid figure because the money has come from different transportation accounts, some of which don’t even exist any longer.

But state officials said the construction project is coming in pretty close to budget.

All told, it appears the new road cost a little less than $30 million a mile – or half the per mile cost of the proposed busway between Hartford and New Britain that’s slated to get underway next year. 
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Copyright 2010. All rights reserved. Contact Steve Collins at scollins@bristolpress.com

Ann Clark steps down in Fairfield

Former Bristol School Superintendent Ann Clark retired this month from what may be her final job as Fairfield's gazillion dollar a year school chief. Here's a report from her retirement dinner.
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Copyright 2010. All rights reserved. Contact Steve Collins at scollins@bristolpress.com

Charter revision session on Thursday

City councilors will take up proposed city changes next week that could include longer terms for elected officials.

The recommended changes from the Charter Revision Commission are slated for discussion at a 5:30 p.m. council meeting Thursday at City Hall.

If councilors back the commission’s report, its recommendations will wind up on the Nov. 2 general election ballot. Voters will get the final say on whether to change the city government’s blueprint.

There are two significant overhauls to the charter included in the charter commission’s report: increasing the terms of office for elected officials to four years instead of two and adding a requirement that mayors ensure performance evaluations are carried out for many top municipal officials.

A few minor revisions are also on the agenda.  Click here for more.

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Copyright 2010. All rights reserved. Contact Steve Collins at scollins@bristolpress.com

Tme to push for a sports museum in Bristol?

I know ESPN will hate the idea of creating a sports museum in Bristol, but this may be just the right time to push for it.
The powerful sports giant recently declared that it was shutting down ESPN Zone restaurants in New York City, Chicago, Baltimore, Washington and maybe some other places. All of them are stuffed full of sports junk that fans would gladly come to Bristol to ogle.
While there's no doubt that Bristol has gotten a great deal by having ESPN make it home - thousands of jobs, tons of taxes and very little danger or expense for the community.
But as a tourist destination, let's face it, ESPN is a dud. It's got some cool satellite dishes outside, but there's no way to go in and not much chance of running into Chris Berman let alone Tiger Woods.
A sports museum in Bristol would fill an obvious gap.
The best option, of course, would be to have the ESPN Sports Palace with an overflowing volume of sports stuff and some nifty 3-D cameras and screens for visitors to pretend they're on SportsCenter.
But even if ESPN doesn't want any formal connection to the place, a Bristol sports museum could still thrive just because it's in Bristol and so is ESPN. And it's possible the network might loan or give a new community museum some interesting tidbits to put on display. If not, well, maybe Mayor Art Ward can lift some cool stuff next time he's wandering around inside ESPN.
I don't know if it's possible, of course, but at the moment, ESPN has more sports-related displays than even it can do something with. Maybe there's a chance for Bristol to put it on display and pull some of the millions of ESPN fans to visit the Mum City.
ESPN has made sports and Bristol inseparable. The city should find a way to make some money out of that.
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Copyright 2010. All rights reserved. Contact Steve Collins at scollins@bristolpress.com

New Yorker takes note of ESPN's new network

The New Yorker comes to town to take a gander at ESPN's new 3-D network.
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Copyright 2010. All rights reserved. Contact Steve Collins at scollins@bristolpress.com

City cracks down on Marine Court blight

After 18 years of threats, the city began cleaning up part of Francis "Frankie" Kerr's property on Marine Court yesterday.
Kerr is by most accounts a bright, kind man who clearl has a penchant for collecting all the junk he can drag to his land, where it is jammed into collapsing sheds and seemingly filling up his dilapidated house as well. I counted more than two dozen broken bicycles sticking out of piles of debris, not even counting the handful I watched D'Amato's cranes drop into a dumpster.
Kerr is no ordinary pack rat. He's in a league by himself, at least in Bristol. He reminds me of some folks I ran across down South who had barn after barn loaded to the brim with bric-a-brac -- old bottles, rusty tools, cars in various states of disrepair and farm equipment that hadn't been used in decades. They never threw anything away.
Kerr, on the other hand, not only never throws anything out, he picks up whatever he can from the debris that others put out at the curb.
I don't know the answer for dealing with people like Kerr. Surely throwing him in jail would be both pointless and cruel, no way to treat a Vietnam veteran who grew up on the property and then filled it with the tossaways of others.
On the other hand, I saw a collapsing shed only a few feet from a nice little home. That's not OK either.
You can read reporter Jackie Majerus' story about the situation here and her sensitive blog post about it here.
This story isn't over.
The city is going after Kerr's house as well. You can see why from this picture, showing the view in from a rear window:

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Copyright 2010. All rights reserved. Contact Steve Collins at scollins@bristolpress.com

Moylan and Peterson can stay... if city councilors want them

Let’s go back to the early days of Mayor Frank Nicastro’s administration – but not literally.

When Nicastro claimed the mayor’s office in 1993, one of his first moves was to oust the longtime leader of the powerful Board of Finance, Dick LaMothe.

LaMothe had long used his perch to hold sway over many of the issues facing the city.

With LaMothe no longer in the picture, John Letizia stepped up to fill the seat, determined to maintain the tight-fisted tradition of the fiscal oversight panel.

For Nicastro, Letizia appeared too ready to try to become a rival power in city government. So when Letizia’s term expired, the mayor said he would not reappoint him.

The decision caused an outcry and a majority of the City Council, including then-Councilor Art Ward, refused to endorse a replacement for Letizia. They said they would not vote for anyone but Letizia to fill the seat.

For a year, Nicastro refused to reappoint Letizia and the council refused to give its backing to a successor picked by the mayor.

Until a replacement could be picked, officials agreed, the city charter was clear: Letizia could stay on.

One councilor, Joe Wilson, said he read the charter to require that councilors go along with whoever the mayor nominated for the finance board.

But others, of course, disagreed.

In the end, the city attorney, Richard Lacey, issued a ruling that said councilors had the right to vote for or against the mayor’s nominees for the finance board.

Lacey, after many hours poring over old city documents, concluded that finance board choices ''require both nomination by the mayor and concurrence by the city council.''

Lacey said in his legal opinion that early documents from the period when the finance board was created in 1932 show that officials ''placed great importance'' on maintaining the full membership of the oversight panel.

Initially, in fact, the finance panel itself could fill vacancies if the mayor and council failed to appoint someone to fill an empty slot.

Seven years later, changes were made so that only the mayor and council would have the power to fill vacancies and make new appointments.

“There was no intention to make appointments the sole prerogative of the mayor,'' wrote Lacey after studying a special committee's report from 1939.

The committee's recommendations that year were approved except that the council rejected a proposed two-term limit for finance panel members.

With nothing specific to bolster Wilson's contention, Lacey wrote, the normal legal rules for interpreting charters come into play.

And there, he wrote, the rule is that mayors appoint and councils confirm unless the charter specifically says otherwise.

With Lacey’s ruling in hand, and the impasse likely to linger unless someone gave in, Nicastro decided to endorse Letizia after all.

Why does it all matter now?

Because Ward, who is in his second term as mayor, has told two finance commissioners he won’t reappoint them. Their terms expire this month. He plans to nominate two replacements for Janet Moylan and Mark Peterson next month.

But councilors don’t have to go along with it. That’s been clear since 1995.

So if Ward nominates successors, the council is free to back them or not. If councilors want Moylan and Peterson to remain on the finance board, they can keep them there simply by following the lead that Ward helped establish 15 years ago.

If councilors don’t stick with Moylan and Peterson, it’s because they, too, want them gone.

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Copyright 2010. All rights reserved. Contact Steve Collins at scollins@bristolpress.com

Brickley lashed Larson on health care vote

Press release from Ann Brickley, the endorsed Republican congressional candidate in the 1st District:

Brickley Assails Larson Vote to Keep Mandate Requiring All Americans to Purchase Health Insurance

Republican challenger calls on incumbent to explain support of requirement to force all citizens to purchase insurance or face new tax penalties.

Washington, DC – Ann Brickley, the Republican Nominee for the First Congressional District, decried Congressman John Larson’s (D-1st District) recent vote in opposition to a proposal that would have eliminated one of the most onerous aspects of the Health Care Reform initiative that requires all individuals to purchase health insurance coverage.

The call for the repeal of the insurance mandate was under a “motion to recommit” which is a parliamentary procedure used to change bills on the House Floor.  Larson was one of 230 Democrats voting against the measure which was defeated by a vote of  187-230. Brickley pointed out that 21 Democrats did vote in favor of the rolling back the requirement.

“There are certainly many aspects of the Democrats’ health care law that should be rolled back,” Brickley said. “This is probably the most egregious one as it makes every American citizen choose between paying for government-approved health insurance or pay a new tax if they choose not to.”

As Brickley travels throughout the First Congressional District, many individuals, including small business owners have expressed their frustration about the new health care reform law, because it fails to address the primary problem with our national health care system – rising costs.

“The healthcare mandate allows Washington to dictate any private purchase they deem in the best interest of the country…with no restrictions,” Brickley said. “It appears that John Larson and our state’s other congressional representatives want the mandate to remain in place endangering our constitutional rights.  I would like to know why he has put Washington’s legislative demands ahead of what is best for Connecticut’s residents?"

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Copyright 2010. All rights reserved. Contact Steve Collins at scollins@bristolpress.com

City saves on heating costs

Thanks to new boilers at City Hall and a decision to turn down the thermostat in municipal buildings, the city shaved nearly $200,000 off its winter heating bill this year.

A reasonably mild winter also helped, officials admit.

City Councilor Cliff Block said heating costs a year ago totaled $396,000. This year, the cost fell 49 percent to $203,000, he said.

The new boilers are responsible for $134,000 of the savings, Block said, while turning down the temperature for city offices produced the rest of the savings.

“It goes to show we can save money just for turning a thermostat down,” Block said. Click here for the complete story.

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Copyright 2010. All rights reserved. Contact Steve Collins at scollins@bristolpress.com