Is Enfield considering privatizing trash removal? Let's discuss.

Image
  Recent discussions in the Enfield CT Open Forum have sparked concerns about a potential plan to privatize the town's trash removal services. This originated from a union post suggesting this idea might be under consideration. While details remain incomplete, the implications could be significant for our community, and we need clarity before any decisions are made. Current service excellence Enfield’s municipal trash pickup has long been a model of reliability and quality. Our town’s workers know the community, understand our unique needs, and deliver consistent, dependable service week after week. These relationships and local knowledge are assets that cannot be easily replaced. Questions that need answers Financial impact and analysis Has the town conducted a thorough cost-benefit analysis of privatization? Are there multi-year projections to show the expected return on investment? How would privatization affect long-term cost stability for residents? What will happen to the to
Post a Comment

Nine suggestions for improving Enfield

Thompsonville, Ct.
Thompsonville will never be a commercial center for Enfield. 

Improving Enfield is going to take creative thinking and course corrections. The town has focused its development in the wrong places, namely Thompsonville. It has pinned its hopes on the wrong things, namely the train station. And the town has neglected the most important part of this community: the Enfield Mall area.

Here are suggestions for making Enfield a better place.

(1) Redevelop the mall area into high-density residential, office and shopping complexes. Create smaller affordable living units in high rise buildings. Move the library and town hall to the mall area. That will bring foot traffic and help anchor the commercial businesses. Create shared office spaces. Develop a new town green there. The shopping area is our town center and it's time to recognize that. Acknowledge that the town's laissez-fair approach to the mall area has failed.

(2) Stop spending money to develop Thompsonville as a commercial center. The town has spent more than $6M in this area and hasn't gotten a dime in return. The town is trying to revitalize Thompsonville into something it isn’t, a commercial and housing center. The attention that Thompsonville gets is a distraction from the obvious: The Enfield Mall area is the true center of this community. Start investing there, not Thompsonville. What part of town already has theaters, stores and restaurants? It's not Thompsonville.

Gov. Lamont was given a tour of Thompsonville last year and town officials shared the hopes for the train station. The town, instead, should have drove the governor to the Enfield Mall area and told him this: "Help us fix the mall because it's the most important commercial property from the state line to Hartford. It ought to be a landmark center for this state."

(3) Realize that the train station will do very little for this community. The pandemic is creating a massive change in how people get work done. People will be commuting less and working at home more. This change will be permanent. Think about shared office space. By relocating the library to the Enfield Mall, we can expand it -- perhaps in a public/private partnership -- to include shared office space. Think about how this can be made into more of a destination for the Asnuntuck community.

(4) The pandemic will hurt the town’s budget. Resist the temptation to drastically reduce taxes by cutting. The services the town provides are entirely basic. There's very little fluff in this. You need economic development to control the rate of tax growth.

(5) The town’s politics seem too revolve too heavily around the parties, and not around a competition of ideas. Being a Republican, Democrat or Independent shouldn’t matter all that much at a local level, but in this town it does.

(6) Recognize that any business locating or expanding in this town is doing so because of the highway, the airport, and the quality of life in this area. They already know that taxes are high. This is true for our entire region -- all of Western Mass and Southern New England -- is a high tax area. Businesses are locating here because they want to be here.

(7) People who work in the industrial park want places to walk. Try crossing Hazard Ave to buy a cup of coffee. You can’t do it. We don't even have a way for people to cross the street to the hotel and restaurant on Phoenix Ave. I once saw a woman with a baby carriage try to cross from the Home Depot shopping area to Enfield Mall. There’s no easy way to do that. Why not? There aren’t enough sidewalks or crosswalks. People want to bike to the shopping areas. We've done all we can in this town to make that as difficult as possible. If you want to make the town attractive to businesses, make it attractive to their employees as well. That should be obvious but it isn't.

(8) If you don't like Enfield, please move to Florida. Bye. The rest of this message is for everyone else. Our average temperature has increased 3.5F since the 1970s. We all know things are changing, but Connecticut and New England are poised to be in a better position to ride out the problems ahead until this planet can get its act together. We have water, low fire risk, stable geology, good farmland, high-skilled population, and great infrastructure. Demand for our land and housing will only increase over the coming decades. A great migration away from problem areas is beginning.

(9) Start with a positive attitude about this town and you'll see how much it has to work with it. If all you do is look for things to complain about, you're not coming to the table with solutions. Move along. We don't need complainers. The question for everyone else is: How can we make a great town better?









Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Why Enfield is in trouble? Facts with a dose of sarcasm

Image
Molly at School Rally People are going after spending in Enfield and trying to dissect it to see where they can find gross mismanagement. Since the Republicans have been in control for all but two of the last 16 years, let's assume that the town's spending is pristine and error-free and beyond reproach—except for the two years when the Democrats were in charge. As we all know, the Democrats dumped money out of the windows of Town Hall. The Town Council Republicans are going to try to set a token reduction in the Mill Rate. To reach that point, they may have to do some problematic things, such as deferring spending on things like police cruiser replacements and equipment generally, putting off some maintenance, and not filling vacancies and laying off where they can, and who knows what else. There's a lot they can't touch, namely contractual salary obligations. But they want to be able to say that they reduced taxes. More concerning will be how much of the costs are bein
Read more

Fewer kids, fewer costumes: What declining school enrollment means for trick-or-treating

Image
Enfield has experienced a significant and ongoing decline in public school enrollment over an 18 year period. When compared to four nearby towns of similar population size, Enfield and Middletown show the steepest declines. Many factors may be contributing to this trend. These include smaller family sizes, lower fertility rates, job market, cost of living including housing costs, an aging population across the state, and an increase in families choosing alternative education options, such as homeschooling. The data is available at EdSight . The enrollment data only covers the last 18 years. Update : After reading some of the insightful Facebook comments , more data is needed to show how population changes are contributing to the school population decline. The comments about an increase in homeschooling were thought-provoking. I wish there was a way to quantify that shift; I suspect the school district may have some estimates. Enfield has experienced an approximate 8.76% decline in popu
Read more

Enfield Town Council's unprofessional action

Image
  Enfield's Town Council is apparently trying to kill a 70-unit housing project in Thompsonville that the Planning and Zoning Commission approved. The Council's behavior has been egregious and unprofessional in pursuit of that goal. It's doing this in secret and risking a lawsuit for murky reasons. Impact Residential Development recently received PZC approval for this project in a 5-2 vote. It was a remarkable and courageous moment for the commission. But the Town Council Republicans want to block it. They are designing in executive session a way to oppose it. They did not let the developer know of their plan until the last minute. Here's the background The developers plan to build this housing on and near the former Strand Theater site, land which the town had acquired. It combines primarily affordable housing and market-rate units with 70 parking spaces. It faced opposition over concerns about on-street parking. The idea is that since this is a transit-oriented develo
Read more