Nine suggestions for improving Enfield

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?