Fall Festival to have fireworks

The Cheshire Chamber of Commerce's Fall Festival is scheduled for Satuday Sept 13. And despite some uncertainty about funding, the fireworks will happen this year. I'm glad they're happening... and I'm glad I asked about them at the Aug 12 Council meeting. If I hadn't asked... would they have been on the Aug 28 agenda?

Personally, I would prefer to have reduced spending elsewhere. After all, no member of the Council gets paid... yet we have a $60,000 budget.

When I mentioned reducing spending though, there was a Charter restriction mentioned that prohibits spending reductions for the first nine months of the fiscal year. I accepted that concern at the moment. But in retrospect, I kinda wonder about that. I mean... what if the economy was horrible and people couldn't pay their taxes? Would the Council be prohibited from reducing spending? And what happened in December 2002 when the state reduced it's payments to the town? Didn't we reduce spending then? (I wasn't elected to the Council until Dec 2003.)

Oh well... my preference was to reduce spending to offset the cost of the fireworks. But finding five votes on this Council to do that would obviously have been difficult. Besides... my suggested spending cut to the Council budget may have eliminated the Strategic Plan. And we all know how badly we "need" that new strategic plan!

I think the most interesting part of the conversation though was the suggestion that I no longer supported adding video to the Town website (it's in the same budget line item with the strategic plan). It was a clever, spur-of-the-moment pivot that I anticipated, but let go. To articulately "prove a negative" can be time-consuming and nuanced... better done via the blogosphere, than during a Council meeting.

Regardless, I'm confident that any regular here knows (in retrospect) that town website videostreaming was dead on arrival, more than a year ago.

Some people support improved transparency. Some people don't.

Control the information. Control the agenda.

Tim White