Selectman Nick Williams this month called for the town to consider creating a commission to oversee the Department of Public Works, as similar volunteer bodies do with other municipal agencies.
New Canaan has several appointed bodies that advise the Board of Selectmen on the work of town departments, as Williams noted during the selectmen’s Sept. 5 meeting, held at Town Hall and via videoconference.
“I am looking at our commissions and I am looking at a number of things on your plate today,” Williams told Public Works Director Tiger Mann.
“I am assuming there are 128 other things that you haven’t brought to our attention, and this should probably be directed Town Council,” he continued. “We have commissions—Charter Revision, Conservation, EMS, Fire, HHS [Health & Human Services], Historic District, Housing Authority, Inland Wetlands, Parks & Rec, Parking, P&Z [Planning & Zoning], Police, Utilities. Query whether at some point it would make sense to have a Public Works Commission. I would just put that out there because I think that would help you.”
Williams added that the DPW is “overworked as it is.”
“You’ve got so many things going on in this town and God bless you, and [Senior Engineer] Joe [Zagarenski] and [Buildings Superintendent] Bill [Oestmann] and the whole team,” he said. “But I’m wondering if in the future, it wouldn’t be a bad idea to have a Public Works Commission. We finally have a Utilities [Commission] which, Kath [Selectman Kathleen Corbet], we finally got through and P&Z and all these other things. I think that would be a big help, so I’m just going to put that out there.”
The comments came during a portion of the selectmen meeting dedicated to general matters before the town. Williams opened his remarks by thanking Mann for all he does for New Canaan.
Williams stopped short of pointing to recent examples where the town has suffered financially from shortcomings in public buildings projects. He recently referred to the “design-build” model that the town adopted for the renovation of the Playhouse—a project that has come in at about $8 million, twice the original budget—as “Mickey Mouse.” Williams also has been vocal about the dozens of ADA violations that federal investigators found last year at public facilities in New Canaan—violations that have cost taxpayers tens of thousands of dollars to address.
The prospect of a commission overseeing Public Works has been broached in the past, including by former Selectman Kit Devereaux, who lost the 2017 first selectman race to Kevin Moynihan by just 33 votes. In his six years as first selectman—a tenure that will come to an end after Nov. 7, following his trouncing at the GOP Caucus—Moynihan has been hands-on with respect to public building projects, including proposals to build a new police station on a Saxe Middle School baseball field and erect a cell tower behind West School (an approach that both the Town Council and first selectman candidates have criticized).
Neither Moynihan nor Corbet responded to Williams’s suggestion during the meeting.
Why now? Nick Williams has had 12 years as a Selectman to make these proposals. This should be something for the new regime to decide when they arrive in January. They should not have to deal with last minute agenda items of the past. It’s time for a clean slate.