News

Letter: Colm Dobbyn for Town Council

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Editor,

I have served with Colm Dobbyn on New Canaan’s Inland Wetlands Commission for five plus years. He is exactly the kind of person we need on Town Council. Colm is very smart, a good listener and always fair-minded. As a corporate attorney, currently at MasterCard and formerly at PepsiCo, Colm has had years of experience dispassionately analyzing complex problems and coming up with creative solutions. He has used these skills to good effect on the IWC, where he is a thought leader and his clear arguments often command the agreement of other commission members.

Government

Letter: Vote for Kit Devereaux for First Selectman

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Editor:

Kit Devereaux has served in more capacities in New Canaan government and not-for-profits than there is space to list. Her tenure on Town Council, Board of Finance and the Charter Review Commission, and her financial services background, provide the necessary experience and skills to manage town government, improve accountability and save taxpayers’ money. Kit’s track record, including serving on the Parks & Recreation Commission, as president of the League of Women Voters and her many roles at St. Mark‘s Church, provides hard evidence that Kit is collaborative, a good listener, transparent and an effective problem solver. New Canaan needs such qualities to solve challenges like declining state funding for schools and other services, poor cell phone service, inadequate parking, and sloppy oversight of town projects.

Government

‘I Am Sort of Puzzled’: After Neighbor’s Apparent Misdirection Is Exposed, Officials OK Bridge Repair on Weed Street Property

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Though he apparently had been informed otherwise, a Weed Street man told the town that a plan to repair a stone bridge—a span that forms part of an original, disused route to a neighbor’s 15-acre property—required his own approval, officials said this week. Yet several days prior to making that claim at a May meeting of the Inland Wetlands Commission, Craig Kingsley of 592 Weed St. had been told by a land surveyor that his own property in fact did not touch the dilapidated 110-year-old bridge in question and so the project did not need his sign-off, according to a local landscape architect who addressed the commission Monday night on behalf of the applicant. In fact, the bridge is owned “by nobody other than” Austin Furst of 590 Weed St., Keith Simpson of Simpson Associates said during the commission’s regular meeting, held at Town Hall. “But because the neighbor [Kingsley] was rather insistent that he did, we carried the meeting forward and then found out from the surveyors that, in fact, he had been informed a week before by them that he did not own any portion of the bridge, so I am sort of puzzled that he would tell the commission that he still thought he did,” Simpson said.

Government

‘We Are Encountering Some Really Rather Peculiar Hostility’: Neighbors Petition for Public Hearing on Weed Street Inland Wetlands Application

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Neighbors of a Weed Street homeowner have petitioned town officials to hold a public hearing for what appears to be a straightforward application to repair part of a driveway where it spans a small stream. If the neighbors in the case of the project planned at 590 Weed St. had come forward with genuine, relevant concerns regarding how the proposed work would affect their own properties, landscape architect Keith Simpson said that he would be “totally understanding.”

“But we have a very hostile law firm representing neighbors, writing and claiming things about this application which, quite frankly, have nothing to do with this application,” Simpson, representing the applicant, told members of the Inland Wetlands Commission during a special meeting, held Monday at Town Hall. “We are encountering some really rather peculiar hostility to this application and some claims which don’t even relate to the jurisdiction of the commission.”

It isn’t clear just what those claims are. Town officials last week received a petition with 42 signatures—said to total 65 by the time of Monday’s meeting—from a Stamford-based attorney.