Town Approves Contracts for Fencing Upgrades at Mead, Saxe

Town officials last week approved a pair of contracts for sports facility fencing at Mead Park and Saxe Middle School. The Board of Selectmen during its regular meeting June 3 approved about $82,000 in contracts for fencing at the Mead Park pickleball courts and large baseball field, as well as a replacement fence at the Saxe baseball field near the YMCA and South Avenue. A major part of the projects is upgrading the fence gauge from nine millimeter to six millimeter, according to Superintendent of Parks Ryan Restivo. 

“This change provides a thicker, more durable coated material that will enhance longevity and durability of the new fencing installations,” Restivo told the selectmen during their regular meeting, held at Town Hall and via videoconference. First Selectman Dionna Carlson and Selectmen Steve Karl and Amy Murphy Carroll voted 3-0 in favor of the contracts with New Canaan-based Gannon Rustic Fence ($14,680) and P&C Fence of Bridgeport ($67,390). The fencing at the Mead pickleball courts is failing, Restivo said, and two baseball fences—the perimeter at Mead Park’s large field and the backstop and dugout at Saxe—both need replacement.

PHOTOS: New Canaan Memorial Day Parade and Ceremony

For U.S. Marines Major Charles Paksi—a decorated veteran with three combat deployments to Somalia and Afghanistan—there’s one word that captures what motivated his friend Domingo Arroyo Jr. on Jan. 12th, 1993. The men were part of an 11-member patrol near the Mogadishu airport in Somalia as part of an effort to feed the hungry there, and Arroyo, a 21-year-old private and already a veteran of The Gulf War, had about four months left before his discharge. 

“An hour into the patrol, the children and civilians dispersed, creating an uneasy silence,” Paksi told about 250 people gathered Monday in Lakeview Cemetery on a sunny and comfortable morning. He continued: “The enemy subsequently executed a textbook ambush—gunfire erupted from the buildings to our left and right and our rear. We were being baited into the obvious action: Move through the intersection to the front.

Town To Focus on Ridding Elm Street of Double-Parking Trucks

Once the oversized dumpsters in the parking lot behind The Playhouse are moved to a better area, and there’s also a new ramp connecting that lot with the alley that runs alongside Le Pain Quotidien, enforcement officers will focus on getting double-parking delivery trucks off New Canaan’s main drag downtown. As it is, delivery trucks exacerbate congestion on the one-way stretch of Elm Street throughout the day. That segment of Elm and the commercial block of South Avenue both will change to paid parking later this summer, reversing a decades-old system. (When that happens, the town will convert the paid spots in the Park Street Lot to free.)

“We are going to be trying to push them, and we do that now,” Parking Manager Stacy Miltenberg said Tuesday during a regular meeting of the Board of Selectmen, held at Town Hall and via videoconference. 

She continued: “We try to move them. We try to direct them where we can.