Around Town

Q&A: Composting Talk To Be Held Thursday at New Canaan Library

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New Canaan Library, Planet New Canaan and the Conservation Commission are co-sponsoring a talk about composting on Thursday. Registration is open for ‘Anyone Can Compost: Approaches to Home Composting that Work for You,’ to be held at 6 p.m. on June 15 in the Jim & Dede Bartlett Auditorium at the library. It features Master Gardener and Composter Alice Ely, garden education chair at Wakeman Town Farm, one of the organizers of Westport’s Pollinator Pathway, a UConn Advanced Master Gardener and a UConn Master Composter. Composting is widely practiced in New Canaan. According to data supplied by the Department of Public Works, the total food scrap collection weight at the transfer station (in pounds) for the five weeks starting May 3 are: 1,110, 1,420, 980, 1,040 and 1,150.

Around Town

Ethics Board: Further Investigation Warranted in Complaint Against First Selectman

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An appointed body voted unanimously Tuesday night to adopt a resolution saying that further investigation is warranted into a complaint that New Canaan’s highest elected official violated multiple provisions of the town’s Code of Ethics in the run-up to November’s municipal election. 

The Ethics Board has not yet made a determination regarding the complaint lodged Nov. 1 by Micaela Porta, a town resident identified by the appointed body’s chair, Tucker Clauss, as president of the New Canaan chapter of the League of Women Voters. [Note: Porta contacted NewCanaanite.com Wednesday morning to clarify that she filed the complaint personally and not on behalf of the League of Women Voters, as spelled out in the Ethics Board’s resolution, full text here.]

Porta as complainant asserts that Moynihan “using his position as first selectman violated several sections of the town Ethics Code when he sent an undated letter to all residents of New Canaan prior to the town’s Nov. 2, 2021 municipal election,” Clauss said during the meeting, held in the Town Hall Meeting Room. (The full text of Moynihan’s letter is printed at the end of this article.)

Specifically, Porta in the complaint “asserts that the letter mischaracterizes the voting rules at issue, that it was ‘misleading to voters seeking to understand how our municipal government works’ in general and in the then-pending election, and that the letter thereby granted preferential treatment to candidates preferred by the respondent,” Clauss said, citing the Ethics Board’s resolution.

Arianne Kolb

‘Women of Waveny’ Exhibition Opens at New Canaan Museum & Historical Society

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New Canaan’s Arianne Faber Kolb, an art historian, came across the name Abastenia St. Leger Eberle by accident one day several years ago. The water had been drained out of the lily pond in heart of the formal gardens east of Waveny House for a full cleaning, exposing the Eberle’s name at the base of a 1918 bronze of a nymph—the sculpture, “Lotus Fountain,” is known to thousands of New Canaanites—and prompting Faber Kolb to start researching. What she and fellow town resident Micaela Porta went on to discover about Eberle—a highly accomplished sculptor whose work has been shown at the Metropolitan Museum of Art—and four other women whose unique contributions helped form and document Waveny House and park as we know it today, would lead them to co-curate a new exhibition that launched last month at the New Canaan Museum & Historical Society. “Women of Waveny—Artists, Patrons and the Lapham Legacy” is open through March 31, 2022. 

Located in a second-floor gallery in the Historical Society’s main building (13 Oenoke Ridge), the exhibition features six sculptures from Eberle as well as many photographs from Frances Benjamin Johnston—an early American photographer and photojournalist who took pictures of Waveny—and paintings, prints, ephemera and other works and images that tell the story of how they and Antoinette Lapham, Ruth Lapham Lloyd and Elise Lapham contributed to Waveny and beyond—women whose lives spanned 1864 to 2011, according to the show’s 35-page program, written by Porta.

Board of Education

Board of Ed Candidates Debate Curriculum Development 

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Candidates for the Board of Education this week debated whether changes should be made to the process through which curriculum long has been developed and approved for New Canaan Public Schools. As it is, a team of educators led by the superintendent—known as the Curriculum Leadership Council or “CLC”—draft, continuously review, update and approve curriculum so that New Canaan’s schools are meeting educational standards set by agencies such as the Connecticut Department of Education. The Board of Ed receives regular presentations on curriculum—a practice that has slowed amid the COVID-19 pandemic—and in cases of large-scale changes to those standards, the school board dedicates even more time at its meetings to corresponding decisions such as new classes or updates to the district’s goals and objectives. While Republican candidates for the Board of Ed said they’re not advocating for public meetings of the CLC (such as through appointment of a school board member to it), they called during Tuesday night’s League of Women Voters debate for the ability to weigh in on its development earlier and with greater detail and frequency than the elected body currently does. “I think that what we are pushing for is more oversight, more balanced thoughtful oversight at periodic stages,” GOP candidate Dan Bennett said during the debate, held at Town Hall.

Beth Jones

New Canaan Talks Housing: The ‘Three E’s’

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Please join us for the second New Canaan Talks Housing conversation to learn about the “Three E’s of Housing: Equity, Economy, Environment.” On Thursday, April 15th at 7pm, a fact-based panel discussion will feature experts from each of the three E’s to talk about housing’s impact on New Canaan. Proposed zoning changes were submitted for consideration in Hartford this session. They have now been significantly revised and are out of committee pending a vote. Why are they important? Home is complex and interconnected.