Around Town

‘Doing Good’: St. Mark’s Launches Accessible Outreach Program; Open Door Shelter Is First Beneficiary

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The funds that support St. Mark’s Episcopal Church’s outreach program long have come primarily from one of New Canaan’s iconic and most treasured community events: May Fair. The 500-plus volunteer effort to organize and operate May Fair is intense and weeks-long—so much so that many New Canaanites with typically demanding schedules are excluded from participating in the celebrated fundraiser, according to members of St. Mark’s Outreach Commission. And according to one commission member, Miki Porta, many perfectly wonderful volunteer opportunities—such as giving a weekend day to help build a house somewhere in the county—are equally demanding of scarce available time.

Business

Westport to New Canaan: Unless Local Merchants Embrace Banning Plastic Bags, Don’t Bother

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A ban on standard-sized, single-use plastic bags on retail checkout at New Canaan businesses can only work if merchants themselves are not only backing but also leading the effort, town conservation officials say. Given that paper bags can cost four or five times more than plastic ones, the town must think creatively about how the change feasibly could happen without damaging the bottom line for local businesses that already do so much to support New Canaan causes, community events and human services needs, members of the Conservation Commission said at their most recent meeting. Those interested in pursuing a focused ban on single-use plastic bags must “step out with small merchants so that the small merchants are really spearheading it, so they have a leadership role with us helping—that is how I would love to see it happen in New Canaan, because we love our small businesses and they do so much for the town,” commissioner Miki Porta said at the group’s Dec. 11 meeting, held in the Art Room at Lapham Community Center. “It really has to be a partnership.”

Westport, prompted by concerns for the environment (more on that below), has had a ban in effect since March of 2009, and Liz Milwe and Jeff Weiser, each of whom helped lead Westport toward its plastic bag ban, attended the meeting as guests, as did town resident Molly Farnsworth, one advocate for a similar effort here.

Government

NCHS Juniors, Pesticide-Free New Canaan Research Fellows: Highest Incidence of Pollutants Directly Downstream from Country Club Golf Course

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Researchers say they’ve detected a higher incidence of pesticides in surface waters in New Canaan this year than last, mostly “downstream” of the Country Club of New Canaan’s golf course. Of the 28 different pesticides (four more than in 2013) detected by New Canaan High School juniors Connor deMayo and Paul Gelhaus—environmental research fellows with Pesticide-Free New Canaan, a nonprofit organization—more than 60 percent were found “directly after the golf course on Country Club Road,” deMayo said Tuesday during a presentation to the Board of Selectmen. “Coming into New Canaan, there are relatively few pesticides, and after the golf course there are really a lot of pesticides in the water,” he said during the meeting, held in the Training Room at the New Canaan Police Department. The reason is likely from “point source pollution” that flows into the Fivemile River, among other places, he said. Under the direction of Pesticice-Free co-founders Heather Lauver and Miki Porta, the teens this summer performed water sampling and lab and computer analyses, among other work, at 14 research sites in New Canaan—mostly along the Fivemile River.

Government

Conservation Survey of New Canaanites: 61 Percent Favor Plastic Bag Ban

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The average New Canaan household cares far more than many might normally believe about conservation, town officials say. In a survey whose results recently were compiled by the Conservation Commission, 65 percent of respondents said they’d pay more for renewable resource energy, while those who would pay more for wind and solar outnumber those who wouldn’t by a 2-to-1 ratio. “This was not a small group of tree-huggers,” Conservation Commission Chair Cam Hutchins said during an interview after the group’s meeting Thursday night at Lapham Community Center. “This was a cross-section of New Canaanites—all ages, all walks of life. The fact that 35 percent of them didn’t know we had a recycling center says that these are not people who are ‘into’ recycling.”

Findings from the survey—summarized in the commission’s newsletter—include:

87 percent want more access to locally grown food;
63 percent want to learn more about home energy assessments;
96 would like their garbage company to take all recyclable materials;
and 61 percent would like to see the use of plastic bags prohibited.

Around Town

New Canaan Nature Center, Town, Businesses and Organizations Mark Earth Day 2014 [VIDEOS]

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“Where have those flowers and butterflies all gone

That science may have staked the future on?”

—from Robert Frost’s “Pod of the Milkweed”

 

The migration of monarch butterflies through New Canaan—and everywhere else along the East Coast—is happening less frequently in recent years, to the point where some are calling the insects’ once widely anticipated journey between the Northeast/Canada and Mexico “endangered.”

The major reason, experts say, is a lack of milkweed, which monarch caterpillars feed on. “The butterflies can go to all kinds of flowers for nectar, but the caterpillars can only eat milkweed plants. They’re having a hard time with loss of bio-habitat, so we are encouraging people in town to plant these free milkweed seeds,” Susan Bergen, a volunteer for the New Canaan Garden Club, said Tuesday morning from a table inside New Canaan Library. There, she and Jen Rayher (nee Sillo, a 1994 New Canaan High School graduate), director of membership and volunteers at the New Canaan Nature Center, handed out the seeds (“Got Milkweed?” on the packet) to mark Earth Day here in town. It’s one of several initiatives and events planned by the Nature Center for the next week, which New Canaan’s highest elected official today declared “Environmental Awareness Week 2014Week” (see video below).