Around Town

New Canaan Train Station To Get Energy-Efficient Lighting

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With an eye on energy efficiency, New Canaan is planning to put $35,585 into new exterior lights of the train station’s platform and building downtown, officials said this week. Electricity at the station nearly maxes out on each breaker, so New Canaan will replace the lights there with energy-efficient LED models, said Bill Oestmann, superintendent of buildings and fleet with the Department of Public Works. The work hopefully will be done in August, Oestmann said during the June 17 meeting of the Board of Selectmen. “And then that reduces the load tremendously and hopefully the breakers should not be an issue after that,” he said during the meeting, held in the training room at the New Canaan Police Department. “We are also looking at an anticipated return on investment of 9 percent.

Around Town

Town: Some Still Taking Mulch from Lapham Road

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Though New Canaan last year relocated the town’s mulch pile from Lapham Road to the Transfer Station (to prevent contractors from hauling off with the valuable material), some residents are still ducking into the original site to take pails of it home, officials say. There haven’t been any complaints about the practice and it hasn’t gotten out of hand—likely because it’s physically very demanding, said Tiger Mann, assistant director of the Department of Public Works. “They’re carrying trashcans full of compost in and out because there’s a gate, and that gets old after a while, so you can imagine they’re not carrying much,” Mann said. “It’s a 5-gallon pail kind of thing, no big deal.”

The town carts mulch from Lapham up to the Lakeview Avenue facility—where officials can ensure that only New Canaanites are getting at it—and the change has worked out well. Contractors are no longer taking it.

Around Town

Parade Hill Road Residents Petition Town for Traffic-Calming

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Saying their neighborhood sees vehicles driving dangerously fast around blind turns as well as heavy commercial traffic, residents of Parade Hill Road and adjoining streets are appealing to town officials for traffic-calming. A petition signed by 33 residents of Parade Hill Road and its offshoots—Hampton Lane, Rural Drive, Siwanoy Lane and Riverbank Court—calls for town officials to consider a speed limit reduction, sidewalk construction and/or limitation of the streets as a cut-thru for commercial traffic (traveling between Oenoke Ridge Road and Route 123). Mary Maechling, a mother of three boys—South School third- and first-graders and a 3-year-old preschooler at home—said that in order for her kids to play safely in the front yard of her home on Parade Hill Road, she must position herself at the end of the driveway. “I’m sure any parent would do that on a busy road, but I’m scared because even if a driver sees them [the kids], nobody slows down,” Maechling told NewCanaanite.com. At its southern end, Parade Hill starts at the “off-ramp” for southbound traffic on 123—one of the worst intersections in New Canaan—and follows a roughly straight line past Riverbank Court, then abruptly turns 90 degrees west and climbs a steep hill with another sharp turn before coming perpendicularly into Oenoke Ridge Road.

Around Town

Town: Sightline Problems Caused by Two Trees along Main Street

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Town officials say a pair of trees at the start of Down River Road have created sightline problems, including for motorists traveling southbound (away from town) on Main Street, and should come down. Two of the evergreens planted on the corner in front of 5 Down River Road should be removed for safety reasons (and, for aesthetic reasons, not simply pruned back), according to members of the Traffic Calming Work Group. The group, which fields traffic-calming requests in New Canaan, includes officials from the New Canaan Police Department, Department of Public Works and Fire Department. “When they were planted, they were planted almost directly on the line [between private and public property near Main Street],” Tiger Mann, assistant director of DPW, said during the meeting held Monday at police headquarters. “But now it’s been a while.

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).