Government

Selectman To Youth Sports Committee: Meet Your Charge, and with Total Transparency

By |

A selectman on Tuesday urged a committee that oversees youth sports in New Canaan to operate with total transparency and make good on its original charge to ensure that the private groups overseeing youth football, soccer, field hockey, lacrosse and other sports are contributing equally to the town on a per-player basis to fields maintenance. Specifically, the Youth Sports Committee in three years has not been able to impose a seasonal $20 per-player fee for the various youth sports groups that would come back to the town for redistribution in fields upkeep, Selectman Beth Jones told the committee at a special meeting. A key responsibility of the committee is to “try to make it fair between all youth sports groups, that they are all chipping in their fair share, and you were going to make that open to the daylight,” yet after years of sporadic meetings that at times appear not to have been properly posted with the Town Clerk, no hard information to that effect has materialized. While thanking the committee members for their volunteerism, what’s needed is “more sunshine on all of this,” Jones told Youth Sports Chairman Chris Robustelli and committee member Sally Campbell at the selectmen meeting, held in the Training Room at the New Canaan Police Department. “The more information that is available to anybody that wants to look at it, the better off we all are, because then people don’t think we are hiding anything,” Jones said.

Around Town

Local Landscape Architect Floats Plan for New Ice Skating Area, Footbridge, Model Boat Launch at Mead

By |

A prominent local landscape architect is proposing several improvements to the northern end of Mead Park that could bring not only a new walking path and footbridge along part of the pond but also a modest-sized ice skating rink and small area for model boat enthusiasts to launch their watercraft. Keith Simpson’s plans (see PDF at bottom of article) are conceptual and newly introduced, and many questions must be answered before the Park & Recreation Commission could offer its formal endorsement, Commission Chair Sally Campbell said at the group’s July 8 meeting. That said, after seeing the plan and spending time at Mead Park with Simpson visualizing it, Campbell added: “I think it looks great and it would just be a wonderful addition to the park.”

She said it must be clear just what it would cost to deliver the improvements Simpson is proposing, who would pay for it and how, whether the town would incur any new costs to maintain Mead and what extra safety precautions, if any, would be required. As it stands, the area directly behind the disused shed at the park’s edge (where Grove Street comes into Richmond Hill Road) is weedy and largely inaccessible as pedestrians approach the pond. Simpson’s idea is to clear out a 100-by-160-foot area—about the size of three tennis courts—for a wildflower meadow in the summer that could be flooded with several inches of water for family ice skating in the winter.

Government

Mallozzi: Town To Halt Dumping of Dredged Material in Waveny Cornfields

By |

Though it’s saved money for New Canaan and even generated modest revenue, concerns about aesthetics and environment are prompting town officials to end the practice of dumping the organic material dredged from Mead and Mill Ponds in the southwest corner of Waveny. First Selectman Rob Mallozzi said his swift decision follows comments from residents that even though New Canaan is recouping some money from the dredged debris because it’s been sold to a local business that’s doing the considerable leg work of converting it into topsoil, “the wear and tear is not conducive to the ultimate goal of the preservation of that beautiful area of Waveny.”

Mallozzi had high praise for New Canaan’s Peter Lanni, who in past years has carted off the material from the area of Waveny known as the “cornfields,” and more recently has been working at screening and then carting off about 1,000 cubic yards of the debris, but said that on Thursday he informed the local man that “the town is not interested in continuing further.”

“He graciously understood and agreed to work with [the Department of Public Works] to grade and restore the area. We have 250 more [cubic] yards to go on the contract and then he will leave and we will no longer be using the cornfields for dumping grounds of any organic material that we dredge up or move out of other spots. And I did that after consultation with the Park & Recreation Commission and private citizens, and just the feeling we all have that it’s a beautiful area. We’re very appreciative of the work that Mr. Lanni did in removing it, but we’ll put it back the way it was over a couple of years and there will be no more dirt disturbance in that environment.”

The matter had emerged as a major talking point at the Park & Rec Commission’s meeting Wednesday.

Around Town

Waveny Park Conservancy Seeks To Raise $2 Million, Start Work on Grounds Next Spring

By |

Members of a group seeking to raise money for, recommend and help oversee yet-undetermined capital projects across a big chunk of Waveny Park said Wednesday night that they’re seeking to hit $2 million in order to “break ground” after prioritizing plans through the winter. Calling itself the ‘Waveny Park Conservancy,’ the group has “some money in the bank to get us going, and I think we have pretty reasonable ideas and prospects whereby we can raise this $2 million,” its chairman, Bob Seelert, told the Park & Recreation Commission. “I know a lot of people are trying to raise money for a lot of different things in town—this, that and the other thing—so I suppose there is competition for scarce resources,” he said at the commission’s meeting, held in the Douglass Room at Lapham Community Center. “But the reality is if you live in New Canaan, and you’ve been here a long period of time, if you ever have out-of-town guests into your home, you can do two things with them: You can take them down to Elm Street and bring them over to Waveny. And they all sit there and say, ‘Oh my god, what an iconic place this is, it’s a real gem, I wish I lived here.’ So we think there is enthusiasm for what it is we want to do because, in truth, it is for a really noble purpose.”

Inspired by the model of the Central Park Conservancy, the group incorporated on June 11 with the intention of helping Waveny “thrive in perpetuity” for all New Canaanites, according to Seelert, through a public-private partnership.

Animal 411

Parks Officials Seek To Ban Dogs from Bristow, Formerly a Bird Sanctuary

By |

Parks officials want to ban dogs altogether from Bristow Bird Sanctuary, a public park off of 106 that adjoins Mead Park. If the Town Council updates an ordinance that deals with dogs in public parks, then the New Canaan Police Department’s Animal Control Unit could ticket anyone with a dog in Bristow, even if it’s leashed, members of the Park & Recreation Commission said Wednesday night at their regular monthly meeting. “There are plenty of places for dogs to go in town on leash, so it is not like they would be denied recreational access,” the commission’s chair, Sally Campbell, said during the meeting, held in the Douglass Room at Lapham Community Center. The commission had taken up the matter one year ago and, despite reservations from the parks superintendent about how widespread was the desire to ban dogs from Bristow, made a recommendation to the Ordinance Subcommittee of the Town Council. That effort went nowhere.