Around Town

Did You Hear … ?

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We heard that the New Canaan Y has put off indefinitely its proposal to “bubble” the Waveny Pool for winter use while it undergoes an expansion that includes a new aquatic center. Officials at the Park & Recreation Commission say the Y is focusing on fundraising now while it works on a plan for its swimmers. ***

New Canaan High School 2014 grad Kit Mallozzi has been named to the Dean’s List at Syracuse University. Kit, winner of a Student Leadership Award as a NCHS senior, finished her first semester with the Orange with a perfect 4.0, proud father Rob Mallozzi said. “She just loves it there,” he said.

News

Schools Plan $600,000 in Security-Focused Technology, Facilities Upgrades

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The district intends spend nearly $600,000 in the second phase of a plan to bolster security at all five public schools, officials said Thursday. Though officials do not disclose publicly details of security plans and equipment in the schools, Superintendent Dr. Bryan Luizzi said during a presentation of the district’s capital budget that the planned upgrades involve continuing “some of the work that we began, finishing off a couple of things that we are important to finish.”

“There are technology components to this and there are also facility components to this,” Luizzi told officials from both the Town Council and Board of Finance during a meeting held in the Sturgess Room at the New Canaan Nature Center. “There are no staffing pieces to this, so there are not recurring costs that are built in beyond maintenance of the technology pieces that we have.”

The comments came after Luizzi’s formal presentation of the Board of Education’s proposed 4.87 percent increase in operations spending. Total capital needs during fiscal year 2016 will come to about $12.3 million, the district estimates—a figure driven mainly by an estimated $10.1 million project to renovate the 1957 Saxe Middle School auditorium and create sufficient visual and performing arts classroom space to accommodate a burgeoning student population. (Download a copy of the schools’ proposed budget here, and see page 131 for information on the district’s 5-year capital plan.)

Director of Digital Learning Dr. Robert Miller on behalf of the schools put in for and received a state reimbursement grant that will return about 20 percent of the district’s planned $598,500 investment in security, Luizzi said.

Government

By Narrow Margin, Town Officials Vote To List Waveny on National Register of Historic Places

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First Selectman Rob Mallozzi on Wednesday cast a tie-breaking vote in favor of listing Waveny on the National Register of Historic Places. New Canaan’s highest elected official broke a 6-6 tie on the Town Council (voting record below), freeing local preservationists to draft an application to list on the register Waveny House and a portion of the park whose exact boundaries are still to be determined. Rose Scott Long, president of the New Canaan Preservation Alliance—the organization that fueled the effort to list Waveny and has offered to fund the application cost (up to about $30,000)—in an interview directly following Mallozzi’s vote thanked the Town Council and especially those on its Land Use & Recreation committee for their diligence. “They have done the right thing for Waveny and they have done the right thing for the town of New Canaan and the citizens of New Canaan,” Scott Long said outside the Sturgess Room at the New Canaan Nature Center, where the Town Council held its regular monthly meeting. The dramatic vote followed multiple meetings and public hearings before the Town Council and other municipal bodies, and a walk on the grounds of Waveny this week that included councilmen, New Canaan’s recreation director, state officials and local preservationists.

Government

‘A True Town Treasure’: New Canaan Pays Tribute to Dr. Sven Englund, 93, for Contributions on Inland Wetlands Commission

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New Canaan landscape architect Keith Simpson can remember his very first appearance before the newly formed New Canaan Inland Wetlands Commission in 1988—for a subdivision on Seminary Street known at the time as the “Bryant-Kellogg subdivision.”

It required blasting out about 30 or 40 feet of rock to get through into what we know today as Scofield Lane—and in the 26 years since, Simpson and scores of fellow architects as well as residents, lawyers, soil experts and other professionals as they’ve sought approvals for sensitive projects have depended, among others, on one consistent figure on the commission: Dr. Sven Englund. “He’s a brilliant engineer and we all benefitted from his knowledge and understanding of engineering and science—he was a tremendous help to other commissioners,” Simpson said Monday night from the Douglass Room at Lapham Community Center, where nearly 40 locals gathered to honor Dr. Sven Englund for his decades of service on the commission. “I think he and other commissioners have been very good about striking a balance between making sure the wetlands are protected and allowing property owners to have a reasonable exercise of their rights as property owners, but doing the job which state statutes really require, which is to protect the wetlands,” Simpson said. “There are sometimes when you have to come close to wetlands and sometimes you have to cross them and if you do it in a responsible way then it’s fair and things don’t get damaged long-term.”

During a celebration of the 93-year-old’s work—which in truth goes back to the early-1970s, as a member of the then-Environmental Commission, family members say, a predecessor to Inland Wetlands—current commission Chairman Daniel Stepanek presented Dr. Sven Englund with a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Connecticut Association of Conservation and Inland Wetlands Commissions, First Selectman Rob Mallozzi and Selectman Beth Jones read a proclamation declaring Dec. 15 ‘Dr. Sven Englund Day in New Canaan,’ and Stepanek, Simpson, Inland Wetlands and Watercourses Director Kathleen Holland, son Sven Englund and others offered words of gratitude to a man that Mallozzi called “a town treasure.”

A retired chemical engineer and father of two, prominent member of the United Methodist Church and choir who also has belonged for years to the New Canaan Senior Men’s Club, Dr. Sven Englund announced in October that he was stepping down from the commission.

Around Town

Deck the Firehouse: New Canaan Firefighters Carry On Local Tradition 

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Sven Englund, joined out front of the New Canaan Firehouse on this crisp, clear Sunday morning by a half-dozen fellow firefighters, cupped his mouth and called up a ladder leaning against the 1938 structure at Main and Locust. There, Mark Savini was about to affix a loop for hanging a string of white pine roping, wrapped with white Christmas lights, to adorn the firehouse’s façade through the holiday. “Tighter,” Englund, a volunteer firefighter here since 1978, instructed good-naturedly. “It’s going to be too low. Don’t let it drop below the lintel.”

Within a few hours, the guys had looped 375 feet of the roping, bunting-like, along the roofline, hung six red-ribboned wreaths (with another large one out back) and framed in pine needles the four bays and entrance door at the iconic Main Street firehouse—an undisrupted, understood annual tradition of our town on the first Sunday of December that goes back as many generations as the firefighters themselves can remember.