Thursday, January 14, 2010

Town affairs -- land use

Went to a planning meeting last night; the town is slowly working towards a new 10 year plan addressing conservation and development. Memorable tidbits:

Dave Hosmer said whenever they draw down Lake Bungee and Witches Wood Lake, he gets flooded out and last year he lost a crop of mulch hay. They draw it down to clean their docks and such, but there's no system to warn those downstream. The problem is worse for folks farming downstream from Thompson Dam and the other dams on the Quinebaug.

Jean Pillo gave a presentation on water. Woodstock holds the headwaters for water ways headed into other towns, and by state law we're supposed to be careful to keep it all clean. That means no one can build a new sewer system here. That limits a lot of larger development.

A lot of the water in town is in a layer of hard rock, but there's a large section in the SE of town where the ground water is in a layer of sand and gravel, and much easier to contaminate. In 2009 Putnam diverted enough water from the Little River (is that the one? I may have the name wrong) to completely dry out a section of it here in town so's nothing was left very lively in that section.

There was a lot more to the meeting but those are a few things I didn't know before. Some of it was tedious, as zoning can be, and some of it seemed out of touch from reality, or my reality. We're not going to build a big solar farm around here and provide all our energy needs. Most of our lifestyle of large houses and long commutes is gonna half to go. In fact, we'll be lucky if we don't descend into large scale chaos in a decade. But it's hard to frame a discussion that way, and easy to repeat the basics -- we like lots of open space, farms give us that, what can we do to keep the farms here?

But after blurting out a few thoughts I was reminded that discussion makes you examine your assumptions. Why should we support the farmers when their product is sold to far off markets and they're at the mercy of Federal policies? That question got me some strange looks but I'm glad I asked it.

Wednesday, January 6, 2010

Move Your Money

Look, someone's on it! There's a movement afoot to move deposits to community banks. I must say that there seem to be a number of good options in this area for banking -- unlike restaurants!