Category: Guest Views

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Making Norwalk Bike & Pedestrian Friendly

The importance of bike and ped planning to create a livable, walkable and bikeable city became very evident to me today.  Having previously risked life and limb on an extended walking tour of my part of the city, I know the hazards of side view mirrors and speeders of every sort.  Of course, most every town and city on the east coast started out as walkable…colonial villages didn’t have cars and horses do tend to walk.

The post war boom that created suburbia also created the sprawl that gave birth to the automobile centric society we live in.  Anyone who has lived in a center city and relied on mass transit and bikes for a while knows the major difference in lifestyle this creates.  Unfortunately, the largest part of our population never thinks about life without a car.  I don’t know what I would do without my Flex.

To assist in the work being done under the Transportation Management Plan study, I took my new friend Peter Libre and consultant Dan Burden around this side of town by bike.  Today was a school holiday, so the traffic wasn’t quite as bad as it might have been, but nevertheless, we don’t live in what can be considered a bike friendly city.  As I recall there was significant political resistance to the approval of this study.  That was misguided and disappointing.

Now, I don’t know how many bike friendly cities there really are, but Bicycling Magazine does…their top 50 includes New York and Boston, but not one city or town in Connecticut.  So, real urban centers are adding the infrastructure and support, it would seem, while edge cities like Norwalk are only now beginning to recognize the need.

We are recognizing the need and the simplicity of making changes.  By working together to add simple and cost-neutral touches to our roadways, we can make a difference for pedestrians and bicyclists alike.  Eliminating center stripes, adding sharrows or large striped bike lanes accomplishes the goals of creating a safe biking environment while having an impact on the flow of traffic as well.  Creating a little lack of confidence in the roadway might seem counter intuitive, but it actually slows traffic and allows better use of the roadway by walkers and bikers.

The more we create a user friendly environment for this subset of our citizens, the more that can join their ranks.  I have advocated for Transit Oriented Development and that goes hand in hand with access to mass transportation.  The more we can create linkages that don’t involve motor vehicles and the more we ingrain our young people in avoiding using cars, the more we can create a lasting culture shift.

So, what are the benefits?  To me, a man who enjoys his bacon, there is a decidedly beneficial boost to my health.  That is true across the board and will tend to affect society as a whole through a reduction in long term health care costs.  I see this as similar to anti-smoking acts.  Enabling a physical activity might just allow a few citizens to help themselves to be healthier.   The other effects aren’t too shabby, either, the lack of congestion, the lack of air pollution, the end of dependence on foreign oil.

Ok, so I took a bike ride and solved the energy crisis.  No, not really.  I will still get in my car tomorrow and so will you, most likely.  The difference won’t be made tomorrow or next week, but in the next few decades as our children’s children begin to take over.  In the same manner as the proclivity to smoke or other archaic habits have faded, so might the over reliance on inefficient, uneconomical modes of transport.

Kimmel On Slow Development

The saga of Norwalk’s redevelopment projects has been front-page news since early spring.  The first article (The Hour, March 20) was about the Spinnaker Company requesting more time for the northern portion of its District 95/7 SoNo project, which in year’s past went by the mundane name of Reed Putnam.

According to the story, zoning commissioners granted the company “another” one-year extension; that is, actual construction does not have to begin for another year. The story stated that the developer plans to devise new concepts that, presumably, will make the project more attractive.

The 95/7 SoNo story continued two months later (The Hour, May 24), when officials announced that Spinnaker plans to scuttle the proposed hotel and office building, which were to be built on the southern portion, and replace them with two residential buildings.

I was a member of the Common Council in the late 1990s, when this project began to creep forward. Although I can’t recall all the details, the plan kept evolving, even though very little was happening. There was the “hotel, or no hotel” debate early in the new century, and the decision a few years ago to reduce office space and add more retail. Who knows what the new concepts and ideas will lead to, but anything is better than a dirt-covered, vacant lot.

In mid-April, The Hour reported that the Waypointe Project, after years of debate over eminent domain and public financing, and after various reconfigurations, was about to take a new direction. The article said Stanley Seligson, the principal developer, was “looking at an entirely different project and timeline than once envisioned for Waypointe.”

Despite the expansive rhetoric, the story said redevelopment officials do not believe a new land disposition agreement will be needed. (I hope the Mayor and Common Council disagree.) The story also said the so-called new direction will focus on housing and “bite-sized pieces” of land. No mention was made of the hundred million (strings-attached) dollars the developer hopes (hoped?) to receive from the state and city in order to build five garages.

I believe it was early 1998 when I was first introduced to Waypointe, which at the time went by the pedestrian name of West Avenue. Then, the developer was asking for twenty-four million, split evenly between the city and state, for “infrastructure improvements.” Council members were lukewarm, at best, to the complex financial scheme the developer was planning to employ. And the community was not pleased with many of the project’s details.

Details aside – and there are lots of them, especially related to financing – here we are, thirteen years later, talking about a “new direction.”

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Victor Cavallo on Let’s Not Encourage Theft of Services

Andy Garfunkel, who is the declared democratic candidate for mayor of Norwalk, has recently made unfortunate public comments accusing the incumbent Mayor of misusing his office in the Tanya McDowell fraudulent enrollment case. He’s not been very specific about his allegations, but I deduce from his comments that Mr. Garfunkel, among other things,  is blaming the Mayor for  prosecuting Ms. McDowell and for removing Ms. McDowell’s child from the Brookside School .

Mr. Garfunkel’s implied allegations are fallacious and false. Mr. Garfunkel should know that the Mayor has no such powers. It would behoove Mr. Garfunkel to brush-up on the City Charter if he is to competently occupy of the Office of Mayor. He should also be more aware of the facts: that it was the Norwalk Housing Authority that was the driving force behind the criminal charges and that Ms. McDowell, herself, removed her son from Brookside by choice, after her Roodner Court baby-sitter and fraudulently named guardian, Ana Marquez, was evicted for submitting the counterfeit paperwork to Norwalk schools claiming that Ms McDowell’s child was living in the City.
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Marc Bradley On Politics of Decency

Politics of Decency

By:  Marc Bradley

Norwalk Democratic Town Committee, Chairman

The recent arrest and ensuing felony larceny charges filed against Tanya McDowell – the single, homeless mother of a five-year-old Norwalk student – should challenge all of us to consider exactly what our government is in place to do.

Although the circumstances leading up to the child’s departure from Brookside Elementary School remain unclear, the decisions made thus far by Mayor Moccia and the State’s Attorney leave plenty of reason for outrage.

In the history of Norwalk, there is not a single instance where a parent has been charged with a criminal offense for erroneously enrolling a child in the Norwalk Public School system.  Not one.  In pushing precedence aside, the Mayor and the State’s Attorneys Office have called for Ms. McDowell to be punished to the furthest extent of the law – to set an example for future wrongdoers.

What Mayor Moccia has callously overlooked is that a five-year-old child has been caught up in the middle of his political grandstanding.

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David McCarthy on Older Americans Month

John F. Kennedy, a member of our “Greatest Generation” and the man who led us to put a man on the moon, also designated May as Senior Citizen Month beginning in 1963.  17 years later in 1980, Jimmy Carter changed it to Older Americans Month.  In 2011, this celebration is especially important for Norwalk.  We are celebrating the 40th Anniversary of the Norwalk Senior Center and keeping faith with the overarching theme of “Connecting the Community”

When the observance began, there were only 17 million Americans that had reached their 65th birthday.  If you think about who those people were…they had been born in the waning years of the 19th century, lived through 2 World Wars as well as Korea.  A third of them lived in poverty and there were virtually no support programs to educate them so that they might help themselves to a better life.

By 1963, the focus on the needs of the aging population had begun to grow.  Improvements in healthcare made it possible for this group to grow as large as it had, in spite of the wars, and brought the issues to the forefront.  Since then, a light has been shone on a number of issues related to aging, such as elder abuse, the unique medical needs of an aging population, shortfalls in Medicare and the need to plan and save for retirement.  While Alzheimer’s disease was first diagnosed in 1906, it only became apparent as more Americans lived long enough to experience it.

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Haynie on Education Gap

MAKING A CASE FOR SB929—AN ACT CONCERNING CLOSING THE ACADEMIC ACHIEVEMENT GAP

Connecticut has the largest Achievement Gap in reading among low income children and their more affluent peers in the nation.  Between 1998 and 2009, Connecticut’s neediest children showed no improvement on the National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP), a test that compares the reading and math achievement in all 50 states.  Here in Norwalk and based on 5 years of our own Connecticut CMT data, 50% of Norwalk 3rd graders, from all socio-economic levels, were not reading at grade level. Brain research informs us that reading is teachable to 95% of our students. So what happens to kids who are not reading at the level they should be, when they should be? For one, a child who hasn’t learned to read by the end of 1st grade has only a 1 in 8 chance of ever catching up with his peers. And, without grade level reading skills by 3rd grade, 1 in 6 children will drop out of school or fail to graduate on time. We live in a global and demanding economy; sub-par reading skills are simply no longer an option.

SB929—An Act Concerning Closing the Achievement Gap was discussed at the April 5th Legislative Reading Forum in Hartford.  Act SB929 stresses the need for better university level pre-service reading instruction for teachers, better tools for classroom reading assessments, better professional development for classroom reading instruction and better communication with parents about effective reading strategies to use at home.

Childhood illiteracy to the degree that we are experiencing it is a detriment to the long-term health of our nation and has negative consequences for everyone—and not just the child who has not been taught to read. The repercussions of illiteracy at this scale impact you, your children, your neighborhood, your property values, your taxes, your schools, your city, and your country. Let’s hope the Connecticut General Assembly adopts a sense of urgency in regard to this reading crisis in Connecticut and acts on Act SB 929.

Sue Haynie

Member Norwalk Board of Education

 

Kimmel on Waxing Nostalgic

I was recently accused of “waxing nostalgic” for the administration of Alex Knopp. I found the charge, which was made by a prominent Republican, amusing because the expression generally refers to the tendency of people to look back to better times when things are not going well in the present.

The reason for the “accusation” was a column I wrote in The Hour (March 25), in which I delineated some of the accomplishments of the previous administration. I also wrote that Norwalk could still be considered the county’s “hole in the donut” because of our inability, during the best of times (the 1990s) and the worst of times (the last few years), to advance our major redevelopment projects.

But the conversation started me thinking about some of the criticism of the Knopp administration and the various initiatives that were implemented between 2001 and 2005, when he was defeated by our current Mayor, Richard Moccia.

(I was a member of the Common Council during those years, and it is my belief that Knopp would probably still be Mayor if not for several difficult contract negotiations with city unions and the election-year charges made by Republicans that Knopp was responsible for the spike in homicides that occurred in the period prior to the 2005 elections.)

There were indeed a number of important initiatives under Knopp and the Democratic Common Council. And in our rush to get things done, after years of inaction and neglect during the administration of Frank Esposito, we may have missed a few details. For instance, we were criticized by Republicans for rushing to fix leaking school roofs, of biting off more than the city could handle in so short a timeframe.

I always found those criticisms disingenuous, at best, since everyone knew all the roofs in our school system were leaking when Knopp defeated Esposito in 2001. They had to be fixed, and the sooner the better. If I remember correctly, there was also some criticism of the long term funding projections of the Water Pollution Control Authority and the Parking Authority.

But the city needed both of those authorities, and badly; thus, they were created, and they are still with us, doing good work and saving taxpayers money. There were other initiatives during those years that focused on technology and how we handled large scale construction projects. But the question is, if I was “waxing nostalgic,” was there good reason?

Moccia has been in office almost six years. The Arts Commission was created, I believe, during his watch, and he has done an excellent job supporting its activities. And he has argued that he has steered the city through an extremely tough and long-lasting recession. But is that enough to justify another term?

I don’t think so. The long-term property values of Norwalk and the overall quality of life of our residents depend on the quality of our schools, the level of violent crime, and the completion of our major redevelopment projects. On each of these issues, I do not believe the Mayor’s record justifies his re-election.

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Kimmel On ‘Hole in the Donut’

By Bruce Kimmel

I first heard Norwalk characterized as the “hole in the donut” in the late 1990s, when I was a Democratic member of the Common Council. Since the only donuts I ever liked were Cream and Boston Cream, neither of which has a hole, I had to smile before trying to figure out what the phrase might mean. I concluded that Norwalk, unlike its wealthier neighbors, must be lacking important stuff, such as a thriving downtown, first rate schools, and a low crime rate.

I also thought the phrase might be turned into a nifty campaign issue. At the time, we had had a Republican Mayor, Frank Esposito, for about a decade, and the so-called “hole,” according to many Norwalk residents, seemed to be growing when it came to our school system and redevelopment projects. Unfortunately, until the 2001 municipal elections – when Democrat Alex Knopp trounced the aforementioned Mayor – the only issue that really mattered come election time was whether to implement the long-delayed property revaluation.

Let’s fast forward into the second decade of the new century. Once again we have a Republican Mayor, Richard Moccia, who is running for a fourth term. About a month ago, the Mayor characterized Norwalk in The Hour (Feb. 26) as still being the “hole in the donut.” He was referring to our stalled redevelopment projects, especially along West Avenue and the Reed-Putnam area. I found the statement revealing for two reasons:

The first is that the Mayor repeatedly has argued that our redevelopment projects have ground to a halt because of the recession. However, during the 1990s, those very same projects were stalled, even though the country was in the midst of sustained economic expansion.

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Guest View: Transportation and Parking by David McCarthy

Transportation and Parking by David McCarthy

Recently, I had the opportunity to appear before the Transportation Committee of the General Assembly to testify in support of a proposed bill concerning the availability of Parking Spaces on the New Haven line and its branches.

The life of the rail commuter is difficult in normal times and has been made worse by this winter’s ice and snow.  The ability to park one’s vehicle safely with the knowledge that you will be able to return to it after your return trip is a crucial success factor for the New Haven line.

I feel there is a distinct and pressing need for study of the parking supply and policies related to parking.  We need to understand the inventory of parking at railroad stations on the New Haven line and its branches as well as the policies related to permits at those stations.  There is a need for a consistency in management of the parking supply over time as well as a need for ongoing local control of the quality of the spaces.

Unfortunately, for a number of reasons, this is not always a simple task.  Some stations have limited convenient parking and their total inventory relies on remote lots some riders do not wish to use, especially in winter.  Pricing inequities and other uncertainty lead people to add their names to multiple waiting lists and perhaps hold multiple passes for a period of time causing an artificial inflation of demand.

Lack of a coordinating effort may lead to sub-optimized development of parking inventory.   How can we know where and when to add to the pool of available spots when we don’t know what our true utilization is?

I don’t believe we should put a burden on our towns and cities, nor DOT, without truly understanding the situation and knowing that our plans are the right thing to do.  Understanding what we have now will help us understand in the future that any money spent on something new will be spent well, and that anything new will be built in places where it is needed most.

Some have said to me that parking should just be free and we should do away with the Norwalk Parking Authority, but I don’t agree.  The ongoing effective management of parking, both at train stations and around the city, is essential to our city’s economy.  Parking spots are scarce resources that need management.

The fees the NPA charge go back into the system and fund operations as well as capital improvements.  What used to cost the city well around $1.5 million annually is now self-funded.  Since 2005 an investment of over $7M has been made in much needed repairs to parking decks, as well as lighting, landscaping and technical upgrades – all funded by the NPA.  Since its founding, the NPA has almost retired the debt associated with the Maritime Aquarium deck and started a capital reserve.

As I recall, even after the worst of storms, the Norwalk Parking Authority was able to remove the snow from the lots and to clear the curbs to allow parking.  That focused effort by the authority is worth the price we pay.  The addition of electric car charging stations and the new innovative pay stations are ideas that might never have seen the light of day without local management and oversight, tempered by community involvement.  I like the little touches, such as the partnerships with the Norwalk Arts Commission that has allowed for exhibits at different locations.

I feel that the proper management of parking is crucial to the overall economic development of our city.  The economic engine that will drive the redevelopment of our center city areas is retail and dining.  The proper access to parking is essential for the success of local small business.  Management allows for shared parking across the city and moves us away from inefficient approaches in space development.   The change made to the fee in lieu of parking regulation, so that no fee is necessary upon a change in use in certain areas, is a good example of backing off and allowing business to take root.

Parking, like plowing and pot holes, will never meet with the approval of 100% of our citizens and is unlikely to win any awards.  I think that the efforts of our local legislators, such as Rep Lavielle’s introduction of the bill regarding parking at New Haven line stations, as well as the efforts of local administrators and commissioners, are necessary to produce an improvement in the parking infrastructure here in Norwalk and beyond.  Continued study and wise decision making, and not knee-jerk responses and criticism, are the ultimate routes to success.

David McCarthy is a Norwalk Zoning Commissioner as well as one of Norwalk’s representatives to the Southwestern Regional Planning Association.  These views are his own, however.

 

Guest View: Regional Thinking

By David McCarthy

Life in southwestern Connecticut is changing rapidly and not necessarily for the better.  The economic crisis has hit us hard and solutions leading to real sustainable economic development are in short supply.  If we do not improve the prospects for young workers, they will continue to abandon the area in favor of more forgiving climes.  The issue needs to be tackled in a non-partisan regional manner.  We cannot allow impediments to progress due to turf wars, personal agenda, or bureaucracy.  We share many things in southwestern Connecticut and we need to act in unison for our mutual benefit.

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