Commuter surcharges, police over time, and the kafkaesque immigration spotlight are the stories in the newspapers. Yesterday’s SoNo arts festival saw many more people out and about than Saturday, which goes to show you the impact of weather. Greater Hartford towns are battling with a regional sewer budget proposal that is stalemated over minority set asides. I snip a few highlights:
“The MDC is preparing to undertake a massive project designed to fix problems with the region’s antiquated and overextended sewers that send sewage into rivers and basements when it rains hard,” reports The Courant.
And then there’s this gem:
“A bill before the legislature last session would have authorized a surcharge to help finance the 15-year upgrade project by spreading the cost among the district’s water users. Without it, the price tag would land hard on the municipal budgets of the MDC’s eight member towns.”
So we have antiquated sewer systems upstate that do the same thing during rain storms that we have here in Norwalk, and yet there’s a regional body that exists there, which has its own way of prying money from the state.
Let me put that in context for you, we, as in the tax payers of Fairfield County, pay more state taxes than any other county, yet instead of our tax money coming back to fix our sewer systems, they will go to Hartford area towns.
With flooding in Westport, Fairfield, Darien and Stamford, you’d think that some municipal sewer departments would get their noggins together and figure out a regional allocation approach to lessen the impact of municipal budgets down here too.
The comments are all yours to tackle the issues you want to talk about.
