This is Politics at work. There is a struggle going on in the little town of Bethel. Bethel is a great small charming town and the struggle over keeping Terre Haute preserved as open space.  There is a lot of misdirection and it has taken me about six months and a lot of conversations to try to understand the issues. The property is part of a larger chain of open space stretching from Bethel through Danbury’s Tarrywile Park, Wooster Mountain State Park and Ridgefield’s preserved lands. You can check out this site for maps and boundaries www.ctpath.org.

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Norwalk’s Special education program has been under sanctions a number of years. So naturally, now that Corda has hired a new director of Pupil Personnel Services, he deflected answering any questions to the new director. Who would of course be unfamilar with all that has gone on for several years.

And what is with this title, “director of Pupil Personnel Services”? It has  a Soviet Sptunik era ring to it.

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This is a puzzler. Chief Rilling applied for a job in Weston. And so Norwalk wants to extend his contract another 4 years. Rilling has demonstrated he has a problem supervising sex crimes investigations. He has allowed investigations to be botched such as the “spa” prostitution investigations and likely others that we all don’t even know about.

The commissioners said they also plan to extend Rilling’s contract until September 2011 at the Oct. 18 meeting. His salary will be discussed as part of the contract process, they said. Currently, the chief makes $102,000 per year and has held the job since 1995.

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It’s become apparent that the math skills of embattled Superintendent Sal Corda are unsatisfactory. I think an individualized educational program is in order here. How else to explain the faith based budgeting numbers he dreams up, the excuses (then) that you just have to wait and see what the budget numbers are after the end of the school year, and not this latest example.

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The Working Families Party has endorsed twelve (out of 15) of Democratic candidates for Common Council in addition to its earlier endorsement of Walter Briggs for Mayor.

Receiving the cross Endorsement are:

At Large:

Mike Geake, Amanda Brown, Doug Sutton, Fred Bondi, and Marc Bradley

District:

Steve Serasis for Council District A

Kevin Poruban and Laurel Lindstrom for Council District C

Anna Duleep and Gail Wall for Council District D

Gwen Briggs and Bill Krummel for Council District E

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