Oatmeal and the Town of Canton

Oatmeal and the Town of Canton

From the Chicago Tribune:

President Barack Obama said on Thursday that "Americans are completely fed up with Washington" a day after the latest fiscal impasse was narrowly averted.   

President Obama was then quoted in the same piece:

“The shutdown had proven that government is valuable to Americans”, he said.
If people object to some government policies, "push to change it, he added, "but don't break it. "Let's work together" to make government better, he said, "instead of treating it like an enemy."
17 October 2013 Washington DC

This is sound and obvious advice from the very top echelon of our government and of course issued without the smallest hint of irony.  If one were to take our commander and chief at face value and for a single moment think that he would consider treating the opposing party as anything other than something which needs to be annihilated and then apply that same notion here locally, we really could get some work done; right?  At least we could have better local governance which is open, transparent and happy.  We could get a new town garage built at a reasonable cost, bad ideas like the 18 million dollar publicly run hydro dam would be tossed in the rubbish bin and all our roads would be made smooth again.  Ideas could be discussed over cupcakes and tea, and real compromise could be achieved all for the good of those who are completely “fed up”.

Regrettably; this snuggly notion of governance is not likely to ever exist; if it ever did.  Consider the following mundane five sentence statement made by the author at a September Canton Board of Selectmen meeting with a request for verbatim publication in the written minutes of this public meeting.  A written copy of the statement was provided for the sake of accuracy.

“Chris Budnick, Canton, CT, stated that a letter dated 15 May 2013 from the Canton Energy Committee was distributed to the Board of Selectmen at the 11 September 2013 meeting of the Board of Selectmen without being included on the agenda.  This letter requested that funding, not to exceed $82,500.00, be allocated for the furtherance of of the Canton Hydroelectric project.  The project has an estimated cost of $18,315,500 as stated in the STEAP grant application submitted by the town of Canton to the State of Connecticut. Ultimately, the grant application was rejected by the State of Connecticut, and it is now necessary to ask the Canton taxpayer to fund the initial documentation required to move the project forward.  Canton has already spent $27,000 dollars on the hydroelectric dam effort.”


This is what ended up as approved written minutes:

"Chris Budnick of Orchard Hill Road read a statement and portions of several documents relating to a letter distributed at the previous Board of Selectmen meeting from the Energy Committee"

If the events of the last few weeks in Washington are a symbol of everything that is wrong now in our government, then that single act of deliberately editing a citizen's remarks down to something which resembles a bowl of yesterday's oatmeal in an effort to stymie the public disclosure of the costs of a pipe dream project, like the town owned hydro dam, is symbolic too.    The reciprocal of President Obama’s advice is that citizens are not an enemy which needs to be silenced with ham fisted tactics like those on display here.  Besides; actions like these speak for themselves much more clearly than anyone ever could.

Respectfully,

Chris Budnick
Canton, CT