Hole in the roof

['john meissner' via Trustees]

The old Richard Scary children's books had a story about Haggis, a man with a hole in his roof, who never fixed it because on rainy days it was too wet to work, and on sunny days it didn't need fixing.

 

I get that we elected town officials to mostly interpret what staff presents, but iit would be reassuring if we had trustees forward thinking enough to decide withouut prompting from staff that we can't keep going through this.

 

The last flood was over 10 years ago.  In the past decade, fires are occurring in the area on average once every year.  I think the priority should be clear.  I think that if you say you can do both, you ought to do both, instead of talking about both and doing nothing on either except talking.  Talking will not stop the fires, unless you have very powerful breath to blow them in the opposite direction.

 

One helpful sign would be if you used the trustee comments/liaison reports section of the next town board meeting to each propose a viable, meaningful answer to how we can prevent this from happening every year.  I could think of 15 off the top of my head, like throwing everything at them when they are small, reducing fuel load, creating a permanent perimeter fire break, having a dedicated local television station or radio station that was updated with the latest information, enacting a fire ban that went into effect sooner rather than later, talking about cloud seeding after 10 days in the summer without rain, etc., etc., etc.\

 

Doing nothing or saying it is too expensive to bury power lines, not doing what is clearly very easy to do to decrease the warming of the atmosphere are no longer acceptable responses.  Talking and doing nothing is no longer an acceptable response.  We have objective measures to determine if trustees deserve re-election, and saving the lives of citizens is clearly at the top of the list.

 

-john