A betrayal of trust

You know, I should make an infographic about the betrayal of trust – how the town, and the state have betrayed us. The town, for example, had their agent working in what was supposed to be the Town Plan and the Zoning Office. It should have been called Zoning.

We had a Town Plan, but they took it, shelved it, and changed their name to “Planning and Zoning.” There was no real planning involved; it was just zoning enforcement, and we don’t even know who’s in charge now or what happened to the files. The department name was Town Plan and Zoning; it should be restored to that. 

Outdated Zoning Map

We haven’t published an updated zoning map in seven years. We have to work with Greenwich and all the other towns in Fairfield County to put this together. I should start a Google Drive shared folder with everyone, where they can post all their Town Plans, Charters, Constitutions, and codes, including the State Constitution. I’ll even include part of Mississippi’s old state constitution. You don’t even know what you have because it’s all been changed, manipulated, and updated. We can streamline this; you can look at all of it now, and anything you don’t like, we can get rid of it. Oh, this is great! I’m going to empower the people with Google – Google politics!

See, Google levels the playing field like never before. For the first time, everything is totally open. The phrase “levels the playing field like never before” is accurate. For the first time in history, everything is in the open, and everyone is on the same footing, which is how it’s supposed to be: an exchange of ideas, thoughts, culture, and humanity, not obfuscation, blocking, manipulation, and backroom deals. 

Which is what the Porsche deal is! How did that happen? I was in the room. Their application was denied – rightfully so, for a million more reasons than the ones that were cited. 

The normal procedure is: if you don’t like a decision, you go to the ZBA, the Zoning Board of Appeals. That’s what the appeals board is there for. You’ll be heard. But instead, they… I don’t know… they filed a lawsuit (I didn’t see that in the paper, so I guess they did). They met with our attorney, the town attorney. The attorney for the applicant met with our attorney in private and reached a settlement. And then, as a settlement of what? What does that even mean – a settlement? We had already made our decision.

And then, during a regular Town Planning and Zoning meeting, they pulled the commission out of the meeting and away from the public into a side room for a secret meeting with the attorney. They came out of the room and said, “There’s been a settlement, and the Porsche deal is approved.” How did that happen? I was like, “Wait, what? No, it’s not!” 

So, we have a House of Cards Congress right now. What we’d like to do, in addition to coming out against it and listing everyone who opposes it, is in Fairfield, Easton, and Bridgeport… well, just in our area, Fairfield (I can only speak for Fairfield), the three Representatives in the House and Senate – we’re going to pay their salaries. Right now, it’s forty thousand dollars, and as I’ve talked about before, that has artificially kept their income low, making them vulnerable to needing outside income. We all have to live. And so, now they’re under the Democratic Party’s thumb. If they want to keep their jobs, they have to do what they’re told.

It’s wrong, and we’re changing that. We’re going to pay them immediately out of our funds – eighty thousand more, so it’s $120,000 a year to be our public servants. We’re going to ask that they don’t take money from anywhere else. We’re going to take steps to reduce the influence that others have on them in meetings.

I need to show them the map of Fairfield and how Town Services became a monster – what it was on the map 50 years ago and what we have now. We’re going to go public and say, “This is what we want to do,” and we’re going to embrace this. We’re going to address these challenges head-on: the environment, the climate, and the landfill, which the state refuses to address.

The water.

Because we’re going to do it for ourselves.

And, you know, in fact, I don’t even think we should call it Beaches State Park. There are two options; we’re going to ask Fairfielders which they like better. Because to be honest with you, I don’t trust the state. There’s been such a betrayal of trust. I don’t know if we can call it “Fairfield Beaches State Park.” I would love to, I really would. But part of me wants it to be called the “Long Island Sound Wildlife Natural Refuge” – not making those kinds of accommodations, not making it open for development or mass crowds, but more of a natural preserve. So, that’s what we have to ask Fairfield: do we want active recreation, or do we want passive nature? And if we want active recreation, who will be the steward? Can we really do that effectively? I can envision an extension from Hallock State Park, perhaps focusing on measuring the Sound – a million things going across it, measuring it laterally and at different depths longitudinally. I don’t know if you understand what I’m saying, but you’d really get an idea of the different depths and sections of the 17 miles across (it’s more actually to Hallock, I think it’s like 30, I don’t know). But then you’ve got… we’ve created something real where we can measure, we can look, and we can see differences, and all sorts of things. Man, would I love to link that with the Victims’ Memorial. You have to understand, not only do I want you to see Fairfield for what it really is and what it was, but also Bridgeport for what it was and what it is. It is a beautiful city with everything and anything you could want. The trouble is, it has been stuck for 50 years.

And we can change that. Now, we can never recapture those years, but we can move forward and build on it. And we can have a new tomorrow, and we can appreciate that and have some justice and a future and enjoy our lives and our surroundings, and create the Utopia that you want to live in. Our state government has betrayed us so much, and so often, and so blatantly in the open. Like last year when they took money meant for the homeless and used it to upgrade the arena in Hartford with new kitchens! It’s so hypocritical. And to even begin to try to claim any sort of moral high ground… just don’t go there because you have betrayed your people and your constituency so deeply that we have to fix this mess. You have us in 50th place!

Create platforms for user-generated content. Give them like 13 categories. Post the assets, post the headlines, post the message. You can decide what works. You can propagate it your way. You can talk on your social network, you can cut and paste. I can give you the issues, the awareness, and the education, and you can turn that into change. So, let’s see your stuff. Let’s have all your work sent in, and let’s get going here. Here’s what’s happening, ad agencies: let’s get user-contributed stuff. Let’s do some good work, like in the old days. America would not be the America it is today if we forgot our founding fathers. Period. Now, it’s time for our matriarchal mothers to step up, to step forward.

It’s time for our matriarchal mothers to take the first steps, for us to take giant leaps forward. Take the step to give us all a giant leap forward.

Take the step to empower women… I’ll loop back to Fairfield. This isn’t about limiting public input now that you’ve limited our say-so. It’s not about running for office. You’ve shut us out again and again and again. You have shut me out for 25 years, and I’m not going to be shut out again. I could do a piece called “25 Years Without Oxygen” about how I have been working for 25 years to effect change, to do something here in Fairfield, and have been blocked and blocked and blocked and blocked and blocked. Why is that?

And how do you change that? This is our last chance. My subhead could be: “Have I been working for this moment for 25 years?” This is our last chance. I’ve been trying to fight against this moment for 25 years. I’ve been fighting this moment for 25 years. Period. This is our last chance. This is about an industry that has made itself the locomotive of our entire state and has its tentacles and operations in every part of our government and local society, from the employees within the town to our elected officials’ dominance, to the very laws and codes we write. Today, we are left with what could be called the world’s most aberrant Golden Corral – an all-you-can-build blight. That’s not a stretch; it’s a dystopia before us. So, we need to implement an active remediation program to undo all the damage that the state has done for the last 50 years, and there are various ways to do that: you can reshape the landscape, you can move things, you can lower things.

Like the book says, be creative, be original. If every picture tells a story, here’s mine, the tale of how, after 50 years, Fairfield can finally regain itself, control its future, its life. Fairfield can finally reclaim itself. Idea: Do a three-minute blitz using these glasses. It forces me to be concise. And it’s easy; I don’t even have to edit. I’ve got it nailed right there. It’s a new style, using the glasses. Headline: “Until our public sector un-invents Google, they better wake up to the new reality.”

Times have changed. But our public sector hasn’t. That’s the second idea. What I can’t accept is that you are putting our lives at risk. There is no ecological awareness, no testing regarding rising sea levels. Climate change is probably the most pressing factor in our lives right now, and we are literally in Fairfield, on the front lines, and you just completely ignore it. In fact, you’re building on the wetlands and naming the roads after what you are destroying. We need a reform on the overabundance of real estate agents.

And on naming roads and developments – too many roads and politicians naming things for themselves. We’ve got a lot of cleaning up to do there. Starting with the most recent one I saw, the condo complex – it’s the driveway to the condo complex, and they’re calling it “Old Fuel Commons” or something. “Private private”… what? Am I going to go up your driveway to the condo? I should put up a sign that says “My Private Driveway.” It’s not a road; it’s a driveway. That has to come down. All the ones I don’t like, any “private road”… but that particular one, or that pattern of closing it off and letting them name roads themselves at Sasco Point or wherever, it’s unacceptable. In fact, we have a lot of renaming to do.

Because where it gets confusing is, for instance, Post Road – that one-block section, maybe half a mile long, where Fairfield Avenue is renamed Post Road. You guys remember coming from Bridgeport? There’s no reason that section should have been renamed Post Road. Maybe it was originally? It was Route 1, right? That connection existed before it went up and around. I don’t know exactly why, but that should be renamed Fairfield Avenue to minimize confusion and address that hazardous look-over-the-shoulder merge, which the traffic engineers don’t even talk about. They call it a “peanut” because people are speeding too fast. It’s not that; it’s just a bad angle and merging onto a tricky interchange, and then you have to cross a line of traffic, which isn’t ideal. People manage, but the dangerous part is the need to look sharply over your shoulder with cars coming fast, and especially if you don’t have good eyesight like myself, it can be really tough and dangerous. You’ve got to turn your whole head. Next, we should just extend the name of State Street because, again, it comes from Bridgeport into Fairfield, and just keep it as State Street there, not Commerce Drive.

Let’s unify the names. So, it’s not all these made-up constructs. You leave it as State Street going all the way down, except for the one area. Instead of calling it “Constant Comment Way,” let’s just call it “Constant Dead End” because that’s what it is – because there’s no through access. If you open up the access, you can call the area Bigelow. That whole complex is going to be called Bigelow, and we’re going to leave that name as a scar, like a wart, to remind ourselves of what could have been.