Government

Irwin House, Outback, NCPD: Residents Suggest New Uses for Town-Owned Buildings

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What follows are three ideas for new uses of town-owned buildings that attendees at last week’s panel discussion presented during the two-hour Forum on Public Buildings. Designed as a follow-up to a comprehensive committee report released in December, the event was sponsored by the New Canaan Historical Society, New Canaan Preservation Alliance, Town of New Canaan and NewCanaanite.com. The panelists—First Selectman Kevin Moynihan, Town Council Chairman John Engel, Town Council members Penny Young and Cristina A. Ross, and Board of Finance member Amy Murphy Carroll (Young and Murphy Carroll also are co-chairs of the Town Building Evaluation & Use Committee)—responded to the suggestions. Swapping Irwin House for Additional Park Space

One resident mulled whether tearing Irwin House down completely to add more green space would benefit New Canaanites since the park itself is a more popular attraction. The panel agreed that the idea of tearing the house down isn’t completely off the table, but involves building a new structure in its place.

Around Town

Did You Hear … ?

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Urged by local leaders, dozens of New Canaanites attended Tuesday night’s ConnDOT hearing in Stamford on proposed service cuts to the New Canaan branch of Metro-North Railroad—reductions that government and business officials both have called potentially devastating. Scroll through the gallery above for photos and a transcription of First Selectman Kevin Moynihan’s comments at the hearing. ***

South School failed the most recent surprise health inspection of its cafeteria kitchen, and East School and New Canaan High School, as well as St. Luke’s School, also failed recent inspections. Food items in a 2-door Hobart at South were discarded after the cooler was found to be at 63.7 degrees—far higher than required—during a May 2, 2017 inspection.

Around Town

UPDATED: Community Forum on ‘The Future of Town-Owned Buildings’ To Be Scheduled

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[Note:  Originally scheduled for March, this forum will be held some time after budget season. We apologize for any inconvenience.]

The Town of New Canaan in partnership with NewCanaanite.com will present a community-wide forum on “The Future of Town-Owned Buildings.”

Panelists will include:

Town Council Chairman John Engel
First Selectman Kevin Moynihan
Town Building Evaluation & Use Committee Co-Chair and Board of Finance member Amy Murphy Carroll
Architectural preservationist Marty Skrelunas

The forum will be held at Town Hall, moderated by NewCanaanite.com owner and editor Michael Dinan. Refreshments will be served. New Canaan is working toward major decisions about the uses and futures of town-owned buildings. A selectmen-appointed committee in December produced an in-depth review of some 50 such structures in New Canaan, including recommendations in many cases about what could be done with them. Right now, elected and appointed officials are weighing decisions about spending money next fiscal year to study or alter buildings in ways that could rearrange not just where municipal departments are located but whether some buildings continue under town ownership or exist at all.

Government

Citing Need for Decision on Future Use, Finance Board Puts Off $50,000 Study of Former Outback Building

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Saying that the town first must decide how the building will be used, members of New Canaan’s funding bodies decided last week to put off a vote on $50,000 in studies that would be needed in order to make repairs and code-compliant upgrades to the former Outback Teen Center building. It’s too early to discuss an investment in architectural and engineering plans for what some now call the ‘Town Hall Annex’ when its future use remains unclear, Board of Finance members Todd Lavieri and George Blauvelt said at the group’s regular meeting, held Tuesday at Town Hall. Town Councilman Steve Karl voiced that thought during the legislative body’s regular meeting the following night. “This is about a building and about a hardship, basically, that the town inherited—we inherited what amounts to a dilapidated barn and we need to figure out what is a post-and-beam barn that is 17 years old with two bathrooms, how much is a couple of bathrooms and a barn worth?” Karl said at the meeting, held at Town Hall. “And there is no property underneath it, because it’s the town’s property.

Government

Board of Finance to Keep 2 Percent Budget Increase as ‘Strong Guideline’ for Town Departments

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Members of the Board of Finance on Tuesday night discussed the effectiveness of an October memo instructing all departments to present their budget proposals for next fiscal year with no more than a 2 percent budget increase, especially in light of Superintendent of Schools Dr. Bryan Luizzi last week opened Board of Education budget talks with a request for a 3.5 percent increase. Finance board member Colleen Baldwin said during the group’s regular meeting that while there were discussions before the memo was sent about making the 2 percent a “hard number,” the idea was eventually scrapped “for this very reason.”

Instead, she said that the number was “put out as a starting discussion” with a strong suggestion that the budgets should be presented with “no more than 2 percent.”

But member Thomas Schulte questioned whether the departments are taking the memo seriously enough, considering the financials challenges that the both the town and the state are facing in the coming years and urged the board to bring up these concerns at department meetings. “We tried to do our best to share with them the concerns that we had,” he said at the meeting, held at Town Hall. “I think that the world is very different. It is a more expensive one for people to pay their state and local taxes [in]…and we can’t ignore that, and I think [in terms of] real world budgeting, all of the departments need to be aware of that—whether they’re halfway or all the way through creating their budgets.