20 April—Today is Adolf Hitler’s 133^rd birthday. Vladimir Putrid’s 70^th won’t be until 7 October. And Donald Trump won’t be 76 until Flag Day. That naturally takes us to last night’s Litchfield Board of Selectmen’s meeting at the Bantam School. It was just coincidence that a good part of the meeting was devoted to the future of that embattled building.

Sam Olmstead, the dynamic and enthusiastic chairman of the Town Facilities Review Committee that’s been farting around with what to do with and about town buildings and broadband, made a truly eloquent pitch at the meeting for throwing gargantuan bucks into the Bantam money pit. Sam called it “an architecturally significant and gracious building,” wherefore the committee believed “a plan to upgrade it would be in keeping with Litchfield’s values.”

Sam also said, in passing, essentially that building a new town hall would just give us a nicer version of what we already have. And of course he made a case for blowing $200,000-plus on a study to justify the extravagance. I asked if he was crazy.

Sam Olmstead and his committee are way off-base on a number of fronts. The first, as readers of Litchfield.bz will recall, is that last year’s town-wide survey was a terrible waste of time and money. Poorly conceived, poorly worded. Among other things, the options it presented were limited and didn’t include demolishing the Bantam School, or Bantam Annex, as it’s called these days.

Nor did it contain anything about the little grey courthouse, which is now destined to become a so-called boutique hotel to cater to visiting Forman School parents and (discreetly?) amorous executives.

Yes, the survey contained blank spaces to fill in. For all the good that did.

Then there’s the assessment of the aesthetic, architectural, and presumably historical value of the Bantam building. Purely a matter of taste and opinion no matter how you look at it, so I won’t argue that there are six other buildings in Litchfield to keep Marcel Breuer enthusiasts happy. But there are and we wouldn’t miss them if there weren’t.

Sam and the committee also have ignored the intransigent false economy of Litchfield voters. False economy? I’m being too nice. They’re really cheap, penny-wise, pound foolish, and—bottom line—just plain stupid when it comes to paying for constructing, renovating, and maintaining buildings. They cut corners everywhere and then make up for it in spades. We’ve seen that at least since the Breuer schools were built in the fifties and most recently in the last rejection of a new town hall—and what led up to it.

And let us not forget far and away the most virulent force present at last night’s meeting and manipulating the fortunes of Bantam School for at least two decades, the militantly pro-Bantam School-preservation crowd, Bantam über alles, a.k.a. Bantam Wants It All So Screw Litchfield If We Can’t Get It.

Its leader, Bantam P&Z chair John Langer (who, rumor has it, will be moving down south) was largely responsible for putting the kaibosh on the town’s efforts to sell the Bantam property for seven figures over a decade ago. Langer’s Bantam P&Z simply and categorically refused to allow commercial or industrial use of the property.

Langer made it clear last night that Bantam School should be Litchfield Town Hall. No two ways about it. A few years ago he suggested that the town give the school property to Bantam. That’s give, not sell. And that the nice people of Bantam would then assume the cost—estimated at $200,000—to remediate environmental violations.

And then Bantam could do anything it damn well pleased with the property and make lots of money for itself doing it.

Any expenditure will by law have to be approved by a town meeting. The selectmen should have the presence of mind to send such expenditures directly to referendum. If, however, they fail to do the right thing, referendums will be forced.

A Vietnam vet suggested a way to solve the problem: just drop a bomb on Bantam School . . .