31 January—At Litchfield’s annual town meeting last night, surprisingly sizable majorities of the roughly 140 people who attended and survived the two-hour-long ordeal approved the Sustainable Litchfield cell’s misguided plans to install EV charging stations in town parking lots and shell out for a study of what to do with the Bantam School/Annex. The voting was done by paper ballot to save individual voters from embarrassing themselves.

The selectmen should have sent the controversial questions to referendum in order to give more people a chance to vote while reducing the likelihood of either side packing the meeting. But referendums are known to favor opponents and a majority of the selectmen favor both questions, so that was that.

And I plead guilty for not forcing a referendum. No excuse.

EV chargers are intended to be installed in the town’s three parking lots in the borough and parking lots are so-called public ways. Yes they are. Thus the chargers fall within the purview of the borough’s Historic District Commission (HDC). So that means the chargers still need to get the HDC’s coveted certificates of appropriateness (COAs). So there’s still the possibility—and hope—that the appurtenances to benefit a few businesses won’t get to be installed.

After—if—the HDC issues the COAs, the EV chargers must then clear the town’s Planning & Zoning Commission. P&Z’s approval isn’t unlikely. But hope springs eternal.

As for the Bantam School/Annex study, God bless it and all who believe in it. The comprehensive survey will cost only $150,000, after all. And that’s quite possibly all that will be spent on a Bantam Breuer monument because of the legendary and frequently demonstrated shortsightedness and financial stupidity of Litchfield voters.

Still in Bantam, then, EV chargers are also supposed to be installed in the town parking lot behind the Bantam School. While Bantam doesn’t have an HDC, it does have its own planning & zoning commission. (The Borough of Litchfield farms out its P&Z function to the town. With an HDC, after all, why bother with a P&ZC?) But the Borough of Bantam P&Z’s approval of the superfluous EV chargers is likely.

On the other hand, even with Bantam P&Z’s thoroughly reprehensible former chairman finally and mercifully out of the picture (and the state), you never know how it will react to a Bantam boondoggle, whatever it may be . . .