25 September—In yesterday’s “Dear Heloise” column, Cindi N. noted, “My cat stopped using his litter box for reasons he never explained, but he was happy to use his pee pad.” One is relieved that Cindi’s cat now happily relieves himself on a pee pad but wonders whether Cindi asked her cat the right questions. Because most cats tend to be forthcoming about their excretory functions.

And Goshen’s embattled soon-to-be-former first selectman Todd Carusillo evidently can’t take the heat his maladroit administration has generated: “They don’t have to use meetings to bash public officials,” he whined at a particularly lively and well-attended selectmen’s meeting Tuesday night. He won’t be missed.

But the big news is in Litchfield. In fact, it’s right in the cozy little Borough of Litchfield. The good news is that the lawyers—the only people who got anything out of the Chabad shakedown of the borough that was countenanced by the grossly misguided Second Circuit Court of Appeals—have been fully paid off and the borough has received the satisfaction of judgement. As Warden Gayle Carr put it, “That ship is now in dry dock.” The question, then, is, with a $130,000 reduction in the annual debit, how much relief will borough taxpayers actually see?

Litchfield town-borough news concerns the tempest-in-a-piss-pot about the new double-glazed windows on the town office building popularly known as Town Hall that were installed without benefit of a borough hysteric district commission (HDC) certificate of appropriateness (COA). Yes, that is indeed unforgivable.

So a week ago the town formally applied for a coveted COA after the fact, lest it be hauled into court by the omnipotent and sanctimonious taste police. Better late than never. Yeah, right. Adding injury to insult, the town is to install purely decorative muntins (commonly known as grills) on the outside of the new windows that already have them between the panes, presumably to add some Victorian colonial historic authenticity to the distinctly mid-century modern, architecturally blah building. Funny that storm windows on so many old houses along the borough axis aren’t embellished with grills.

There are really very fine, intelligent, reasonable people on the borough’s HDC. But when you put them all together they’re like a school board.

It must be noted that the only time (so far) the HDC actually took a property owner to court for doing the dirty without benefit of COA—it was about 25 years ago—the property owner prevailed in the trial and appellate courts. But the HDC was ready to waste still more borough taxpayer money at the state Supreme Court when the property owner, who had by then moved back to California, offered the HDC $75,000 to drop the silly suit.

So that it did. And in so doing the Borough of Litchfield Historic District Commission established a precedent for being bought . . .