29 June—Update on municipal taxes first. If the USPS Informed Delivery daily email can be believed, paper Litchfield borough tax bills have been and are being delivered today. At least they’ve made it to Springfield, where they go from Litchfield—and where most mail destined for Litchfield takes a detour to be digitally coded and photographed—only to come back here (if we’re lucky and it’s not miscoded and sent off to the hinterland).

And the Litchfield town tax collector’s office says the paper tax bills will be in the mail on 1 July. We didn’t go into why the tell they haven’t been sent out earlier. But it appears the contractor who’s responsible for getting the bills printed, posted, and mailed should not have posted the motor vehicle tax bills on the town website. Why not?

While we’re in Litchfield, town officials appear finally to be approaching—but haven’t yet reached—the realization that the Bantam School, now functioning as the Town Hall Annex and home to the Bantam post office, is like the immense boulder Sisyphus was condemned to push up the hill in Tartarus (the destination of the damned, super-hell) only to have it roll back every time it neared the summit. In other words, preserving, upgrading, renovating, repurposing Breuer’s Bantam abomination would be a futile and never-ending burden to taxpayers. Like maintaining it is.

Thanks to an intransigently arrogant and just plain stupid Bantam planning and zoning commission tyrannized by a chairman who did the borough and town a favor when he moved away, the town wasn’t able to sell the decrepit Breuer Bantam burden and its land to an enthusiastic developer a couple of decades ago for really big bucks.

Bantam School was closed in the 70s, reopened and augmented with modular units (what we called trailers back then) for a short-lived pupil bump a few years thereafter, and repurposed as town offices and leased space for a state court and U.S. post office when the bump in enrollment passed.

The three poorly conceived and built Breuer-architected schools in Litchfield have been money pits for most of their 70-odd-year existence. Taxpayers were fortunate that the Montessori people who had been leasing Breuer’s little Northfield school bought it almost four decades ago even for the pittance they paid and even though nonprofit Montessori pays no taxes. But we’re still stuck with the former Litchfield High School and of course the Bantam Annex.

Marcel Breuer adulators come up with all manner of desperations to preserve his Bauhaus cheesebox legacy in Litchfield. But there are four unattractive and unlivable private homes in town for that.

Weren’t the Breuerites talking a few years ago about spending something like $10 million to bring the Bantam Annex up to spec and repurpose it? Well, that’s metastasized to over $30 million.

The highest and best thing to do with the Bantam Annex, then, as selectman Dan Morosani has mooted, is to demolish it. Demolishing the high school, as it happens, had been the best option many years ago, to replace it with a proper school building—so it was naturally discounted by the screw-up school building committee at the time. That’s how it’s always been in Litchfield.

Demolishing the Bantam white elephant would cost under a million. If the Bantam planning and zoning and historic district commissions have problems with it, the town will beat them in court—unless the selectmen roll over and play dead, as has been their wont of late.

And maybe the demolition people would give the town a break if they could also raze the high school while the wrecking balls are in town . . .