Towns like Stratford Always Have Controversies - Mini and Major

Controversy sells papers, or so it used to be when newspapers were actually ‘for sale,’ and not distributed at no cost, like the weekly Stratford Star, or provided online for the price of your Internet connection, which Patch readers expense regardless of whether yours truly and the Stratford Patch exists or not - the "paid for" exception being the regional CT Post, of course.

(And congrats to Star editor John Kovach on his recent award from Sterling House.)

There are always controversies going on in towns like Stratford. It’s the nature of the beast when you have a town as large as ours with budgets measured in the tens of millions of dollars and with so many people and livelihoods involved.

Controversies needn’t be spectacular newsmakers in one fell swoop, either.

One of these kinds is the ongoing town budget deliberation, which is like a slow, nearly boiling pot. Sure, it occasionally gets stirred, like the seemingly quiet Friday a few weeks ago when Supt. of Schools Irene Cornish sent out an email to school PTAs warning that the mayor was not recommending any increase in the Board of Education budget for the upcoming fiscal year – which would meaning the closing of at least one school, it was widely believed.

That one email, which was copied to us here at Patch within an hour of its initial distribution - and presumably to the other news outlets - led to a rather interesting Friday afternoon at Town Hall. We have it on good authority that it was Mayor John Harkins himself who, perhaps unintentionally, set off the initial spark after a visit to the super’s office that Friday morning to discuss the education budget for FY 2011-2012.

It is now being billed as a misunderstanding between the mayor and the superintendent. But what happened was the mayor and reportedly at least one other high administration official visited Board of Ed offices that Friday morning to meet with the superintendent. And when the meeting had concluded, the superintendent believed that the mayor had told her that there would be no increase in the education budget.

The bottom line: at least one school would have to close in rather quick fashion in time for the next school year beginning in September in order to close a multi-million budget gap, or so the superintendent believed, which prompted her email saying as much to PTA leaders.

The mayor, for his part, is said to have believed that the education budget issue was “still on the table” and that he was returning to to mull over his budget options that Friday afternoon before releasing his official budget recommendation, which, according to a timetable set months earlier, was due to the Town Council that very day.

What happened next is still subject to some debate. But some accounts say that PTA leaders and other school parents bombarded town hall with calls and emails protesting the mayor’s no increase decision. Some in town hall refute that saying that less than a handful of calls and emails were received, which is interesting in itself because another town hall employee told Patch a few days later that the email and phone systems were both “down” that Friday and at least part of the day before on Thursday. (We heard that the systems were down again for at least part of Monday of this week, too.)

No matter. By that Friday afternoon, the Board of Ed Chair met with the mayor and it was agreed that the schools would receive a mayoral recommendation for an increase of $1 million on top of the current year’s education funding total. No school would have to be closed, although a challenge remained for Board of Ed and school administrators to find ways to close a smaller ed budget gap going forward.

So that one is back to a mini-controversy.

In that same vein, when the Long Range Facilities Planning Committee held public meetings in January and February to review the findings of a consultant that could lead to the closing of schools in Stratford, emotions ran at a fever pitch at several of those meetings where overflow crowds came to Stratford High to witness the proceedings – major controversy.

On Feb. 15, that committee decided that they would neither recommend the closing of any school, nor the movement of sixth graders out of the elementary schools and into the middle schools – at least for another year – back to "mini."

Similarly, library officials and its proponents, as well as the animal shelter crowd, all believe that their budget issues merit attention once it became clear that they were targeted for reductions in Mayor Harkins’ proposed town budget for fiscal year 2011-2012. These remain of the mini-controversial nature, as the pot is simmering on both but not quite boiling.

Other controversies are more immediate, and potentially more spectacular.

One of these surfaced last week and now is threatening to become the major controversy and topic de jour  – Mayor Harkins' appointment of a new EMS director in what amounts to a major reorganization of how that town department is supervised.

One of the first peeps of dissent came from the Town Council’s newest member, David Fuller, a Democrat, who protested that the mayor, a Republican, should have received council approval before making such an appointment. The mayor and town attorney, among others including Council Chairman Thomas Malloy, a Republican, defended the mayor’s actions, saying that it was well within the mayor’s jurisdiction to make such an appointment.

Mini-controversy.

But wait, this mini-controversy is now threatening to become a “maxi,” as a West Hartford labor attorney has notified the town attorney’s office this week that it intends to sue the town if the EMS appointment goes through.

The offended party is none other than the current EMS administrator, Donna Best. Among other complaints alleged in the letter from her attorney, Best claims that the appointment is political payback, as her husband, Jonathan Best, ran and lost against Mayor Harkins in the most recent GOP primary for mayor.

Against this backdrop is the CT Post report by reporter Brittany Lyle on Wednesday that Jonathan Best’s complaint against the mayor was upheld by the state elections commission, although the violation was deemed a technicality that demanded no actual monetary fine, only an order for the mayor to comply to the letter of the law going forward.

Thus, the EMS appointment and its sidebars are now in the "major controversy" category – and one that will certainly fill some newspaper space locally for days, and maybe weeks to come.