Archive - May 2012
May 10th
MIDDLEBURY — Gov. Peter Shumlin on Tuesday commended the 2012 Legislature for adopting initiatives he said place the state on a firm foundation for job creation, fiscal solvency and sustainable health care costs — in spite of the crippling effects of Tropical Storm Irene.
VERGENNES — Aldermen moved closer on Tuesday to creating a final policy that will establish a three-member committee to handle, on a year-round basis, applications for displays on the city green — including the popular, decades-old Christian nativity scene.
The committee that is called for in that policy — a final draft of which remains to be written and approved — will consist of City Clerk Joan Devine and one member each of the city’s planning commission and recreation committee.
MIDDLEBURY — Picture this: 12- and 13-year-old boys heading into the Catskill Mountains to tend a fire alone for 24 hours.
It might sound like a rite of passage from an earlier age, a challenge set for boys who might one day live on the animals they trapped or the edible plants they gathered.
This scene, though, takes place in August of 2009 and forms the central narrative of Peter Ferland’s documentary “Tending Fires,” which he will screen at Bridge School in Middlebury this Saturday at 7 p.m.
VERGENNES — Voters in the five Addison Northwest Supervisory Union towns will almost certainly be asked in either November or March to support a $2 million Vergennes Union High School bond that could also, in theory, approach $5 million.
The $2 million, said ANwSU Superintendent Tom O’Brien and business manager Kathy Cannon earlier this week, would pay for a long list of what they called long-term building needs and “health and safety” items.
NEW HAVEN — Ed McGuire spent 18 years teaching math to Mount Abraham Union High School students before retiring in 2008.
Now McGuire, a New Haven Democrat, will be reaching out to many of those same, now-adult students to earn their votes as he embarks on a race for the Addison-5 House seat that represents the towns of Bridport, Weybridge and New Haven.
“I do know a lot of young people,” McGuire said on Monday, the official kick-off of his first foray into politics.
BRANDON — It was with mixed feelings that Rep. Joe Acinapura, R-Brandon, officially announced this week he will not seek a fourth term in the Vermont House.
Local murmurs about the decision had been rumbling for months, and in an interview on the steps of Acinapura’s Park Street home Monday morning, the 73-year-old confirmed that he had made his choice some time ago.
BRISTOL — The Bristol selectboard on Monday took its first big step in exploring an expansion of the fire station on North Street.
HANCOCK — On Saturday, May 5, people across the globe held up dots — small, large, cut out or painted — asking their fellow citizens to “connect the dots” to climate change. Demonstrations went on underwater in the Marshall Islands, on the sides of cliffs in South Africa and on the last patch of snow on the Allen Trail at the Middlebury College Snow Bowl in Hancock.
