Archive - Apr 1, 2010 - Page

MIDDLEBURY — Addison County lawmakers and their colleagues will spend the next several days studying a list of $38 million in potential savings in state government intended to help shore up a $150 million hole in the fiscal year 2011 general state budget.

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MIDDLEBURY — Construction on the Cross Street Bridge project will begin to spill into the center of downtown Middlebury beginning on Monday, April 5, when road and utilities work will kick into overdrive and create some slower going for traffic in some locations through the early fall.

Work on the $16 million project has, until now, been largely confined to sections of Cross Street and Bakery Lane near the Otter Creek, where the enormous span is taking shape.

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VERGENNES — As expected, Vergennes officials were handed on Tuesday a petition calling for a revote of the city’s Town Meeting Day decision to approve changing governance of the Addison Northwest Supervisory Union to a one-board system.

City Manager Mel Hawley said Aldermen Ziggy Comeau and David Austin and former planning commission member Michael Ferland each dropped off petitions with signatures calling for a second vote on the question. The total number of signatures totaled 85, in excess of the 75 needed to trigger a revote.

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BRISTOL — Administrators and some community members at Mount Abraham Union High School are balking at the school’s recent appearance on a list of the state’s 10 “persistently low-achieving” schools.

The designation means Mount Abe could qualify for as much as $600,000 in federal school improvement grants, and the school board voted last week to move ahead with an application for the funding. Meanwhile, school officials have also been quick to point out that the list of low achieving schools paints an inaccurate, oversimplified picture of Mount Abe’s record of achievement.

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MIDDLEBURY — Richard Nessen still vividly recalls the day that he, his wife Kathy, and friends Gerry and Bobbi Loney decided to put into motion what had been a dream of starting a school.

“We had had a notion of starting a school together since the 1970s and one night, we just said ‘We’re going to do it.’ We gave notice at our jobs,” he said. “It was kind of like stepping off a cliff.”

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MIDDLEBURY — It’s been seven months since Middlebury doctors Diana Barnard and Will Porter saw the first patient in their new practice, Partners in Palliative and Home Care, and they say that it is going very well.

And Porter Medical Center board chairman Joe Sutton agreed — he introduced Barnard’s keynote speech at Porter’s annual meeting last Thursday with glowing praise.

“This is a practice that is unique within the state, and even the country,” said Sutton.

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BRISTOL — Lacrosse, billed as the fastest sport on two feet, has also in the past two decades become one of the fastest growing team sports in the United States.

But that doesn’t mean that speed is the right way to build a new program in the sport, according to Mount Abraham Union High School boys’ lacrosse coaches Tim McGowan and Paul Low.

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LINCOLN — Ask blacksmith Brian Anderson, and the South Starksboro metalworker will tell you that a cool, hard lump of iron and a soft piece of clay aren’t as different as you might think.

Sure, you may have to heat iron to 2,500 degrees before it becomes malleable — and malleable only with the force of a hammer and tongs. But at that point, he said, the distinction between hard and soft, clay and iron, all but disappears.

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