ANGELO LYNN

Green Up’s ultimate goal

Here’s the deal about Green Up Day: it works best if you coordinate your efforts with your town. Specifically, most towns have maps marking who is picking up which sections of various roads. Rather than duplicate efforts on any single road, a simple check-in with the town Green Up Day coordinator can put your efforts to the greatest use. It might not be your road, and it might cause you to shift your plans a bit, but Green Up Day should be viewed as a community-wide effort with hitting 100% of the roads and streets in each town the ultimate goal. (Go Leicester!)

So make that call ahead of time; not the morning of May 7, but the few days before. That allows each town coordinator to develop the best possible plans for making our roadsides cleaner and letting Vermont’s natural beauty shine through.

And don’t forget to be a part of your community’s lunch, ice cream social, raffle, or whatever activities they have planned. (See story on Page 1A for what several towns have cooking, and an advertised list of town coordinators on Page 11A.) It’s a day to Green Up, but also to celebrate community.

Reporting on zoning

The lack of affordable housing in Addison County and throughout Vermont has been a pressing topic for the past several years, made worse by the pandemic’s influx of out-of-state buyers. State and town officials are working hard to respond, but such changes take time to do well. Middlebury’s Planning Commission, for example, has spent the better part of the past 3-plus years developing new zoning rules and a new master plan that address the problem.

Read, then, a story in today’s Addison Independent by reporter John Flowers on changes put forth in Middlebury’s newly proposed zoning regulations. It’s on Page 8A. Note two things: the thoughtfulness of the changes proposed, and also of the detailed reporting by Mr. Flowers. It’s a level of detailed reporting not found in many newspapers, partly because such stories don’t create headlines that generate online clicks.

Importantly, however, these are the type of stories that inform residents of what’s really happening in their towns. Take the time to read this one report and understand that’s the real work town boards do week after week; it’s just not noticed often enough.

Angelo Lynn