“Of this I am certain, that if we open a quarrel between the past and the present, we shall find that we have lost the future.”
Winston S. Churchill
After watching the Windham Town Council meeting of Dec. 18 the one thing that I am sure about is that the councilors wouldn’t be getting together to go a-caroling (like from the Perry Como song). I don’t remember seeing and hearing so much fire and brimstone from any other Town Council meeting in Windham. It was so bad that I won’t touch it with a 20-foot pole but rather hope a newspaper does.
During that recent meeting sparks flew between the town councilors and one can hope that such tactics will in the end help calm things down. But if they don’t, I would highly recommend wearing flame-retardant clothing to meetings. I would also suggest bringing a few gallons of holy water just in case things get worse.
Here sits the Town of Windham in limbo waiting for their elected officials to hire a new town manager, and with my experience I suspect it’s going to be a long, drawn-out affair, to put it mildly. Seeing the way the public part of that council meeting went, I would have loved to have been be a fly on the wall during their executive meeting.
One part of that meeting dealt with the meaning of “resident.” I see a connection with that word to reside and residence, which certainly shouldn’t be hard to discern. But leave it to government, especially Windham’s, for things get a whole lot foggy and I might as well add blurry. Other municipalities in Maine have removed people from town councils or boards of selectmen because they either moved out of the district they were elected to represent or moved away from town all together. There is an exception and that, of course, is Windham. Best I can gather is that Windham had a couple of board members move out of town and they still, I guess, are considered members of that board.
To cut to the chase, the Windham town councilors had to vote during that meeting to set the definition of citizen as this: “A citizen of the Town is defined, in this section, as a legal resident or property/business owner in Windham. This provision does not apply to current members of the Town boards or committees as of the date of enactment of this amended procedure. Any such member who does not meet the amended definition of citizen is ineligible for reappointment.”
That statement really bothers me as a Windham resident and taxpayer. To be sure, I have no problem with a business owner being a part of the Windham Economic Development Corporation, or the Chamber of Commerce for that matter. Other than that, I only want real Windham residents making decisions that affects our town and citizens. And by real residents I mean the real definition of residents as defined in a dictionary, not government gobbledygook or some place worse, like the U.S. Congress.
I noticed on Dec. 19, that the sidewalks from the Windham High School campus to the Windham library had been plowed. I, for one, would not have wanted to walk on the ice that was left after the plowing. As a matter of fact, I witnessed many students walking on Route 202. What I fail to understand is how Gorham constantly beats Windham in clearing their sidewalks, even in Little Falls Village, while sidewalks in South Windham remain encrusted with snow and ice.
Lane Hiltunen of Windham believes it’s time to get rid of the all the mumbo jumbo in Windham government.
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