Towns are right to proceed with caution

Now is not the time for people, or municipal governments, to spend money for which they haven’t accounted. Get in a jam, and there are now fewer ways to find a way out. So it is that two Northwest Corner towns, Cornwall and Falls Village, are being cautious in proceeding with costly civic projects.

In Falls Village, voters turned down a referendum proposal to fund a new firehouse/emergency services center with a bonding of $2.5 million. This project has been in the planning stages for years, but bringing the idea to fruition has been very difficult. It takes a lot of money to build such a modernized center. While many in town might agree that replacing the antiquated firehouse is necessary, taking on such a large cost was not, in the final analysis, something voters believed their small town could realistically handle.

In Cornwall, a road repair project the town thought it had covered with federal funding through the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act is now in question because it could be that any work done in the spring of 2012 would not be covered by the act. That would mean a huge chunk of the money needed to complete the roadwork could disappear. The town board is taking this problem as it should, seriously, and stepping back in order to confirm the requirements of the funding before proceeding. Certainly the targeted roads in Cornwall, especially after the extra pressure put on them by Hurricane Irene, need the remediation. But it’s to nobody’s benefit to begin a project that cannot be completed because it is not properly financed.

All the Northwest Corner towns have approached the challenges of the recession carefully, taking measures that will not put their communities at financial risk in the years to come. It is a balancing act, however, finding the compromise between keeping the towns solvent and maintaining or even improving their services and infrastructures. Finding just the right middle ground is the essential yet arduous task municipal officials must accomplish if their towns are to remain viable communities. Those who win their races this coming election season have their work cut out for them preserving that delicate balance.
 

 

Ten years after 9/11

This newspaper would never presume to try to tell anyone how to feel about the 10th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks. Suffice it to say that we all can likely agree the events of that day changed this country, and the world, irrevocably. Those changes have affected each of us differently, but there are some things we all share: the grief at the loss of life that day, and the loss of some singularly American innocence. Our thoughts are with those who lost their lives or their loved ones that day, and with those who serve in the military who have been defending the nation since across the globe.

 

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