Editor’s Note: This op-ed was submitted by George Frampton Jr. of Old Lyme.
The unusual partisan political divisiveness that crept into the elections in Old Lyme last week seems to have been laden, at least in part, with charges on both sides (and some public concern) about how Town government operates.
These charges include complaints that local officials don’t move important issues forward diligently, that decisions sometimes take place ‘behind closed doors’, that the public is not provided with enough of the factual information key to those decisions, and finally, that officials omit how that information is being evaluated and processed to reach final decisions.
Any such local disaffection can hardly be a matter of partisan ideology, however, since Republican, Democratic and unaffiliated voters in Old Lyme all favor strikingly similar goals and policies for the Town. What is more clearly responsible are the limitations imposed by the structure of the government itself.
As a resident who visited family here for decades and moved here permanently five years ago, and started off in a dispute with Town government, I have had an opportunity to observe intensively how Old Lyme government actually works (or rather, doesn’t work). I have seen, in particular, how it has addressed two major issues facing the community over the past decade — beach sewers, and the development/zoning of Hall’s Road.
As it turns out, local government in Connecticut often doesn’t work well because state public meeting laws and traditions dating to colonial times make it extremely difficult for the main body of the community’s elected decision-makers — the Board of Selectmen (BOS) — even to communicate with one another about difficult policy decisions except at publicly noticed formal board meetings.
In turn, the BOS struggles to communicate with the slew of semi-independent ‘commissions’ that also have an important and decentralized (even balkanized) role in final decisions. This situation creates a dynamic in which it is even harder for government officials easily to share their analysis or have robust discussions with the public. These antiquated legal restrictions seriously impede voters’ ability to review and evaluate how public officials are marshaling and analyzing the information necessary to make sound choices.
There are some potential fixes for these built-in handicaps. But they don’t lie in partisan politics. Rather, they require leadership and innovation to institute workarounds that could at least marginally improve the decision-making process, facilitate internal and external communication, and foster a greater sense of transparency in Town government.
For major issues facing the Town, two workarounds involve centralizing leadership and making sure boards with authority work together. To accomplish both goals as they relate to major Town projects, a single ‘project director’ should be engaged — hired part-time or full-time — to manage and oversee the Town’s work under the supervision of the First Selectperson (who generally does not have the time or bandwidth to develop deep understanding or manage the necessary coordination to move such issues forward). The project manager would be working, however, on behalf of and reporting to the full Board of Selectmen and, when appropriate, to the public.
This is an idea that has been put forward before, most articulately in an article by Howard Margules published in olwenonline.com/ last year. Given the rhetoric of the last election, now is clearly the right time to embrace it.
For example, the future of Hall’s Road clearly requires a complete Town reset and is an important enough long-term issue — key to the Town’s personality and economy for many future decades — to justify hiring and empowering a project director.
Then, rather than tasking the Zoning, Planning and Economic Development commissions with working together on the challenge (a necessary but virtually impossible task), the project director could engage flexibly and in alignment with each, and as the connecting link between all of these committees and the BOS —take the lead in engaging and reporting the outcome of these discussions to the public.
The first job of the Hall’s Road project manager should be simply to sketch out roughly three or four different preferred ‘visions’ for what the north side of Halls Road should look like, then conduct a quick Town survey and a workshop or two to identify the most attractive alternatives, or possibly the top two approaches. This is initially a planning issue and an economic development issue more than a zoning issue.
The project manager would then be able to steer collaboration between all three commissions and the BOS in the upcoming overall Town-wide zoning review to design a template that maximizes the incentives for any owner-developers to implement the Town’s vision for the north side of Hall’s Road and consider more creative alternatives that might be available to ensure that the Town’s vision is realized.
Should the beach community sewer issue also require a reset, a project manager would be essential in considering the bewildering slew of bodies that have some jurisdiction over ultimate decision-making. These include several independent water/sewer bodies for the Town and beaches, the state Department of Environment (DEEP), the finance commission, the BOS, and others.
To explore a whole new set of options is certainly going to require much more involvement with DEEP and probably other state agencies, new pollution studies and serious exploration of the new technology that has come available in the past ten years.
A new project director would be essential to work with the relevant local boards and authorities as well as the State of Connecticut, to develop new alternatives and ensure both decision-makers and the public receive transparent information necessary to make final decisions.
There are other more detailed ways to adjust and even revise current procedures for how Town boards bodies operate to increase public engagement, efficiency and public transparency that are well within the bounds of existing state open meeting laws. Now is the time for an administration that has just retained its mandate but needs to continue to merit public support to assess and adopt such steps.
If Old Lyme voters want more effective Town government, the best route is not to complain and blame those in either political party, who devote substantial parts of their lives to public service in this effort, but to support innovative ways to enable them to do their jobs better.
