First Selectman Weekly Update 8-9-2019

Happy Friday North Stonington,

We hope everyone had a great week!  This past week was another busy one here in town.

On Thursday we held our walk audit where groups walked around the village to assess safety and walk/bike ability of the area. We are thankful for those who came out to help us with this exercise and look forward to using some of this data for the upcoming community conversation on September 7th! Please remember to mark your calendar for this community conversation where we will talk about the greater village area and our residents vision for it. Again it is September 7th from 9-11am at the Wheeler Library.

This Monday from 5:30-6:30pm we will be holding an informal discussion about the idea of farmers markets in town. If anyone is interested in joining this discussion we would welcome your input! Please come to the Recreation Center 267 Norwich Westerly Road to share ideas on this topic.

NoStoFest is slated for September 21st from 12-4pm in the village! It is a great celebration of all things North Stonington featuring food, bands, and vendors all from our town! It's an event not to be missed. If you are interested in helping or being a vendor please contact the planning committee at nostofest@gmail.com

In highway news, the new over the rail mower included in this years budget was order and anticipated to be delivered within 60 days. Mowing through town and tree trimming continue. You maybe interested to know that we have removed over 350 dead trees over the past year either via the town, State, or Eversource's efforts. We will be hiring another tree crew for a month to remove the trees that could not be removed due to height and limitations of our equipment. This will be helpful as we enter into hurricane season to give us the best chance of minimal power interruptions should a major storm impact us. Great job to our Tree Warden Joe Rubino and highway crew for their work on this as well as our partners at the State and Eversource.

I would like to give special thanks to Tax Collector Karen Joyal for her efforts over the past few weeks. We had some technical difficulties as well as a late passing budget that put us in a very tight timeline to get tax bills out on time. Karen did a great job managing these difficult circumstances and we are grateful! Feel free to visit her from 9-3 Monday-Friday to pay your tax bills this month or you can always pay it online at our website here... https://www.mytaxbill.org/inet/bill/home.do?town=northstonington

That's it for today, have a great week!
Mike Urgo, First Selectman