Greenwich town officials held illegal secret meeting to discuss soil contamination at the high school

 

Here’s a hundred bucks – mum’s the word, eh?

So says the state’s Freedom of Information Commission. The town claims it had to keep everything secret because Bill Effros might sue it. This was ruled a specious argument, as it should have been.

Wonder what those same officials know about the true cost of PCB remediation at the site. So far, they aren’t telling.

For a government organ that banned Winston Churchill from its airwaves in the 30’s for fear of offending Hitler, this is just an honored tradition

Reporting for duty

BBC, Britain’s “impartial” government mouthpiece, conducted a global warming propaganda course for its top executives.

The BBC has spent tens of thousands of pounds over six years trying to keep secret an extraordinary ‘eco’ conference which has shaped its coverage of global warming,  The Mail on Sunday can reveal.

The controversial seminar was run by a body set up by the BBC’s own environment analyst Roger Harrabin and funded via a £67,000 grant from the then Labour government, which hoped to see its ‘line’ on climate change and other Third World issues promoted in BBC reporting.

At the event, in 2006, green activists and scientists – one of whom believes climate change is a bigger danger than global nuclear war  – lectured 28 of the Corporation’s most senior executives.

The news coverage of global warming stories since has strictly toed the government line.

But that was when bad guys were in charge of the moral swamp

 

Obama announces his “lobbyist rule”, which is no longer operative.

Glenn Reynolds:

I’M SO OLD, I REMEMBER WHEN OBAMA WAS AGAINST HIRING LOBBYISTS. Obama spins revolving door again: Former lobbyist named to Energy Dept. post.

Politifact, 2009:

During the campaign, Obama said many times that lobbyists would not run his White House, and the campaign delighted in tweaking rival John McCain for the former lobbyists who worked on McCain’s campaign.Obama’s ethics proposals specifically spelled out that former lobbyists would not be allowed to “work on regulations or contracts directly and substantially related to their prior employer for two years.” On his first full day in office, Obama signed an executive order to that effect. 

Greenwich Time’s editor almost gets it right

Which is newsworthy in itself. While unable to actually oppose Democratic rule from Hartford, he does manage to wring his hands over the state’s new mandate for a uniform school vacation schedule across the state.

What could be of less state-wide importance and more local than how a school board and parents decide to divide the 180 days mandated for education? The stated reason for interfering: “efficiency and teacher training” is ludicrous on its face, so there must be a real reason. My guess is that teachers’ families with two spouses working in different districts want to make sure they can vacation together. Whatever the reason, it’s just another small step toward centralized control. The “common core curriculum” is far worse of course, but this latest usurpation of powers is par for the course – the state wants control of everything, large or small.

UPDATE: Let’s not leave Obama’s Justice Department out of this: it just established “discipline quotas” for all schools across the nation, mandating that discipline be meted out to students in exactly the proportion of each race in each school. 

“The kinds [of kids] who just want to be free to learn in peace, who are not disruptive, have their education injured by the disruptive kids who remain in the classroom,” [Andrew] Coulson told The DC. “And since African American kids are more often assigned to schools like that, they’ll be the ones most hurt.”

Rea

They say that now

P&Z’s demand that applicants pay for outside consultants representing the commission, not the applicant, on tap this Tuesday night. We wrote about this last week, but just a reminder.

Relatively few projects require technical assistance, said [P&Z head ] Fox, most being large scale applications — proposed renovations to the Eagle Hill School, Stanwich School and Convent of the Sacred Heart among them.

This is how the P&Z works: start small, then mash the pedal down. Floor Area Ratio requirements, annoying when first implemented, are now, fifteen years on, a Byzantine labyrinth that require architects and surveyors involvement for the smallest of projects. The “50% rule” for houses in the coastal area management zones, made even more onerous just two months ago despite a public hearing where residents fiercely opposed the commission’s intention, are back, also this Tuesday, for a doubling down to 25%.

“We want to get the public’s input before going ahead with these changes,” Town Planner Diane Fox tells the Greenwich Time. She and her staff haven’t heeded the public’s input in the decade she’s run the place and there’s absolutely no reason to believe that she will now.

Will Peter Tesei be at the hearing to hear “public input”? Like Fox, he has no record of doing so before and it’s unlikely he will on Tuesday. Aside from taking down a salary, what exactly does our First Selectman do?