The police firing range may or may not be disturbing the carp in Beaver Pond, but its impact on humans may lead to its moving near a cemetery.
That was the upshot of the latest neighborhood discussion of the fate of the Sherman Parkway police training facility, at Tuesday night’s WEB (Whalley-Edgewood-Beaver Hill) management team meeting.
Nan Bartow (pictured) of the Friends of Beaver Pond announced that things were going swimmingly at the park this summer, with new gardens, trees and bushes planted, and two interns working, including one from the Yale Forestry School who is doing water testing. She said people are hauling in huge carp, at least some of which are getting eaten. She expressed concern that lead bullets from the police firing range nearby might be making their way into the pond and having a detrimental effect on the fish.
“The bullets are organic,” WEB’s new district manager, Lt. Sydney Collier (pictured), reassured the group, to much laughter.
“They’re from Edge of the Woods,” chimed in Edgewood activist Eli Greer, referring to the neighborhood organic grocery. Click here to listen to the exchange.
That was a good segue into a report from WEB’s Firing Range Committee, which would like to see the firing range now on Sherman Parkway moved somewhere else. Besides the above concern, neighbors have complained about the noise and general stress caused by the frequent firing of weapons, even if it is for training the police.
Assistant Chief Stephanie Redding told neighbors there’s a possibility of moving the facility to a former military installation on Wintergreen Avenue, where, as someone pointed out, the only neighbors would be six feet under.
Earlier in the meeting, city transportation czar Mike Piscitelli made a short report covering several topics. He told the group their efforts have succeeded in stopping a 500-car parking lot that Southern Connecticut State University had wanted to build on Crescent Street; the university has abandoned that plan. He said the school is still going ahead with two more parking garages, totaling 1,650 spaces. It has deferred building another 500-car garage.
“I think the next step is to try to turn the whole dynamic around about how people access the university” and get SCSU to adopt more sustainable transportation, like bikes and other means of getting people out of their cars, Piscitelli said.
Piscitelli asked WEB to write a letter of support for a proposed cross-town bus route. He said, to the surprise of many in the room, that 30,000 people a day use buses in the New Haven division of CT Transit; 10,000 of them have to go downtown to transfer to another bus to reach their destination. A cross-town route would eliminate the need for a transfer for many commuters.
He also announced a meeting July 31 at Edgewood School, where residents will be able to look at plans for the widening of Whalley Avenue, a project many in the neighborhood have reservations about, fearing it will increase traffic speeds, when they would like to see them decreased.
In a low-key vote — minus all the hoopla and name-calling of say, a presidential campaign — the current officers were elected to serve another year: Bob Caplan, Chair; Pamela Lopes, Vice Chair; Peaches Quinn, Treasurer; and Stephanie FitzGerald, Secretary.
One of the last items on the agenda was the reopening of discussion about whether it’s appropriate for members of the management team to donate and to solicit donations from others to pay the rent on the substation where their meetings take place. It’s the only substation not owned by the city, and it fell victim to the budget cutting that occurred this year. Several thousand dollars have been raised toward the year’s rent, and most people did not want to revisit the decision they made two meetings ago to keep the place open, although some felt it set a bad precedent. WEB members said they believe a ground-floor meeting space somewhere on Whalley Avenue is the best location for the substation, and definitely not Hillhouse High School, which had been proposed as an alternative.
After the meeting, Chairman Bob Caplan (pictured) said, “We agreed in the end that we’re not going to second-guess what we decided back then. It’s a one-time event. But people are going to start lobbying for inclusion [of a meeting space] in the city budget for next year.”