Williston Observer

By Jen Butson
Correspondent

A Williston resident has finally received his diploma more than 50 years after his senior year at Richmond’s now-defunct high school.

Ed Young, 74, was awarded the diploma in his former study hall — now the Richmond Town Center — during a recent meeting of that town’s Selectboard.
Young enlisted in the service when he was 18 and just a couple of months before he would have graduated high school. He said in hindsight that probably wasn’t the smartest decision.

“I was 18, what did I know back in those years?” he said.
He did earn a certificate of completion at Fort Sam Houston in San Antonio Texas, where he also trained as a medical corpsman.
Though his service in the U.S. Air Force and more than 33 years at United Technologies Inc. allowed Young to see many different parts of the world, he always knew where home was.

“I retired at 55 and I came back here for the quiet and to enjoy Lake Champlain,” he said.
George Bergin, Young’s longtime friend and former neighbor, helped facilitate the process of getting the diploma. “That’s what neighbors are for,” Bergin said.

Bergin served in the U.S. Navy for 28 years. Some of his service was during the same period Young was in the Air Force.

“We got to talking one day and it came up that Ed had joined the service during the Korean conflict, two months before he would have graduated high school,” Bergin said. “I know the kind of work that Ed did in the Air Force and felt that a guy who had risked his life deserved a diploma.”
Gail Conley, the retiring superintendent of Chittenden East Supervisory Union, agreed to help. With a bit of research, Conley found a diploma from Richmond High School, which closed in 1967, took it to a designer and had a replica made for Young. It was presented to him at a July 5 Richmond Selectboard meeting.
“I never even knew I was going to get a diploma,” Young said. “It was a top-secret surprise, though I think everyone in my whole family knew about it before I did.”
Young and his wife Carol live in Williston. Their four grown children were never told that their dad did not graduate from high school. But after Young received his diploma, family members from as far away as Hawaii sent their congratulations — belated but well-deserved.

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Lyons: kids and Coca-Cola don’t mix

By Tom Gresham
Observer staff

The Selectboard appears poised to fund an electronic scoreboard for the Community Park Little League field, pulling out the town’s wallet to avoid advertising on the device.

Selectboard members seemed inclined to support the expenditure, which would cost approximately $5,000, pending word from Town Manager Rick McGuire about where the funds will be extracted from the current budget. McGuire indicated finding the money should not be a problem.

The Community Park sits on land owned by the Williston School District, but the town has an agreement with the district to run the facilities. The field where the scoreboard would sit mainly hosts Little League games.

Municipal funding of the scoreboard would allow the Selectboard to grant the Williston Little League’s request for the scoreboard without confronting the question of whether to allow advertising, specifically of Coca-Cola, on the structure. Coca-Cola had approached the Williston Little League about funding the scoreboard in exchange for having a small logo on it.

The town’s zoning ordinances would not allow the scoreboard advertising, but Mike Healey, a member of the Williston Little League Board of Directors, approached the Selectboard this summer and asked it to amend rules for Community Park. The Planning Commission unanimously recommended against the amendment.

Selectboard Chairwoman Ginny Lyons reiterated her opposition Monday night to Coca-Cola advertising on the scoreboard because of the nature of the soft drink, which she had referred to as “empty calories” at an earlier meeting. Lyons said she has worked with some coalitions that found there were “a lot of problems with that kind of advertising.”

“They have a negative effect on kids over time,” Lyons said.

When Lyons said she did not believe there was much support for allowing Coca-Cola on the scoreboard, Healey replied that he believed there was in fact widespread support for it. No one but Healey from the Little League has attended any of the Selectboard discussions to speak on the topic, though he attributed that to his desire to keep the discussion to a low profile.

Selectboard member Andy Mikell has been an outspoken proponent of the plan to allow Coca-Cola to purchase the scoreboard. On Monday, he expressed uneasy support for the new plan to use town money.

Mikell said the Selectboard “would still be ducking the big issue” by not deciding whether it would allow advertising at the field.

Mikell, whose children played Little League and who says he has attended numerous youth baseball games around the area, said most youth fields in the area have scoreboards with advertising from Coca-Cola or Pepsi.

“Every other town on the planet allows this,” Mikell said.

Mikell argued that the town could amend its zoning regulations to allow for the advertising and “save the town $5,000.” Healey agreed, saying it made sense to keep the expenditure, however small, off the property tax rate.

But, in addition to Lyons, Selectboard members Ted Kenney, Terry Macaig and Jeff Fehrs each seemed more inclined to use municipal funds, though there was no vote on the subject.

“Conceptually, I’m not averse to advertising if that’s the only way of getting the scoreboard, but I’d prefer to do it the other way,” Kenney said.

Healey asked the Selectboard if it would be opening Pandora’s box by funding the scoreboard purchase. He noted several other fields in town could use an electronic scoreboard. Earlier in the meeting, Mikell had wondered if other nonprofits would now approach the Selectboard with funding requests.

Kenney said the scoreboard was an isolated decision and “I don’t

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By Greg Elias
Observer staff

Add this to the summer’s commuting headaches: Structural problems on a bridge along the road that links Richmond and Williston have forced state officials to reduce traffic to one lane.

Problems with the Checkered House Bridge on U.S. Route 2, which spans the Winooski River in Richmond east of the Williston line, were discovered Monday during a routine inspection. On Tuesday, the state installed a stoplight that will restrict travel over the bridge to traffic from one direction at a time.

Richard Hosking, district transportation manager for the Vermont Agency of Transportation, said the closure would reduce strain on the truss bridge by halving the weight it must bear at any one time. But he said motorists should not worry about crossing the structure, which runs 40 feet above the river.

“If it was unsafe to go over, we would have closed the bridge,” he said.

The bridge, built in 1929, has been rusting for decades. Hosking said. Some rust has been removed over the years, and it was painted in 1988.

The state has been planning to fix and widen the bridge for many years. Earlier this year, state transportation officials asked for the Richmond Selectboard’s support for a $7 million repair plan.

But Monday’s inspection revealed that the bridge was in worse shape than had been previously thought, including extensive rust and cracks in the steel support beams.

“We knew there was some corrosion underneath,” Hosking said. “We just didn’t realize how severe it was.”

The bridge problems come in the middle of a massive repaving project on Interstate 89, the only other direct east-west route between Richmond and Williston. The paving, which is expected to be finished in October, involves a 16-mile stretch of I-89 from South Burlington to Bolton.

U.S. Route 2 is as an alternate route for motorists trying to avoid the paving project.

Hoskings said traffic is usually light over the bridge and on the stretch of U.S. 2 between Williston and Richmond. So commuters may find that backups due to the bridge’s lane closure are minimal.

Still, Williston Selectboard members greeted news of the bridge’s problems with dismay Monday night.

Town Manager Rick McGuire said Hosking abruptly left a meeting with town officials earlier that day after receiving an urgent call about the bridge problems.

McGuire told the board that he was informed that the problems were structural and that the bridge crossing might be one lane “for a long period of time.”

The information eliciting a chorus of groans and sighs from the board.

“It doesn’t sound like an easy fix,” McGuire said.

The state is still deciding what to do about the bridge, said Mike Hedges, structures program manager for the Agency of Transportation.

He said the state would likely do short-term repairs and later completely renovate the bridge. The long-term fix could involve building a temporary bridge and rehabilitating the original structure by using some of its original components and replacing others.

“We understand how important the bridge is to local agriculture and businesses,” Hedges said. “We’re putting together plans to repair it.”

Observer reporter Tom Gresham contributed to this story.

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By Jen Butson
Observer Correspondent

Stephen Brown sat down to eat lunch on the deck of his Sunrise Drive home on a sunny Friday earlier this month. With his back to the wooded area bordering his backyard, he didn’t see what was coming. But his wife did.

Kim Brown walked out the glass doors to the deck. She pointed and stammered, barely able to get the word out.

“Bear!”

Stephen Brown turned to see a black bear that had moseyed up within 10 feet of him. It appeared to have no intention of leaving.
“We’re worried,” said Brown, who is on his neighborhood association’s board of directors. “It’s early in the season and we have 23 houses with a ton of kids who play in the woods and on the street.”
Brown himself has two children who were previously free to roam on the 20 acres of nature trails the subdivision shares. The family had used two-way radios to communicate with the kids, but now the children, ages 10 and 5, are not allowed to venture out of their yard alone.
“They can’t go unless I am down there with them,” he said. “The black bear is not as dangerous as a grizzly, but one swat from any 200-pound bear is all it takes.”
Black bears are mainly vegetarians, but they can attack humans if provoked. Brown and his neighbors suspect that the bear visiting their backyards is a young bear, perhaps 2 years old and weighing between 125 and 200 pounds. He speculates that the bear is attempting to find easy sources of food, like bird feed or suet because his neighbors have recently found their feeders mangled.

Steve Parren, coordinator of the Vermont Fish and Wildlife Department’s Nongame and Natural Heritage Program, agrees that the bear is probably a young male who is looking for a quick meal.
“Bears make an appearance usually in the spring or fall, when they’re food stressed,” he said. “That this one is coming out midsummer makes me think this is a young male bear.”
Brown said what worried him the most was that the bear in his backyard showed no fear of approaching a human in broad daylight. “He’s young, and its 12 noon. He showed no fear of a grown man flashing away with a (digital) camera,” Brown said.
Concern for the bear and the safety of the neighborhood are issues that Parren said should be addressed preemptively.

“It’s becoming more common than it used to be,” he said. “We need to prevent developing a bear culture that’s no longer afraid of people but rather sees people as a source of food.”
The Sunrise at French Hill subdivision where Brown lives is located on the east end of Williston off U.S. Route 2. It borders two large undeveloped tracts of land: 200 acres used by the University of Vermont as a research area and 500 acres owned by the Catamount Family Center.
Brown and his neighborhood association have taken steps to prevent any more visits from unwanted wildlife. They have posted flyers with a list of items to remove from accessible areas of residents’ yards, like bird feed or garbage cans. They notified Williston Town Manager Rick McGuire and the Williston Police Department of the bear sightings.

Williston Police Sgt. Bart Chamberlain said he has received four complaints of meddling bears in Williston this summer.

"This is the time of year when momma bears kick out the 2- and 3-year-olds," he said.

In addition to the Sunrise subdivision, bears have been spotted in Williston on French Hill and in the Meadow Ridge subdivision off South Road. Chamberlain said a bear even climbed onto one woman's porch at the Williston Woods senior housing development on North Williston Road.

"If you spot one that keeps coming back, the best thing you can do is stay inside, call us or call the Department of Fish and Wildlife," Chamberlain said.
Parren estimates that Vermont has a population of about 4,000 black bears.
He recommends keeping domestic pets indoors, leashed or fenced in. If a wild animal is spotted, keep your distance; use binoculars rather than trying to approach any wild animal.
Parren said taking simple precautions can deter a black bear encounter. Removing barbecue utensils, dog food or other edible items from lawns and decks will help prevent the unwanted guests. He also advises elevating bird feeders so they do not provide easy pickings for bears.

“They’re looking for easy food,” Parren said. “If it’s not easy, they won’t even try.”

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By Tom Gresham
Observer staff

The Selectboard has lowered the fine it imposed on a Williston woman for an alleged dog bite incident in April.

Michelle LeBlanc will have to pay $50 instead of the $500 originally levied. Her German Shepherd, Paco, was accused of biting her neighbor, Brooks McArthur, on April 15.

The Selectboard agreed with the argument of LeBlanc’s attorney, John P. Campbell, that the state statute governing the board’s authority in a dog bite case was “ambiguous and vague.” Campbell, a state legislator who has written some animal welfare legislation, asserted that the Selectboard only had the authority to levy a maximum fine of $50.

The Selectboard had made its original decision to fine LeBlanc on April 29. LeBlanc then appealed the decision. The Selectboard heard her appeal at a June 21 meeting.

The board considered the appeal in closed session on June 21 and a draft decision was subsequently circulated by e-mail to board members. The board met June 27 and approved the decision.

LeBlanc, a Vermont State Police trooper, also does not have to ensure that Paco undergoes obedience training — part of the board’s original set of punishments. LeBlanc no longer owns Paco. She placed the dog with someone who lives in a rural area of New York.

LeBlanc purchased the dog with the intention of having it be a police dog, Campbell said. However, Paco was not accepted into the Vermont State Police K-9 program “as a result of this incident and the surrounding publicity,” according to a letter from Campbell to the Selectboard. LeBlanc was accepted into the K-9 program.

The board also decided it will not force LeBlanc to compensate McArthur for expenses connected to the incident. Campbell said McArthur has not responded to repeated offers from LeBlanc to pay his clothing and medical expenses. Campbell told the Selectboard at a June meeting that he believes McArthur, a deputy state’s attorney in Washington County, plans to file a lawsuit against LeBlanc.

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