Week In Review: Local Voices, Borough Elections, Budget

Stonington Borough held elections on Monday. More than 300 residents cast votes electing Paul Burgess as Borough Warden along with six burgesses, a tax assessor, tax collector, and clerk-treasurer.

 The biggest news of this week was the death of Osama bin Laden. Stonington residents shared mixed emotions of the news with thoughts often turning to victims of 9/11 including Stonington’s Joshua Piver and his family.

Conversations about both the state and local budget continued throughout the week. On the state level the house approved a $40.1 billion state budget sending it to Gov. Dannel P. Malloy for approval on Wednesday. And while Malloy signed the two-year budget into law, without concessions more than 4,000 could lose state jobs.

In town the debate over cutting Zoning Official Joseph Larkin’s position from full to half-time to continued. First Selectman Edward Haberek Jr. came to the Planning and Zoning Commission special meeting, making his case for cutting the hours and residents weighed in throughout the week on Facebook and in the comments section. Residents also voiced their opinion on the $15,000 each of the town’s three ambulance services face in budget cuts. At issue is the question are the town’s three ambulance services nonprofits or businesses?

Patch.com introduced Local Voices this week. The Local Voices section of Patch will feature Stonington-Mystic Patch bloggers. Check out Caroline Chapman’s parenting blog, Mystic’s Grey Goose cooking blog, Brian Phillips technology blog and Superintendent Leanne Masterjoseph Stonington Public Schools blog. Are you interested in blogging? Email me. Or do you have a blog on wordpress or blogspot or any blogging platform? Email me the link. Patch has a cool new tool that pulls in local blogs to its site and displays them on the home page. We'd love to have you.

If you missed Michael Costanza’s restaurant reviews last week he was back this week with Under $30 at Mystic’s Pita Spot where he writes the menu has so many alluring choices it’s difficult to choose.

And just to leave you with one last thought for the week, a friend posted this on Facebook which I think sums up the past ten days nicely: “The girl married the prince, and the bad guy got caught. This week has been sponsored by Disney.”—Ellen Petersen.

We covered lots more this week and throughout the weekend, so search the site for other stories, follow us on Facebook and Twitter for the latest updates and check out our calendar to see what's happening next week in town.