Pedestrian Obligation

This piece appeared in the Windsor Journal on April 23, 2026.

Over the past few decades, Windsor has actively placed public housing and elderly housing in the Center. We did this with an implicit promise that these residents would be able to reach life’s essentials on foot: the library, CVS, the Post Office, Town Hall, Geissler’s, the train station, bus stops, local shops, and local employers. The proximity of these places is the reason it made sense to site public and elderly housing here in the first place. Walkability was not a bonus feature: it was the whole point.

The snow storms this past winter emphasized this point; when we fail to keep sidewalks clear in February, and when we leave Broad Street configured as a four-lane highway bypass, we are not just creating inconvenience for dog walkers; we are ignoring an obligation to our most vulnerable neighbors.

Crossing Broad Street is not optional for these residents. It is how they reach their prescriptions, social services, employment, and each other. Broad Street today is not a neighborhood street. Seventy percent of the cars on it today are through traffic. Thirty percent of drivers exceed the speed limit. The corridor sees a crash about once a month.

The Broad Street Pedestrian Safety Project is simple. It narrows Broad Street from four travel lanes to two, adds a center turn lane, installs bike lanes, and shortens the crosswalks with curb extensions. Federal Highway Administration research shows reconfigurations like this reduce crashes and cut the risk of serious injury and death to all users of the roadway, but most especially pedestrians. This is especially important as elderly and disable people are disproportionately injured and killed as pedestrians in the U.S. The project is fully funded by federal and state grants pulled into town by elected officials at all level of government. This project uses zero property tax money.

It’s worth repeating: This project uses zero property tax money.

Our elderly and disabled neighbors are customers for Center businesses, patients at local clinics, and employees at local establishments that are hiring. A road they cannot safely cross is a customer lost, a worker a business cannot retain. The residents, the merchants, and the neighborhood associations closest to Broad Street are the ones who most consistently support this project. That is not an coincidence.

There is a broader principle here. When a town invites residents into a specific neighborhood on the promise that they will be able to live there without a car, it takes on an obligation. That obligation does not end at the ribbon cutting. It extends to the systems those residents rely on to live, even systems as banal as sidewalks and crosswalks.

Windsor Center is gradually returning to its roots as a walkable community for people to commune and do business, just like it was for three hundred years before CTDOT decided it would be the perfect place for a highway bypass. That design remains a dangerous obstacle to residents who, for reasons of age, disability, or income, may not be able to drive a car. We made them a promise. The Broad Street Road Diet is, at bottom, the town making good on a promise we’ve already made to these neighbors, at no cost to property tax payers.

Please support the Broad Street Traffic Calming and Pedestrian Safety Project at the Special Town Meeting on Tuesday, April 28 at 7 p.m., and in the likely referendum in May.

When the Culture Wars Come to Town

This post is about politics. If, like me, you’ve been trying to limit your exposure to politics to shield your sanity, I totally understand; read no further.This post is about politics, and it’s unpleasant. If, like me, you’ve been trying to limit your exposure to politics to shield your sanity, I totally understand; read no further.

The recent doxxing of our mayor is not an isolated incident. It is part of a pattern of lying, political intimidation and bad faith discourse that has characterized the Broad Street debate. A pervading sense of misplaced anger, entitlement, and suspicion of the most basic processes of civil society has seeped from MAGA Republican politics into our town. The way to banish this kind of toxic politics is to vote against it, to show definitively that Windsor won’t be intimidated by lying and bullying.

I still believe that the Broad Street project should not be partisan, or even political. We are trying to address a safety issue. The first Council votes on the project were, in fact, bi-partisan in favor. Unfortunately, however, projects like this have officially been added to the list of Culture War issues, as detailed in Council member Naeem’s recent piece. True to form, the local Republican Party’s response to the Broad Street project in Windsor has been, in a word, strange. A recent exchange in the Town Council Chambers encapsulates the party’s approach:

Council Member Will Pelkey, “I object to the motion.”

Mayor Black-Burke, “What is your objection?”

Mr. Pelkey, “I just object.”

This would have been a good opportunity for Mr. Pelkey to raise his apparent concern that town meetings are inconvenient for many voters due to the busy schedules we all face, and perhaps offer an alternative date. Instead, he and the Republican caucus waited until spring break, when they knew their Democratic colleagues would be out of town with their families, to call an emergency meeting with no public comment, adamant that the Special Town Meeting vote from a Tuesday to a Saturday.

The actual point of all of this, of course, was to distract from the safety problem at the core of this project, inject confusion into the process, and score cheap political points through parliamentary antics. And so, rather than a discussion of how to improve safety for Windsor Center’s residents, or the impracticalities imposed on voters by Windsor’s charter, we had four confused members of the Town Council staring at each other, without a quorum, and not sure what the rules were for the stunt they were trying to pull off.

In the end, Republicans wanted the question to be on the same ballot as the budget referendum, which takes place on a Tuesday.

The entire Broad Street debate has been like this; residents asking for help, voters trying to understand what is being proposed and what the prescribed process is, while the Republican caucus and their allies throw a series of temper tantrums and ignore residents’ description of the dangers they face walking in their own neighborhood. The recent Special Town Meeting was true to form as local residents described the harrowing experience of being hit by cars and many close calls, while opponents offered impractical alternatives, conspiracy theories of their neighbors’ motives, and complaints about the theoretical possibility of non-citizen voters.

The first inkling of how strange this debate would be occurred in January of last year during the first Town Council meeting on the Broad Street project, when Council Member Pelkey went on a 15-minute rant about how the project’s scope was, get this, TOO SMALL! According to Mr. Pelkey, we should move the curbs to expand the sidewalks, get rid of on-street parking, close every driveway on Broad Street, and close the library parking lot. And, of course, we should delay accepting outside grants for the project because these BIG ideas would require years of additional study and discussion.

Mr. Pelkey’s expansive view changed dramatically when it came time to actually vote. In one of the more despicable acts I’ve ever seen from a public figure, Mr. Pelkey used parliamentary antics to bully a man fighting cancer. Mr. Pelkey repeatedly called for roll call votes, trying to catch a fellow Council member unconscious when he was forced to zoom into the meeting from a hospital bed due to the Town Charter’s voting rules.

Mr. Pelkey went on to lie about police records on Broad Street, claiming in writing on March 6th, 2025, “According to data received from Windsor PD, these same streets recorded only 4 accidents since 2017, and zero deaths.” In response to a Freedom of Information Act request, the Windsor Police Department revealed that there were, in fact, 85 collisions in that area during the time period Mr. Pelkey specified, 16 of which resulted in injuries. Furthermore, the Police Department confirmed that it had not provided any data of this kind to elected officials or members of the public in the six months preceding the referendum. To be clear, this is a public servant knowingly lying about police records to make a political point. In many places in the US, this is grounds for removal from office. Unfortunately, Windsor’s Board of Ethics has no oversight over Council Members.

An even more exaggerated version of this claim was repeated by the political action committee Concerned Windsor Citizens in paid ads in the Windsor Journal the following day, “The fact is: No Pedestrian involved in accidents in the last 10 years! 4 Motor Vehicle accidents only in the last 10 years! […] Data provided by Windsor Police Department Records Office, 10 yr. data available.” The same ad was posted once as “Paid for by James Durant / Jeffrey Carter, Concerned Citizens,” and separately as “Paid for by Concerned Windsor Citizens” without proper attribution of the group’s treasurer. James Durant was subsequently elected to the Town Council on the Republican ticket along with Mr. Pelkey.

I wish I could tell you more about the relationship between these gentlemen and Concerned Windsor Citizens, but the PAC has never filed their legally required financial statements for this time period. What documentation does exist never mentions Mr. Durant or Mr. Carter as a treasurer, and does not show any donations to the group except for a donation in 2024 from the group’s president, Keith Samolyk. The only time I’ve ever seen Mr. Samolyk’s thoughts on the issue was a comment on a YouTube video that PACs should stay out of Windsor politics. Despite fines from the State Elections Enforcement Commission, we still don’t know who is funding Concerned Windsor Citizens or who paid for these ads in March of 2025.

Adding to the sense of paranoia and menace in local politics, Concerned Windsor Citizens also paid for an typo-laden ad in the run-up to the budget referendum last year that reads more like a ransom note than political messaging, “(Make Note of who has those Yes Signs as they are the One’s)”

The actual debate on the Broad Street project was (and remains) strange. We get lectures on budget discipline from public officials claiming agricultural exemptions for their financial services businesses. We get PAC presidents saying PACs are illegitimate. We get the political party run by a developer saying all developers are corrupt and can’t be trusted. We get Board of Education members calling for DOGE to scuttle the project. We get politicians saying politicians shouldn’t be involved in the political process. We get statements of “protecting democracy” while circumventing the town Charter to undermine our New England style town meeting: the very origin of American democracy.

We also get increasingly ludicrous claims about the project: The problem is both empty storefronts and ugly new store fronts. They’re turning the Center into North Hartford (yes, someone actually said that out loud). Broad Street is fine and we shouldn’t spend any money on it, but it’s not fine and we should spend more time and money researching the problem that doesn’t exist. We can’t risk drivers being inconvenienced by I-91 backing up 1-2 times a year, so we should remove the crosswalks that residents and visitors use 365 days of the year. Our multi-million dollar fire trucks can’t mount 3″ granite curbs. The bike lanes will kill the Shad Derby (which also causes traffic delays in the Center, by the waw). Just do enforcement, because paying more police officers out of our property taxes will (somehow? magically?) be cheaper than accepting grant money to pay for an infrastructure project. Also, don’t pass the budget so the police department has fewer resources to do the enforcement that we want them to do!

If this all sounds irrational, it is. The intensity of the debate on Broad Street spilled onto the street itself. Volunteer “YES” sign holders were regularly cursed at from passing vehicles, treatment especially directed at female volunteers. I had to file a police report when a truck brushed me as I was putting signs up in the Center and then ran three red lights as the driver sped up Poquonock Ave. Later, a spouse of a local elected Republican explained to me, in all seriousness, why someone might feel justified in attempting vehicular assault in the context of the referendum. When I raised these incidents in the Journal, then Republican Chair Len Walker accused me of “tone policing.”

More recently, opponents have taken to online harassment as an intimidation tactic. In addition to doxxing our mayor on Facebook, opponents have been combing through my LinkedIn pages and speaking engagements with Connecticut Main Street, publishing screenshots online, circling my name in red as if they’re getting to “the real story.” Sam Savelli, a former Republican candidate for constable, was one of the people posting this information about me in public forums.

In another unseemly episode, Mr. Savelli, a volunteer firefighter, posted a video of himself in official Fire Department uniform, lining up town-owned vehicles telling voters “this won’t work” and to “bear this in mind” when residents vote on the project, even though the video shows a clear path through the area he had marked out for the truck to get through. Not only did this show a profound lack of judgement, his presentation reaffirmed the pattern of public officials intentionally misleading voters. He does not say “fire trucks won’t fit”, because the demonstration clearly illustrates that fire trucks can get through the area even in less-than-ideal conditions. He offers no evidence of actual affected response times or vehicle damage on Route 187 in Bloomfield, Route 218 in West Hartford, Windsor Ave. in Wilson, Route 195 in Mansfield, or any of the numerous three-lane configurations in the state for a very simple reason: road diets do not affect emergency vehicle response times.

Frankly, as someone who has witnessed my child nearly being hit by a speeding car in a Broad Street crosswalk, fear mongering over the possibility of scratched truck tires is a bit much to swallow.

Fire trucks are public property, not playthings or props for political messaging. Mr. Savelli does not speak for the fire department, and it was yet another breach of public trust to use taxpayer resources for a ham-fisted attempt at electioneering.

Will Pelkey was aat it again recently, lying about the referendum results in a Town Council meeting while claiming a “a slight majority” had spoken against the project at the meeting, despite multiple people noting that, in fact, residents had spoken more than 2-1 in favor. Even in today’s climate of “alternative facts,” it is still breath-taking to experience a public official lying straight to your face about something you, and they, just witnessed first-hand.

Compare all of this noise to the simple solution. Windsor Center recognized a problem, organized, and spent years developing a plan; reduce the road from four lanes to two with a turn lane to reduce chaotic lane changes and slow down traffic.

To opponents of this project, we are not your enemy. We are your neighbors. We are asking for your help. We have nothing to gain but a safer street so that you, your neighbors, and visitors can safely enjoy our beautiful Center.

I appreciate not wanting a historic district to change visually. The stability of visual similarity over decades is reassuring and worth striving for. I can also appreciate that some residents are accustomed to using Broad Street as an alternative to I-91 and don’t want to be inconvenienced. That’s all fair, it just doesn’t override local residents’ desire for physical safety in their own neighborhood, and it certainly doesn’t excuse the pattern of lying, parliamentary antics, and intimidation opponents of the project have engaged in to make their point.

As strange as this all is, it’s a familiar playbook: claim to be the victim of some nebulous conspiratorial force while avoiding accountability for yourself, complain that the system is unfair while benefiting from it, complain about taxes and fiscal responsibility while engaging in “creative” tax reduction strategies, use the political system to bully anyone perceived as vulnerable, claim to be protecting elections by causing confusion, ignore campaign finance laws, use public resources as political props, wear ignorance as a badge of honor, and challenge anything that even hints that the 1950’s might not have been the apex of American civilization, even if people are hurt or killed by your policy choices.

Who does that remind you of?

Snow Clearance for Some

Each winter in New England brings its own set of challenges. While state and town crews work tirelessly to keep the roadways clear, this year’s heavy snowfall highlighted a significant gap in our snow removal program. Clearance of sidewalks and curb cuts has been uneven at best, leading to dangerous conditions for elderly and disabled residents long after snowstorms have passed.

Improperly cleared sidewalks create very real hazards for our elderly and disabled neighbors. Icy, uneven surfaces create dangerous conditions for everyone, especially for physically vulnerable residents. It was a common site in February to see people abandon the sidewalks entirely to walk on icy street shoulders. This is especially concerning in Windsor Center, where the town has sited public housing specifically for pedestrian access to the Center’s services and businesses. We place these residents here with the promise of a walkable community, but uncleared paths effectively trap them or force them into harm’s way.

This is the consequence of a complicated distribution of responsibility. Unlike road clearance, where the town takes full responsibility for snow removal and the police rigorously enforce a proactive parking ban, responsibility for sidewalk snow removal is diffuse. The relevant ordinance states that sidewalks on private property must be cleared within twelve hours of a snowfall. The Police Department can issue a fine for each day the sidewalk is not cleared, or Public Works can remove the snow themselves and bill the property owner for the cost. Failure to pay can even result in a lien on the property. The same is true for clearance of fire hydrants on private property.

In practice, however, consistent enforcement of this ordinance is difficult to maintain. It’s not always clear where the town’s responsibility ends and the property owner’s begins. Uniform enforcement would undoubtedly require additional resources to inspect relevant infrastructure and issue fines. The existing ordinances also assume every property owner is physically or financially capable of clearing their frontage, which is not always true. Neighbors help each other in isolated acts of kindness, but that can only go so far towards uniform clearance of transportation infrastructure, and any group organizing snow clearance volunteers faces the challenge of assuming the property owner’s liability in the event of an accident or fall.

The result is that pedestrian infrastructure remained inaccessible for months this winter. The curb cuts on Center Street, the very core of Windsor’s transportation-oriented development district, remained impassable to disabled residents until March 11th. After three days of unseasonably warm weather the accumulated ice finally melted and the sidewalks became ADA-accessible for the first time in almost two months.

These are growing pains. Windsor Center is gradually changing into a genuinely pedestrian-friendly neighborhood, to the benefit of local businesses and all Windsor residents. The neighborhood is attracting residents who, for a variety of reasons, may not want to (or be able to) drive a car. The existing systems for sidewalk snow removal are not up to the task, and we need to adapt. One way or another, we need to keep the sidewalks clear in the winter.

HB 8002

This piece appeared on Citizens for a Thriving Windsor's website on Dec. 10, 2025

Governor Lamont signed House Bill 8002 into law. If you are interested in the details, I would point you to Ginny Monk’s work at the CT Mirror. She has done excellent reporting on this bill throughout its tumultuous history.

While this bill is a milestone for Connecticut, it is less than what is needed. It eliminates the “fair share” portion of the original bill and replaces it with “housing growth plans.” In effect, Lamont vetoed the stick and agreed to the carrot. This is likely to leave zoning unaddressed in many areas of the state with high demand and underutilized capacity for additional housing.

Windsor

The bill is unlikely to have much of an impact on Windsor for two reasons. First is the good news: as a town, we are already making strides towards denser housing near transit. There’s always room for improvement, but Windsor’s political leadership and town staff are making a good-faith effort to address housing in town, and it shows.

Unfortunately, the second reason somewhat counteracts the first. The housing market is not confined to town or state borders. Towns in the same region with strict and permissive zoning suffer the same high housing costs. This bill is a good start, but it doesn’t address the underlying problem: many towns are unwilling to allow housing growth and there is little political will in the state to make them change.

On the plus side, this bill moves the state toward regional and state-wide housing planning. There are still incentives for towns to allow more housing near train and bus stations, “Work, Live, Ride.” There are still provisions for towns participating in Work, Live, Ride to allow conversion of commercial properties to residential. It continues to waive off-street parking requirements for new development up to 16 units. It’s not perfect, it’s not enough, but it’s a step in the right direction.

Anger

Watching the debate in the General Assembly, the anger of the opposition was palpable. Unusually for Connecticut legislative sessions, opponents could not resist casting aspersions on the motives of the bill’s authors. They insisted they were ignored in the process, a pretty jarring claim given that the governor had vetoed a similar bill in response to their criticism.

What’s the disconnect? Why does the number of parking spots in new developments cause such a strong response? Why does the political party of business and cutting red tape bristle at allowing property owners to develop their land with less government intervention? Why the seething anger?

History

Escaping the Depression

It’s worth considering how we got here. The modern housing economy has its roots in the Great Depression. In order to avert a deflationary spiral, the federal government began guaranteeing loans. It didn’t take long for the 30-year mortgage to develop, something that local banks could never have offered previously at a reasonable interest rate. This stabilized the housing market during the Depression by artificially increasing demand through government-backed loans. This process also created a secondary market for the debt of these new mortgages, which began the process of financializing housing. The wealth created from housing debt began to spread throughout the entire economy.

There was real fear after WWII that the country would slide back into the Depression as the country unwound the war economy. To stave off this possibility, and to provide a benefit to vets returning from overseas, new borrowing instruments were created to allow veterans to buy homes with much lower down payments and interest rates. The boom in housing construction in the suburbs fueled private sector growth. Cars enabled low-density suburbs to function and provided a product for industries transitioning from war-time manufacturing. The federal government continued to facilitate this transformation through enormous road construction projects, which helped soften the blow of post-war spending reductions.

Entire neighborhoods were built to a “finished state” with all the amenities of the modern nuclear family could possibly need within a short distance… provided you purchased a self-propelled vehicle powered by an internal combustion engine.

A New Way of Life

It’s hard to overstate how radical a departure this was from the ad hoc way towns and cities had developed for millennia. The effect was the aesthetic of small town republicanism without the actual rural economy. Money had to be made somewhere else and brought home to the suburbs. The newness and uniformity gave a sense of social and economic order that would reify the country’s social hierarchy, maintain the astonishing post-war prosperity, and defeat those godless commie bums through the might of our productivity and consumption. The overarching financial system was largely invisible to most people, in part due to its enormous complexity. Someone taking out a small business loan may well be indirectly borrowing from capital that was backed by their own mortgage debt. All of this was opaque to most people.

The new developments reflected the biases and prejudices of the society that created them. Many of the veteran benefits and financial instruments that helped fund suburban expansion were unavailable to women and minorities. The racial makeup of Hartford and surrounding towns is still heavily influenced by the red lines banks drew on maps denoting areas for “undesirables.” In these areas, loans would be issued at significantly higher interest rates, or denied entirely.

Towns competed for wealthier residents by zoning larger minimum sizes for lots, on the theory that this would increase the value-per-acre of land while also supporting services for fewer residents. The opposite has been the case; less dense development requires more utilities per taxpayer, and especially more services for housing types that attract families with school-aged children. The maintenance on these systems has become ever more expensive. Most towns now balance their budgets via deferred maintenance and external revenue from state and federal funding. Put another way, while most towns maintain a balanced annual budget, they don’t actually have the tax base to maintain the infrastructure they’ve built.

Multiple generations (mine included) grew up under this system with an unquestioning belief in suburban, car-based development as the guarantor of American prosperity. A house and a garage on a half-acre symbolized financial independence, stability, and a store of wealth to pass on to future generations. Cars became the embodiment of American individualism and the triumph of our ingenuity as a free people. The American identity became wrapped up in this development pattern as a way of life. It was, and still is, viewed by many as an unalloyed good.

Reevaluating

However, many people’s faith in this system has been shaken over the past two decades. The 2008 financial crash revealed how fragile the system is, and showed that taxpayers would carry the burden of this fragility. Over time, exclusionary zoning and subsidized credit slowly reduced housing supply and increased demand, thus raising prices. Those higher prices produced more debt as buyers stretched further to meet escalating prices.

Ownership of that debt created wealth that could be leveraged into all facets of the economy. And what if the loans that kept the whole system afloat were bad? We found out in 2008: our leaders decided it was better for the American public to bail out the lenders than to deal with the underlying causes of both the financial crisis and the housing shortage. A drop in housing prices now posed a risk to the entire economy.

But many have not shaken their faith in this system. They are convinced of the inherent goodness of suburban land use, or at least the aesthetics of the time period when the suburbs were built. They view cars and car ownership as drivers of prosperity. And they view any change to this system as deeply threatening. While this reaction can be baffling when the topic is something as seemingly technical as lane widths, if you consider the assumptions that go into the suburban mindset then you begin to see what is at stake for people who believe in this system; this development pattern is viewed as the substratum of the order, prosperity, and socioeconomic status that gives dignity to our lives. If we bear this in mind, we begin to glimpse some people’s deep attachment to the status quo, and their anger at anyone who might try to change it.

Proposed Solutions

What Doesn’t Work

Thus, many policy proposals to address the housing crisis are designed more to save the status quo than to address the underlying problems. A few that come up with some regularity:

Insert money at the point of purchase – Trump’s 50-year mortgage proposal and Kamala Harris’s $25K in downpayment support for first-time homebuyers have something in common: they both increase purchasing power (demand) without increasing supply, thus raising prices. Ironically, this inflationary pressure would be most acutely felt in the types of housing units needed by the types of borrowers these policies target; that is, starter homes and small family units. Put another way, these policies put upward price pressure on exactly the type of housing we need as affordable housing.

Public housing – I have yet to see a public housing proposal that details exactly how this type of housing would be built, where it would be built, and how it would be funded, so it would be unfair to pass judgement on whether a public housing plan could work. However, I do think it’s worth considering the government’s role in the housing market if public housing were to become the main method of dealing with the housing shortage. Public housing absent zoning and finance reforms is essentially the government saying it is going to keep restrictive housing policies while also deciding what and where new housing gets built to make up for the shortfall in supply. This is tiptoeing very close to a command economy. Given the scale of the crisis, I understand the impulse, and I can imagine a role for public housing in specific circumstances. But, in general, I would be hesitant to trust the entity largely responsible for creating the problem with solving it.

Build baby build – Should we continue to sprawl? The argument is tempting; if the problem is low supply, let’s make more. We know how to build greenfield housing, so let’s do it! The problem is the tax density issue I mentioned earlier. Single-family, 1/4 to 1 acre development alone is not financially sustainable in the long run. The infrastructure required to run a town that is developed on this model is more expensive than towns can charge in property taxes, so they rely on state & federal funds to make up the gap. Complete local self-sufficiency is neither practical nor desirable, but there must be financial stability somewhere in the system. If a development model results in the vast majority of towns not being financially solvent in the long term, then the development pattern doesn’t work. We need to build self-sustaining places that can then create the economic activity that sustains the less dense places nearby.

Moving Forward

So, how do we solve these interlocking problems? We can’t start over, and the suburbs aren’t going away. What do we do?

Very smart people have been thinking about this much longer than I have. Strong Towns has compiled a list of housing-ready policies that will help create density in existing neighborhoods, thereby making them more financially sustainable, while creating local jobs in the form of small-scale housing projects.

1. Allow conversions from single-family to duplex or triplex by right.

2. Permit backyard cottages in residential zones.

3. Legalize starter homes in all residential zones.

4. Eliminate minimum lot sizes in existing neighborhoods.

5. Repeal parking mandates for housing

6. Streamline approvals and permitting.

These policies are not a silver bullet, and local variation is likely needed. But they are more likely to work than the previously mentioned proposals because they allow us, homeowners and neighbors, to make decisions with our knowledge of local needs and the local market, all while catalyzing the local economy with small, locally-financed projects that employ local craftspeople.

In addition, Strong Towns founder Chuck Marohn makes a compelling case that local government has a role to play in plugging the financing gap for housing projects that traditional banks won’t provide loans for; things like incremental home projects, or building a backyard cottage, or an addition for a relative.

And then there’s the issue of how to talk about these necessary changes. We should be clear about our priorities, the facts, and the history that got us here. We need to remind ourselves that the wider audience does not spend much time thinking about these issues. They are trying to understand these very complex ideas while holding the same assumptions most of us held at one time or another.

These are generational problems that will not be solved with one bill. They require questioning the status quo while simultaneously taking the time to understand its intricacies. There is a way out of the housing crisis, but we need to stare the problem directly in the face. We need both practical optimism and radical common sense.

Let’s Remember Where Our Freedoms Come From

Dr. Lynda Alexander responded to my recent piece about Will Pelkey with a piece entitled “Let’s Celebrate Our Freedoms” in the Windsor Journal.

I have some thoughts.

It may surprise some of you to learn that I grew up in a very conservative family of lifetime NRA members, libertarians, mainline conservatives, and believers of a variety of Christian faiths. Windsor has always reminded me of the floodplains on the north Potomac where I spent most winters hunting waterfowl, one more reason I’ve always felt at home here. Both sides of my family are from Mississippi. Vigorous political debates were a frequent occurrence at family gatherings in Natchez. Among the many topics in these discussions, I heard outrage over armed IRS officers, unelected judges, and federal incursions into state prerogatives. It was assumed that citizens should stay vigilant against unaccountable power. Imagine my surprise then at some of the same family members now gleefully cheering on warrantless “arrests” by masked federal officers.

My point isn’t to highlight hypocrisy (we all have our blind spots), only to note that I watched the conservative movement change from the inside. I have noticed a rhetorical tick among conservatives in Windsor that very much mirrors my family members’ newfound appreciation of maximalist government power. I think it’s worth teasing this out, because it’s worrying, and because I’m not sure they’re fully aware they’re doing it.

The opening line of Lynda’s piece is indicative, “Our founders granted us considerable freedoms in our constitution[sic].” This is a fundamental misunderstanding of the relationship between the people and the government. We are a free people. We are not granted rights: our rights are inalienable. The government is an instrument of our sovereignty. It does not dictate our rights to us.

Rights that are granted are rights that can be revoked. In Dr. Alexander’s formulation, the relationship between the citizens and the government is inverted. Rather than the government representing a sovereign people, the people become subjects to a government that is sovereign unto itself (or perhaps by divine right?), which is kinda’ what the framers were trying to avoid when they launched a rebellion against the anointed monarch of the globe’s most mighty empire.

This isn’t an isolated example. We see this kind of language slipping into local politicians’ rhetoric with alarming frequency. When discussing the recent assassination of Charlie Kirk, Councilor Ron Eleveld said the following, “Because you cannot accept the fact that someone does not agree with you, you have to use violence to quiet them down. In Nazi Germany they silenced the opposition, in Russia, China and North Korea they silence the opposition, even today. In America we do not silence the opposition. We have something called free speech. We should all defend the right to this Right in our Constitution.”

It’s a noble sentiment, but expressed in a way that dangerously inverts the Constitution’s intent. In this framing, individuals’ use of political violence is equated with government repression. The trouble is that the Constitution does not constrain individuals: the Constitution constrains the government. It even states this explicitly in the amendment Councilor Eleveld is referring to, “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech…” We, the people, elect a representative government which passes laws to govern individual behavior. The Constitution protects us from overreach by that government.

When Councilor Eleveld confuses limits on government with limits on the people, he changes the Constitution from a shield into an instrument of censorship.

Other town Republicans have repeated this misunderstanding recently. Earlier this year, I pointed out that opponents of the road diet referendum had been very aggressive, yelling epithets from moving trucks (how brave…) and in one case brushing me with a pickup truck while I was putting out signs. Rather than address this alarming behavior, the Chair of the Republican Town Committee wrote that I was “tone policing.”

Dr. Alexander’s response is of a piece. She says, “In granting us freedom of speech and expression, by implication, [the framers] expected us to exercise our judgment.”  

The idea that the framers expected nothing but good judgement and uprightness in speech falls apart on the slightest contact with early American history. Many of the framers were polemicists of the first order and had no qualms hiring unscrupulous journalists to savage each other in the press. The career of James Thomas Callender is a good example of how the framers used their own First Amendment rights to publicly smear each other without mercy. I don’t hold this out as the paragon of upright behavior, only to point out that for the framers, freedom of speech was a good unto itself and was not contingent on the good intentions of the speaker. One glaring exception to this is John Adams’ Sedition Act, which is (and was at the time) widely regarded as an utterly shameful power grab.

Dr. Alexander goes on,

Speakers and writers are permitted to express their opinions without restrictions. These opinions include the interpretations, speculations and even at times, fabrication of information in order to make a particular point. And we are charged with investigating the motivation of the writers and speakers who have their own goals and agendas.

In short, Dr. Alexander read a piece laying out a factual critique of a government official and, rather than considering the claims against that official, she questions the motivations of the speaker. Seeing a citizen use freedom of speech to hold the government accountable, the very act with the framers sought especially to protect, Dr. Alexander sees nothing but poor judgement and distasteful agendas.

Perhaps it’s no wonder we see this kind of language slipping into local discussions of politics. We’re living through an utterly warped reactionary movement, one that has birthed the dystopian constitutional fiction of the Unitary Executive. For the first time in our nation’s history we have an actual secret police. The government is using its regulatory leverage over the private sector to silence voices it doesn’t like. And when millions of people took to the streets to state clearly that Donald Trump isn’t the sovereign, we are, he responded with shocking contempt by publishing imagery of himself, wearing a crown, dumping excrement on people who were (say it with me!) exercising their actual First Amendment rights.

So, fellow citizens, listen for this type of constitutional sophistry, and guard against ideas that turn the Constitution against us. Now more than ever, we must use our voices to hold power accountable.

Will Pelkey is Unfit to Serve

This piece appeared in the Windsor Journal on October 24th, 2025

Before the actual piece, I want to provide a brief meta discussion about why I chose to write this at all. Having a shit heel Town Councilor in a small town in Connecticut is pretty insignificant, in the grand scheme of things; so why bother?

Well, we’re in the midst of a fascist take-over in this country, and, contrary to the image they like to project, fascists tend to be small-time shit heels that aren’t worth the bother. That is, until they create a movement that swallows up a whole country. I don’t think Will Pelkey is a fascist. I think he sees the big shit heels and buys into their image of themselves. He’s using local government as a way to play act and to garner attention to himself, to make himself feel important.

And that’s how fascism takes hold, thousands of tiny, pathetic men (mostly men, anyway) donning the aesthetics of a mean, bullying movement to make themselves feel better.

We have to defeat this movement at the national level, but we also have to starve it of recruits from below by mercilessly reinforcing how pathetic these people are. We have to say it out loud, clear as sunshine.

That’s why I wrote this.

It’s election season, and we’re all exhausted. Politics has become increasingly ugly over the past few decades, prompting sentiments like Councilor Eleveld’s in this paper recently, “That is my biggest fear: that these sorts of situations happen and we don’t get good quality people, citizen legislators, coming forward willing to put their time in, for the simple fear they could end up with the target on their back.” Mr. Eleveld was speaking specifically about political violence, but I think his point can extend more broadly to the trolling, name-calling, bad faith, and meanness that pervades politics today. Good candidates, people who are genuinely interested in public service, don’t get into politics to engage in food fights.

Which is why I want to tell you about Councilor Will Pelkey.  
 
Mr. Pelkey has engaged in a pattern of behavior that is out of step with Windsor’s values, his oath of office, and basic decency. He repeatedly posted repugnant images of Representative Jane Garibay’s face superimposed on Jabba the Hutt, despite protests from both Democrats and Republicans that such behavior is harrassing. In a rather bizarre episode, he posted pictures, taken at a distance, of Black residents at a public swimming pool, asking if one of his colleagues on the Council was in the images (for the record, she was not). He bullied a seriously ill colleague on the Town Council, repeatedly calling for roll call votes to try to catch former Councilor Smith unconscious when he had to call into meetings from a hospital bed due to a quirk in the Council’s quorum rules. These parliamentary shenanigans were cruel and completely unnecessary.
 
Up to this point, everything I’ve described is just the odious behavior of an unserious person.  However, he also lied about police records, which violates his oath of office to “faithfully discharge” his duties as a Town Councilor.  
 
On March 6 of this year, Mr. Pelkey posted the following regarding the upcoming road diet referendum, “According to data received from Windsor PD, these same streets recorded only 4 accidents since 2017, and zero deaths.” In response to a Freedom of Information Act request, the Windsor Police Department revealed that there were, in fact, 85 collisions in that area during the specified time period (roughly 1/month), 16 of which resulted in injuries. Furthermore, the Police Department confirmed that it had not provided any data of this kind to any elected official or member of the public in the six months preceding the referendum. 

To be clear, Mr. Pelkey deliberately invoked the authority of the Windsor Police Department to mislead voters about basic facts concerning our physical safety. He did not “receive” data from Windsor PD. He made up safety statistics to make a political point. These are simple counts that Mr. Pelkey could have easily obtained or verified with the police had he bothered to try. This project has been under consideration for over two decades; it’s not like he didn’t have time to check. This was no mistake either. Mr. Pelkey doubled down on this claim in the original social media discussion despite being shown publicly available police data contradicting his assertion. The message was then repeated almost word-for-word, in print, by Concerned Citizens of Windsor, a political action committee that has been fined multiple times for state campaign finance violations and reporting lapses. 

His statements were obviously false to residents of the affected neighborhood, leading some to question the Police Department’s truthfulness on this issue. He eroded trust between the neighborhood and law enforcement, and he erased years of diligent, dangerous work by police and first responders from the public discourse.

Windsor police and first responders deserve better. Their jobs are hard enough without unserious politicians lying about what they’re doing. Our Town Councilors and state elected officials deserve better. Being an elected official is hard, but it shouldn’t come with open harassment from colleagues. Most importantly, Windsor residents deserve better. At a minimum, we deserve to be told the truth about our own safety by the people we elect to represent us.

Yes, politics has gotten uglier. But we, Windsor voters, don’t have to accept this kind of behavior here. Please vote for candidates who reflect Windsor’s values and who take their responsibility to us seriously.

The Debt Ceiling is Unconstitutional

I’d like to put forward a proposal to stop the recurring manufactured crisis that is the debt ceiling.

Stop pretending it’s legal.

In this era of increased partisanship and stochastic violence, there’s also the pervading sense that our legal institutions are straining under their own weight. If we’re looking for root causes, we should consider the many extra-constitutional features of the nation’s political institutions as currently constituted. For starters, political parties as a legal unit of governance. The framers did not predict the emergence of parties and a few warned us directly of their malevolent influence on the republic once they emerged. George Washington famously called them, “potent engines, by which cunning, ambitious, and unprincipled men will be enabled to subvert the power of the people.” Add to this state-wide apportionment of electors in presidential elections, the filibuster, constraining the house membership to an arbitrary number set a hundred years ago, and you start to get a picture of the elements of our current political system that are not in the Constitution and, in fact, are often used to subvert the Constitution’s underlying principles of popular sovereignty and majority rule.

But even these ailments, bad as they may be, are not unconstitutional per se; they are omissions. They are the results of institutions and political parties taking advantage of gaps in our founding documents.

The debt ceiling, on the other hand, violates the Constitution ipso facto.

To understand why, let’s do a quick Constitutional refresher on the relevant sections: In Article I, Congress passes laws. In Article II, the president executes those laws, hence the “executive branch.” The relationship between Congress and the executive is crystal clear in the Constitution. It charges the president with the duty to “take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed.” We may live in strange times. Trump may claim the right to impound funds. Stephen Miller may claim “plenary authority” for the president. But we must remember the framers’ clear intent that the president’s duty is to execute laws passed by Congress. This includes laws concerning spending and debt.

The 14th amendment addresses the public debt directly, “The validity of the public debt of the United States, authorized by law, including debts incurred for payment of pensions and bounties for services in suppressing insurrection or rebellion, shall not be questioned.” The current Supreme Court likes to pretend the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments don’t exist, but they are just as binding as the bill of rights. On the question of debt the 14th Amendment provides an explicit directive: it is unconstitutional for the government to refuse to pay public debt. Supreme Court case Perry v. United States affirmed this interpretation of the public debt clause. Writing for the majority, Chief Justice Charles Hughes characterized “the expression ‘validity of the public debt’ as embracing whatever concerns the integrity of the public obligations.”

It’s worth noting that the 14th Amendment addressed the concern that former confederates reentering the federal government would refuse to pay the public debt as payback for Congress invalidating Confederate debt or to hold the budget hostage to gain political concessions (sound familiar?)

It’s worth taking a moment to consider the precise chain of legal obligations at work here. The constitution states the president must follow the laws set forth by Congress, and that neither Congress nor the president may question the validity of the public debt. Congress collects taxes and duties to fund the government. Congress passes a budget, which is just a law instructing the executive branch how to spend those funds.

We may not agree with specific policy decisions made along this chain of commitments, but this is how the system is supposed to work. Trump’s illegal acts in office notwithstanding, the president can’t refuse to spend the money specified in the budget, both because of his Constitutional obligation to “take care” that the budget he signed into law is faithfully executed, but also because the 1975 Impoundment Act specifically forbids it. He also can’t raise taxes to fund the budget; that power is granted to Congress in Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution. (The same section renders Trump tariff-by-executive-order scheme unconstitutional, but that’s a subject for another day). He can’t print more money; Congress vested that power in an independant (for now) agency. The only option is to borrow money within the statutory limits of the budget.

Enter the heel in our melodrama, “The Debt Ceiling.” Congress now passes a different law, separate from the budget. Contrary to much of the rhetoric around the issue, the debt ceiling has nothing to do with spending. It simply forbids the president from borrowing money once the debt reaches an arbitrary threshold. In effect, Congress has spent more than it collected in taxes, borrowed money to cover the difference, and then told the person responsible for writing the checks to stop paying the bills. If this sounds a lot like Congress calling the public debt into question, that’s because that’s exactly what it is.

This puts the president in an impossible position. Congress is, in effect, forcing the President to choose between two different ways to violate the Constitution 1) ignore the debt ceiling to meet the 14th Amendment obligation, thereby violating the budget law 2) accept the debt ceiling and ignore the budget, thereby violating the 14th Amendment. In both cases, Congress has directed the president to break a law, which also forces the president to violate the aforementioned “take care clause.”

In our system, we call laws directing the executive branch to violate the Constitution “Unconstitutional.”

Every president who has had to deal with this legal knot, thus far, has chosen option two in the hopes that there is enough slack in the system that they will not have to actually default on US debt. Both political parties have consented to this state of affairs because it allows them to extract policy concessions when they are in the minority by holding the government hostage. 

For Republicans, it’s a win-win. Shutdowns reify Republican’s accusation of government incompetence and chaos, so they either get what they want in the policy negotiations or they get thrown into the proverbial briar patch. The motivations for Congressional Democrats are more complicated. Shutdowns cause major policy headaches when they occupy the Whitehouse, effectively opening a whole new round of budget negotiations. More generally, shutdowns portray the government as dysfunctional (which, in this case, it most certainly is). People are more likely to blame shutdowns on the party advocating governmental competence and the status quo. 

In the face of an ever-increasingly authoritarian president, however, Democrats are reluctant to give up any levers to check the executive branch while they are in the minority. Some Democrats may be grateful for the opportunity the debt ceiling affords to stick a thumb in Trump’s eye. Fair enough. But taking a step back, it’s hard to see how assenting to the debt ceiling has been anything less than a disaster for Democrats. Further, it’s hard to see how it will work out any better for them in the future. Yes, the public may blame Republicans for shutdowns occasionally, but shutdowns generally give the public the impression of a political system lurching uncontrollably from one self-inflicted crisis to the next. This makes voters gravitate towards reform/change candidates and away from candidates advocating for basic government functions: e.g. Democrats. Meanwhile Republicans will continue to use this process to extract policy preferences outside of normal legislative and Constitutional processes. This is a fight on Republicans’ turf, and Democrats are fools to continue to fight here.

Trump’s actions during this particular shutdown illustrate the dangerous power vacuum that bad actors can exploit when Congress abandons its Constitutional role. Trump’s decision to pay military personnel with money siphoned from research and development funds may sound like a good-faith effort to support the people who protect us, but it violates a foundational principle of the Constitution. It’s the People’s money and the People choose how to spend it through their representatives. If the executive can spend money the People have not allocated, and pay for it with funds the People set aside for a different purpose, then the president is no longer “executing” the will of the People: he is executing his own will. We kinda’ fought a Revolution over this issue. We shouldn’t be so quick to abandon it.

So, what should Democrats do?

Democrats should state clearly that the debt ceiling is Unconstitutional. They should seize this superseding principle and refuse to get bogged down in the weeds of extra-legislative budget debates. Say it clearly, if any president chooses to shut down the government or honor the nation’s debts, they are violating the law and the Constitution.

Use the occasion to make a simple point on the national debt: Tax. The. Rich. Government shutdowns are unpopular. Austerity measures are unpopular. By refusing to engage in the process that creates these unpopular outcomes for voters, Democrats will leave Republicans holding the bag. They will also set themselves up for a winning platform built on the pillars of Fairness, Reform, and the Constitution.

More on this platform to come.

The Modern Parenting Double-Bind

This piece appeared in the Windsor Journal in September of 2025

It’s a strange time to be a parent. We are constantly warned of the dangers modern technology poses to our children. “Screen time” has leap-frogged stranger danger and junk food as this generation’s overarching parenting worry. It explains everything from childhood obesity to weaker academic performance to addiction-like behaviors to reduced social skills. Books touting the anxiety-inducing effects of children’s screen-filled, sedentary lifestyle regularly top best-seller lists. The message is everywhere: kids don’t play outside anymore, kids don’t ride their bikes to school, kids aren’t playing enough sports, kids are too fat.

A recent New York Times piece by David French is typical of the genre. In “How Did the Latchkey Kids of Gen X Become the Helicopter Parents of Gen Z?” Mr. French describes his idilic childhood of unsupervised play and family dinners. He concludes that more intact families will help solve the problem, and gently chides Gen X and Millenial parents to “back off a bit.”

This interpretation falls flat. Current parenting generations have lower divorce rates than their parents, which should have already solved the problem under French’s formulation. He also does not consider whether the “outside” he wants children to play in is physically safe for them, and he does not address the very real consequences parents face when they leave their children unattended.

Allowing a child to walk or bike somewhere invites the very real risk of a “good Samaritan” calling the police. And if the child is injured or killed while unsupervised, the unspeakable tragedy of losing a child might also come with a felony charge. A father in Charlotte, North Carolina was charged in June of this year with felony manslaughter when his 10-year-old son was struck and killed by a car on the way back from a Subway, less than a ten-minute walk from his home (the driver was not charged). Last year, police were called to a quiet suburban street in Louisville, Kentucky when an 8-year-old was spotted bicycling on the street where she lived. A mother in South Carolina was arrested in July of last year for letting her daughter play at a nearby playground while she worked because she could not afford childcare. A woman was arrested last November when her 10-year-old son was seen walking alone in “downtown” Blue Ridge, Georgia, population 370.

Image – road side memorial for Legend Jenkins, struck and killed by and S.U.V. in May of 2025.
Legend Jenkins was hit and killed by an S.U.V. when he stepped off this median on his way home from the Food Lion supermarket in Gastonia, N.C., in May. Credit, Kennedi Carter for The New York Times.

The good news is that children are underrepresented in pedestrian deaths in the U.S. The bad news is this is because parents are making a rational decision not to let their kids walk anywhere, thus the rate of pedestrian death spikes dramatically at 20 years old, when children can no longer rely on parents for every ride.

When children are allowed to walk in neighborhoods, they are more likely to be struck by cars than adults. This is due to their underdeveloped sense of the danger cars pose, as well as drivers overestimating their available stopping distance due to children’s proportionally smaller stature.

Some people attribute this withdrawal of youth from public spaces as a reaction to the risk of violence or abduction. Even during the height of latchkey kids in the 70’s and 80’s, abductions of children by strangers were quite rare; 100-300 per year, or less than 1% of total child abductions. The other 99% of cases are usually non-custodial parents, with the balance being acquaintances of the child’s family. These cases range from trauma to tragedy, of course, but the nature and prevalence of this threat to children has been vastly overstated for years. Put another way, child abduction is primarily a function of custody disputes and family conflict. The issue still dominates the child safety discussion, however, while the far greater threat killing thousands of children every year is right outside our doors: our roads.

Governmental response to parents’ concern about street safety can be puzzling at times. When parents say they would like their children’s ability to walk and bicycle taken into consideration in infrastructure projects, many elected officials trumpet that the arterial roadways crisscrossing residential neighborhoods are perfectly safe. These statements are invariably followed by arguments, also without evidence, that any change to the existing road network would create congestion. Imagine the FAA saying safety infrastructure improvements are impractical because they cause delays: “Faster trips for the survivors!”

Heavier police enforcement is often proposed as an alternative solution to safer street design, (sometimes, paradoxically, by the same public servants who say the streets are safe already). If enforcement alone were sufficient, the problem would have been solved by now. The evidence shows otherwise. This is because enforcement’s vaunted deterrent effect is temporary. Research consistently shows enforcement gains fade within weeks. Enforcement is also very expensive. Enforcement proponents often overlook that police prefer to be paid for their work, and unlike infrastructure costs that can be offset by grants, police are paid directly with property taxes out of towns’ annual operating budgets. Communities can pay once for lasting safety improvements, or pay endlessly for intermittent deterrence: not a difficult decision.

And of course, opinions differ on what a community should feel like, but when I picture a nice New England town to raise kids in, I don’t imagine main streets with four-lane highway bypasses with a heavy law enforcement presence.

Over the past 80 years, we built a transportation system that is lethal to children in their own neighborhoods. We then tell the parents of those children that they are personally responsible for any negative outcomes of that system. Parents have responded by not letting children walk or bike unattended, reducing children’s opportunities for recreation, face-to-face play, and personal autonomy, which parents are also blamed for.

By not letting kids walk anywhere, parents are forced to drive them everywhere. This puts an enormous strain on families, particularly those where all the adults are working full-time. It also exposes children to the risk of automobile crashes as passengers. Car crashes were the leading cause of death for children for decades, until gun deaths recently overtook them. Both causes are many times higher than any other cause of death for children, and they are both enormous global outliers.

Unlike gun control, transportation safety is often a local issue. Towns build and maintain many of their roads, and have influence on how state roads are managed within their borders. It may take time and patience, but this is something we can fix here in Windsor. We should commit to streets where children can walk and bike safely, whether to school or to a friend’s house. If it feels dangerous to imagine a 10-year-old biking near Windsor Ave, Matianuck Ave, Park Ave, Broad Street, etc, then the need is real. Parents shouldn’t have to agonize over screen-time vs letting their kids play outside. Let’s fix our streets so kids can just be kids.

Police Cameras & the Fugitive Slave Act

This letter was sent to the Town Council of Windsor Connecticut regarding an ongoing debate in the town over the use of video data collected by Windsor police and shared to outside agencies via Flock. FOIA requests to WPD had revealed numerous access incidents by federal immigration departments, and at least one incident of a Texas Sheriff's office accessing the system to search for someone for the stated reason that she had "had an abortion."

Dear Council Members,

I was unable to attend the Council meeting last night, but I did want to take the opportunity to share my concerns about the use of Flock cameras in our community.

There is no doubt that retroactive video data, shared across departments, can help solve crimes more quickly and at lower cost. Public safety is important, but any benefits must be carefully balanced against the rights and security of our residents.

History warns us of the dangers of law enforcement tools being used across state lines in ways that undermine individual rights. To discourage enslaved people from escaping the barbaric laws of slave states, the Fugitive Slave Act co-opted other states’ law enforcement resources. “States rights,” in this case, could only be maintained by forcing other states to act against their own citizens’ conscience and the basic dignity and autonomy of people within their borders. The Fugitive Slave Act was a major factor leading to the Civil War and remains a stain on this nation’s history.

There are strong echoes of this now. Some states have criminalized reproductive health care for erstwhile protected classes of citizens, and have also criminalized providing aid to people trying to access that care. As with slavery, the states’ unequal treatment of people before the law is rationalized by religious belief and extra constitutional claims of “states’ rights.” These states are using technologies like Flock cameras to track their residents who travel elsewhere for legal medical procedures. They are also passing civil laws to extend their reach across state lines. This effectively deputizes their citizens to enforce state laws, akin to the bounty-hunting system that existed throughout the antebellum period.

In addition to this retrograde legal environment, we’ve also seen the emergence of masked federal agents abducting people and moving them between states without extradition, without meaningful accountability to the public, and without accountability to the judicial system. Immigrants, documented and undocumented, already face the constant threat of dislocation, deportation, and family separation. These paramilitary law enforcement resources can easily be refocused to impose unjust state laws across other states like our own. With one executive order, local camera data can be used to locate health care providers in our town and send them to face felony charges in other states.

While I understand the potential crime-solving value of these systems, I urge the Council to prioritize the rights and safety of Windsor’s residents and visitors. A prudent course would be to suspend implementation until the Council can guarantee that these systems will not expose Windsor residents, visitors, or providers to out-of-state legal risks.

Please act now to protect our neighbors and the medical professionals our community depends on.

Respectfully,
Keller Glass

This Is Not Normal

This piece appeared in the Windsor Journal on May 2, 2025.

Dear Neighbors,

Though I’ve lived in many places around the United States, I’m proud to have made Windsor my home. One thing I noticed right away when I started to get involved in local matters is Windsor’s deeply ingrained tradition of civility and bipartisanship. Even in the Land of Steady Habits, our civic culture stands out as civil, even cordial. Neighbors and political adversaries talk over beers and across fences. But in recent months, something in our civic culture has shifted, and not for the better.

During the Broad Street referendum in March, volunteers (especially women) were subjected to curses and epithets from passing cars. As I was putting up Yes signs in the Center, I was nearly struck by a pickup truck that veered out of its lane toward me, then sped through three red lights up Poquonock Avenue. Later, a prominent opponent of the project explained to me, in all seriousness, why someone might feel justified in attempting vehicular assault in the context of the referendum. This is not normal.

It didn’t stop there. During the same campaign, elected officials lied about crash statistics in the Center, facts that directly impact the physical safety of Windsor residents. Regardless of your views on lane widths, roundabouts, etc., our representatives have a duty to tell the truth, especially when it concerns public safety. These lies were amplified, and further distorted, by a local political action committee, “Concerned Windsor Citizens,” which, for all their supposed concern, repeatedly failed to meet even the most basic filing and attribution requirements under Connecticut campaign finance laws. They’ve paid several fines in recent months for these violations. Again, this is not normal.

Most recently, the same group ran an ad in this paper riddled with typos and grammatical errors, urging residents to “Make Note of who has those YES Signs as they are the One’s” [sic] who want to increase the town budget. Is this what we’ve come to—political discourse that reads like a ransom note?

The word “Orwellian” has become cliché in recent years, but sometimes the shoe fits. Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four devotes entire chapters to the horror of a society where neighbors are encouraged to monitor and report on one another. He also warns of what happens when political actors view their opponents not just as wrong, but as inherently illegitimate. Once that idea sets in, all acts can be justified. That, too, is not normal.

I’ve been surprised by our reluctance to address this shift in political discourse in town. Yes, Windsor has a laudable tradition of civility. We don’t all have to agree: we won’t. But we should demand that civic and political groups engage the public with a good-faith commitment to the truth. We do not have to accept lies from public officials, and we absolutely cannot accept political intimidation. Civility without accountability does not serve the public good.

Sincerely,

Keller Glass