To the editor:
I do not want to come across as a sore loser because I did not want the rail trail, and it received the vote it needed; however, this is my view.
People talk about how it would be a nice area for residents to go out for a leisurely walk around our beautiful town. Why hasn’t the town ever fixed our streets which look like they went through the war? If we have a sidewalk, those sidewalks are in such deplorable condition and have never been fixed at all. Summer Street and Walnut Street are traveled by all of us. Those streets were so bad for years and we complained and we waited for them to be fixed. Finally, they fixed the street last year and once the pavement trucks left Summer Street and Walnut Street, what seems like the next day, National Grid comes along to tear them up to put in gas lines for streets that do not have gas. Was that well planned? What makes us think the town will take care of the rail trail?
People talk about the fact that the trail “is fully funded.” I wish that the people using that term could look at what was approved and voted on in 2019 as fully funded, and also took a look at what is in the plan now in 2025 as “fully funded” as it is not the same, but we continue to use the term “fully funded.”
Our homes have beautiful lawns but many of us cannot even water our grass because we are always on a water ban and have been hearing for years that this will be fixed, yet to date, it still has not been fixed.
Our taxes have continually gone up, yet our streets are a mess, our sidewalks if they even exist, are a mess.
We were promised that when MarketStreet was built, we would see huge tax savings. I haven’t seen any tax savings, have you?
People like to say that if a town has a rail trail, property values will go up, however not one person has ever been able to show any reports reflecting this in these other towns. It is true that areas where a trail has been put in has had property values increase, but that is the same increase as areas without a Rail Trail. We have been fortunate that all of our values have gone up no matter what. If we didn’t put in a Rail Trail, and fixed our neighborhood streets, don’t you think our values will increase?
People talk about how well the project is planned. I do not see that to be the case. There is nobody that has the full facts because it is not being disclosed or we have to search various websites and we all have to find information on our own and then make our own assessment. To me, that is not well planned.
The town held a meeting to discuss very important votes, yet that meeting was completely disjointed. They expected very large crowds and organized buses to transport people from all the various parking spots, so they knew that the meeting was going to be extremely crowded. They did not plan on where those people were going to go once they arrived inside LMS and then had to find a location to put the people. Was that well planned? They put people in the auditorium, café, and the gym, and yet the people in the café and gym could not hear the presentation nor see it. For those in the auditorium that had the slide presentation, the font was so small, we could not read what was being shown. Was that well planned? They did not have enough electronic voting tablets, so one room had the electronic systems, one room had green and red cards and the other room had “raise your hand to vote.” Was that well planned? How many of those manual counts were wrong? A panel of 10-15 people sat at the front of the meeting to answer questions, yet not one person answered a single question. Residents that had something to say on the Articles to vote where to raise their hands and only a couple where allowed to speak and because one person said to move on and vote, the remaining residents could not raise their concerns. How disrespectful was it for one person to be allowed to stand and basically state, who cares about the 1% of the abutters, and get away with it? When the crowd booed him, the crowd was told to be polite and not speak out of turn. Was that not a slap in the face to the 1% of the abutters that waited for this meeting?
Charles Ragusa
