Ansonia Aldermen voted Tuesday to waive any permit fees for property owners associated with repairs as a result of two storms hitting the region recently.
In doing so, they cited the ​“unprecedented weather events” of Hurricane Sandy and an October nor’easter that knocked out power to the city’s west side last Wednesday.
Aldermanic President Eugene Sharkey said officials got the idea after seeing news accounts of municipal governments taking similar steps in Branford and Milford.
Aldermen Edward Adamowski and Joseph Jeanette brought the resolution forward, Sharkey said. Click the play button on the video above to hear more of his remarks.
“This is only for the two recent storms that we had and it has to be for damage that was the result of it,” Sharkey said. ​“We had several houses that were damaged. We had one house on Howard Avenue, a tree fell into the house.”
Click here to read more about the damage to that house from a previous story.
“That one will need major repairs,” Sharkey said, noting that while most homeowners may not need such major work, a lot of houses had trees or limbs fall on them, or parts of roofs removed.
Aldermen passed the resolution unanimously without any further discussion.
Also Tuesday, one of the city’s Republican Aldermen announced that the local GOP will make videos of the Aldermen’s meetings available online.
At their meeting last month, a majority of Aldermen voted to stop recording their meetings on video, citing the fact that most of the meetings hadn’t been aired on local cable access.
The issue came up Tuesday when a resident, Ken Plavnicky, complained about the vote, saying he was ​“very disgusted and upset” with the decision to discontinue the recording.
“There was no money put into it,” he said. ​“I’m sure there’s a lot of people who don’t want to come to the meeting here. They can watch it on TV rather than come to the meeting, or elderly people who don’t want to go out at night. It was just terrible for the way it was done.”
Alderman John Marini, who records the meetings, took the opportunity to announce that Ansonia Republicans will make videos of the meeting available on their Youtube channel.
“I sort of feel the same way about the vote on the videotape, which is why I’m happy to say that the Ansonia Republicans are going to continue providing that service to the public,” he said. ​“In fact we’ve already made the meeting from October available to the public on Youtube.”
Marini also said that the meetings will air on Comcast public access beginning in January.
Jerome Fainer, a Democratic Alderman, wondered if Republicans were ​“getting political” about the issue.
“How come it couldn’t be on Comcast now, this whole year,” he said. ​“And now all of a sudden it can be on Youtube?”
Marini said there are still technical issues that prevent the meetings from airing, but that they’ll be fixed by January.
“Putting it on Youtube and on the Internet was never a problem, that was actually easy,” he said. ​“It was just that the majority of the video recording commission that we had over the past year did not want it available. Now that it’s going to be available by a private party, it can be on Youtube, it can be on the Internet.”
Adamowski, who made the motion to discontinue recording the meetings at last month’s meeting, said that he did so because the meetings weren’t being aired and that guidelines about recording them set up by a subcommittee of the board weren’t adhered to.
“The rules were not followed,” he said. ​“Comcast had only January of 2012 and nothing after that. And that is why I made the motion to suspend the video recording until we figure out what we were doing with it and make sure that the rules we set in place were followed.”
Adamowski said he’d bring copies of the rules to next month’s meeting.
