Merry Christmas, happy holidays, and let’s go!
5. Legal weed comes to the Valley
I don’t have especially entrenched opinions on stuff. It’s why I get so angry when hack partisan cultists accuse me of bias.
I’d join any cult for five minutes.
You can legally buy marijuana in Seymour and, any day now, Derby.
I’m torn.
I’m half old man yelling at clouds and half ‘heck yeah lemme get some weirdo gummies to make this story interesting.’
Do I care if people smoke weed recreationally? No, my very best friends are potheads. I say friends because I only have one and I don’t want to dox him.
But do I want to constantly lie to my kids about a colony of skunks moving into a neighbor’s house? No.
So much change in society. I’m still getting over Van Halen with Sammy Hagar.
4. Stop & Shop Closes In Ansonia
Ansonia lost Big Y and now Stop & Shop. Far be it from me to understand exactly why they closed – but it stinks.
3. Cassetti v Rochelle
2024 saw us get the Valley news equivalent of the Yankees vs the Red Sox.
Jasmine Wright also picked the race for state House 104 as a story of the year – read her column here – so I’ll try a different, self-absorbed angle.
State politics is a beat.
Traditionally, at a newspaper, the state reporter would travel to Hartford every day to talk about what state politicians were up to, much in the way The Valley Indy attends local legislative meetings to see what’s happening.
We’ve never covered state politics because it’s not our beat. And when we tried to jump in and cover it, we got things wrong.
Long story short, we were able to write a series of stories on the Kara Rochelle v. David Cassetti race thanks to a grant from The Valley Community Foundation. We the money used to hire four freelancers.
Now, the race itself: everybody I interviewed said Rochelle was the underdog because Ansonia is Cassetti town.
But results from past U.S. presidential races showed Rochelle would probably win.
She won the race quite handily – to the point where her supporters were saying ‘run for mayor.’
I expected the results to be much closer.
Shows what I know.
Email correction requests and accusations of bias to WaaWaaaWaa@aol.com.
2. Derby taxes
Long story short: Derby approved an 11.9 percent mill rate increase this year (an earlier version of this article left out the word percent).
Derby has been in bad shape financially for years.
A novel could be written on the ups and downs of Derby’s budget problems, starting in 2016 when the finance office mistakenly double counted grant money, leading to budget deficits and depleted reserves.
Meanwhile, the city kept hiring – and then losing – finance directors. A member of the Municipal Finance Advisory Commission stated it appeared Derby government treated the role of finance director as a political appointment, instead of neutral bean counter (my words).
Mayor Joseph DiMartino’s administration officially hired Brian Hall as finance director in April. He had been doing the job on an interim basis since December 2023.
A result – clearer explanations of problems with Derby’s budget, and a straight-up request to raise taxes to help clean up the mess (along with other measures, such as using American Rescue Plan Act money to fill budget holes).
That 11.9 percent mill rate increase was essentially billed as a necessary evil.
At public meetings Hall advocated for honest budgeting – and the probable need for future, smaller mill rate increases to keep up with rising expenditures such as health insurance.
Now, this is a story that was not only big in 2024. Expect to hear A LOT about Derby taxes in 2025. It’s a municipal election year.
1. The flood
We can’t shake the fact two women died in Oxford during a natural disaster. It’s just such a very painful thing to think about, in part because the event’s strangeness made it more awful: a flood that turned the ‘Little River’ into dangerous rapids.
A storm no one saw coming, houses destroyed or damaged, a shopping center in Seymour taken out, people trapped at a child’s birthday being rescued by boat, roads washed away – and then the impossible task of trying to get insurance companies to do the right thing and payout.
