MONDAY EDITION
ADDISON COUNTY
INDEPENDENT
Vol. 30 No. 42
Nature: Get app for that
• Go to the Audubon meeting to learn about technology that helps citizen scientists – and you. See Page 31.
Farmers market back on city green • After two years away, growers and crafters will return downtown. See Page 2.
What does an EMT really do?
Middlebury, Vermont
Monday, March 4, 2019
Rough winter puts stress on local salt, sand budgets Several communities already in deficit mode
By JOHN FLOWERS MIDDLEBURY — Persistent snowy, icy and slushy conditions this winter have taken a wicked toll on municipal sand and salt budgets, to the extent some communities have exhausted their allotted resources with still a month or more of potentially treacherous weather left to deal with. Winter road maintenance figures supplied to the Independent by a sampling of Addison County communities revealed: • The town of Middlebury had budgeted $130,000 for salt and $25,000 for sand for fiscal year 2019 — the period between July 1, 2018, and June 30, 2019. As of the end of February, the town had spent $131,981 on salt and $24,335 on sand. Also, the town had paid
out $29,726 in winter-related overtime wages; $30,000 was budgeted for that purpose. • In Cornwall, officials had budgeted $15,000 for sand. As of last week, the town had spent $18,103 for that purpose, leaving a deficit of $3,103 entering March. Meanwhile, the community has spent $12,168 of its $16,000 salt budget, leaving a balance of $3,832. • Vergennes City Manager Matt Chabot on Feb. 19 reported the Little City was “about a salt shaker away” from exhausting its $50,000 budget for winter maintenance materials. The city had spent $48,055 at the time. • As of Thursday, Salisbury had over-spent, by $1,500, its fiscal year 2019 salt budget of $58,000. (See Salt sheds, Page 30)
32 Pages
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Middlebury mourns loss of former town clerk Dick Goodro By JOHN FLOWERS MIDDLEBURY — Friends and former colleagues of longtime Middlebury Town Clerk and Treasurer Richard “Dick” Goodro recalled him as a warm human being, jovial jokester and tireless worker who was a walking encyclopedia. Goodro died on Friday, Feb. 22, at age 75 at his home in Ormond Beach, Fla. (see obituary on Page 6). He succumbed to the effects of pulmonary fibrosis, according to family members. News of his passing hit hard in Middlebury, where he seemingly knew everyone. “I would call him the ‘mayor of East Middlebury,’” longtime attorney and former Selectman Karl Neuse recalled with a chuckle. “He was a great guy.” (See Goodro, Page 17)
• A Bridport first responder provides a snapshot of her job helping people in need. See Page 18.
Battle for Barre & rivalry game
• Eagle girls’ hoop hosted a D-II quarterfinal, and the Mount Abe boys visited Vergennes. See Sports, Pages 19-21.
Jam band to land at local venue • Follow “The Herd” to hear Donna the Buffalo at Town Hall Theater. See Arts Beat on Pages 10-13.
VERGENNES RESIDENT MATT Dematties worked for a month on his Lego replica of the schooner Lois McClure, which on Thursday won the high-school division of the First Annual Lego Contest at the Bixby Library.
Independent photo/Andy Kirkaldy
Imaginations live through Legos at Bixby Competition inspires boys, girls and adults By ANDY KIRKALDY VERGENNES — Under the central dome of Vergennes’ Bixby Library on Thursday evening, the Justice League of America
battled aliens atop a skyscraper, patrons wandered through a zoo, the schooner Lois McClure plied the waters of Lake Champlain, a submarine suffered a fatal attack
from a villain, and a miniature Bixby echoed its bigger sibling. And those were just some of the roughly 30 entries in what the Bixby and the Boys & Girls Club of Greater Vergennes jointly billed as their first annual Lego Contest and Exhibit.
Boys & Girls Club Director Jill Strube and Bixby Youth Services Librarian Rachel Plant organized the competition after Strube saw in a newsletter that the Brattleboro Children’s Museum had been (See Legos, Page 16)