MONDAY EDITION
ADDISON COUNTY
INDEPENDENT
Vol. 30 No. 31
Middlebury, Vermont
Monday, December 3, 2018
• “Face of Winter,” a ski and snowboard film by Warren Miller, will screen at THT. See Arts Beat on Page 10.
• A New Haven family seeks help after an early-morning chimney blaze. See Page 3.
LINCOLN RESIDENTS MARIA Teixeira, left, and her partner, Travis Herben, gathered a few toys no longer used by their children, 9-year-old Ezaias, right, Micaiah, 7, and Simeon, 1, to exchange at the upcoming Toy Swap at the Lincoln Library. Teixeira and other volunteers organized the swap to bring new life to old toys.
Independent photo/John S. McCright
Breathing life into old playthings Lincoln Library to host toy swap By CHRISTOPHER ROSS LINCOLN — So profound is the depth of imagination kids summon when they play with toys that it has inspired a special category of storytelling in our culture. From “The Nutcracker” to “The Velveteen Rabbit”
Eagle senior tops field hockey team • Mount Abraham and Otter Valley are well represented on the Independent all-star squad. See Sports, Page 18.
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By JOHN FLOWERS MIDDLEBURY — The Middlebury selectboard will spend the next two months refining a fiscal year 2020 municipal budget proposal that currently reflects almost $600,000 in new expenses, including two new hires and a $296,119 increase in local infrastructure improvements. A $600,000 increase would drive the need for an 8-cent hike in the municipal tax rate, but that won’t happen. Middlebury Town Manager Kathleen Ramsay is proposing, from the outset, that the town use surplus revenues from the community’s (See Middlebury, Page 16)
Home fire leaves family in the cold
• The Bristol Fire Department presented “challenge coins” to generous donors. See Page 7.
32 Pages
Midd budget draft reflects more staff & road work
See winter’s magic on film
Local businesses receive honors
to “Toy Story,” we find hope in the notion that our playthings could live separate lives, struggling like we do, fighting our battles, keeping it real when the “real world” intervenes. Integral to many of these stories is the letting go, the heart-wrenching moment when children outgrow their toys and leave them behind forever. (See Toy swap, Page 20)
City recreation group pitches big pool fixes By ANDY KIRKALDY VERGENNES — The newly formed Vergennes recreation committee last week shared with the city council the list of priorities its members created after its first two meetings — and up to $147,000 of work to the city pool was at the top. The committee, founded to advise the council on maintenance of existing facilities and ways to (See City recreation, Page 17)
Saffron is spicing up New Haven solar farm Lost ag land could return to productivity By CHRISTOPHER ROSS NEW HAVEN — Thanks to a partnership between Peck Electric and University of Vermont, flowers that produce the most expensive spice in the world this fall were blooming in the shade of a few New Haven solar panels. It’s too soon to tell whether saffron, which retails for between $3,000 and $9,000 a pound, will become a viable crop in Vermont,
but three years of testing by UVM’s North American Center for Saffron Research and Development have produced promising results. The flowers from which the precious saffron threads are harvested, Crocus sativus, bloom in the agricultural down-time of late autumn, they thrive in Vermont UVM RESEARCHER ARASH Ghalehgolabbehbahani, shown at a soil and, when protected from the test plot in New Haven growing saffron flowers last month, says elements by high tunnels, have so that an acre of Vermont land could generate more than $100,000 worth of the precious spice. (See Saffron, Page 24) Independent photo/Christopher Ross