Charles C. Gardner

If you haven't already voted, polls are open until 8 p.m. tonight at Newtown Middle School (11 Queen Street) for the town budget referendum. Also up for referendum are proposed bond authorizations for HVAC repairs and upgrades at the High School and replacement of the Edmond Town Hall parking lot. Thank you to those volunteers who made the voting process quick and efficient when I was there this morning.

This is a note of thanks to all those who supported me and the other candidates on our slate over the past several months. While winning is something to be proud of, it couldn't have happened without the efforts of the Newtown Republican Town Committee and everyone who donated their time and resources to the campaign, whether by organizing fundraisers, filling envelopes, waving signs, writing letters, or the simple but crucial task of calling and texting voters. Particular thanks to Ryan W. Knapp and Michele Buzzi for all their help and guidance.

I'm personally grateful to the RTC for the nomination and support throughout the election season. Special thanks also to my wife Kathy for her encouragement and extra efforts with a busy household. Without that, running would have been an impossibility.

Thanks all and I look forward to working with everyone in the term ahead.

The whole family had a good time on Main Street tonight, including a stop by the Newtown Republican Town Committee booth. While the kids love all the treats and creative decorations, I think the best part is running into so many familiar faces and being reminded what a wonderful community we have here in Newtown. Happy Halloween all!

Thank you to former First Selectman Pat Llodra for her gracious endorsement of me, Ryan W. Knapp and Matt Mihalcik in today's issue of the Bee! I'm grateful for Pat's support and am proud to be running in District 2 alongside Ryan and Matt, who have done and will continue to do outstanding public service for Newtown and its residents.

Endorsing Republican District 2 LC Candidates A letter from Pat Llodra.

I join with Ryan in opposing additional taxation on Newtown residents to fund the Initiative. While expanding transportation options and reducing emissions are laudable goals, the town and state can better address these through working to refocus CDOT's priorities and to insure that existing transportation funds are being appropriated wisely.

Thank you to the Patch for publishing this candidate profile! Thanks also to Tim Muckell for his kind words of endorsement in yesterday's Bee. I look forward to continuing to get the word out as we approach November 2.

Charles Gardner For Newtown Legislative Council, District 2 Charles Gardner shared views with Patch about running for Newtown Legislative Council, District 2.

The Newtown Republican Town Committee put on a delightful meet and greet event yesterday afternoon, complete with notable guests, music, drinks, a delicious Oktoberfest menu from Full Bloom Catering LLC and a raffle. My party guest, seven year-old James Gardner, appreciated most of all the thoughtful variety of kids' games and activities.

Our slate of town candidates, in the first of two photos, was grateful to receive encouragement from the state candidates and officials who spoke, and everyone looked to be having a great time. A very big thank you is owed to everyone who helped plan, organize and host the event.

What a perfect morning for the Newtown Republican Town Committee Meet & Greet by the General Store! It was a pleasure to speak to everyone who came out to meet the great group of candidates that are running this year. Thanks to all who helped to put together and set up the event.

Had a great time at the Newtown Arts Festival today with Kathy and the boys! We stopped by the Newtown Republican Town Committee booth where Michele Buzzi kindly took this photo. I look forward to being back on Sunday!

Thank you to the Newtown Republican Town Committee for nominating me as a candidate for the Legislative Council in District 2. I'm grateful for the opportunity to serve a town which I am proud to call home and which has given so much to me and my family over the past five years. One benefit of the scale of local government is the ability to meet so many district residents in person, and I look forward to being a listening ear for the concerns of the community in the weeks ahead.

The high cost of living in our state, and our area in particular, is without a doubt one of the largest challenges facing Newtown's residents. Newtowners expect, and deserve, a town government that appreciates the financial burdens on both young and old and keeps that foremost in mind when approaching critical financial decisions.

How Much You Need To Earn To Live 'Comfortably' In CT It doesn't come as a surprise that Connecticut is expensive, but the difference between areas is pretty stark.

It was only two years ago that, in the midst of a state budget crisis, Newtown faced drastic reductions in Education Cost Sharing (ECS) grants that would have resulted in state education aid to the town plummeting from over $5 million to under $1 million. Thanks in no small part to the efforts of a local legislative team that included Ryan Knapp and which went to Hartford to testify before the General Assembly, the cuts were averted.

While the ECS funding has remained in place for the time being, projections show Connecticut returning to substantial budget deficits as early as 2021, within the upcoming Legislative Council term. If elected, I will be a staunch opponent of any efforts by the Lamont administration to balance the state budget on the backs of Newtown taxpayers, in effect penalizing our residents for prudently managing their town's finances.

Thanks to Chamber of Commerce of Newtown, Inc., FO Newtown Sr. and the League of Women Voters of Northern Fairfield County for hosting this event at the new Community Center, and to everyone who turned out to meet the candidates!

One notable part of Newtown's legacy infrastructure is the track of the old Maybrook Line, a railway which once ran from Maybrook, NY to Derby, CT via Danbury. Although it only briefly carried passenger traffic with local stops in Hawleyville, Newtown (on Church Hill Road), Botsford, Monroe and Stevenson, the line was never fully decommissioned and today still carries freight under the ownership of the Housatonic Railroad. Just last month, Danbury obtained approval for a feasibility study for restoring passenger service on this line from Southeast station, in New York, to Danbury, which if achieved would bring a connection to the Harlem Line to within just a few miles of Newtown.

The photo below I took just north of where the track crosses Old Farm Road, east of Queen Street. Also included is a graphic which shows part of the Maybrook Line (the dotted red line) overlaid on a map of rush hour traffic along the I-84 corridor. Any long-term transportation plan for this corridor, and particularly Newtown, needs to consider both rail and bus rapid transit both to break the gridlock on I-84 and for economic development.

Jeff Capeci, who is running for re-election as Selectman, joined me, Cathy Reiss (D1), Deb Zukowski (BOE) and William DeRosa (D1, the photographer) for some door-to-door campaigning in District 1 yesterday on a perfect fall afternoon.

In yesterday's Hartford Business Journal, Eric Person opines that "[o]ne of the biggest trends [in reducing new home construction in Connecticut] is shifting demographics. . . . During the past decade, people who would sell their starter home and move to their next home left the market. This not only removed a level of new construction for the move up, but did not open up the inventory of starter homes for people to purchase their first home."

That builders cannot construct new "starter homes" is taken for granted, but this wasn't the case in the past, when Newtown built hundreds of modest bungalows, capes and ranch homes which were marketed at entry-level buyers. Today, however, the cheapest new homes on the market, apart from age-restricted options, are no less than $500,000.

Starting in the early 1990s, Newtown's planners began implementing regulations that made land subdivision more onerous and expensive, including increasing minimum lot sizes, deducting slopes and wetlands from allowable acreage and restricting the use of flag lots. Though justified by environmental concerns, these rules accelerated the sprawl of development across Newtown's farmland and increased the length of car trips while at the same time raising housing costs and multiplying road maintenance expenses.

Newtown's challenge for the present, underlined by falling school enrollments and rising mill rates, is to create a new planning vision which embraces lower-cost housing that makes efficient use of existing infrastructure while increasing the grand list to the benefit of all town residents.

https://www.hartfordbusiness.com/article/tariffs-slow-growth-hamper-cts-struggling-homebuilding-industry

Tariffs, slow growth hamper CT’s struggling homebuilding industry Eric Person, CEO of the Home Builders & Remodelers Association of Central Connecticut,, talks about the various challenges his members and industry face amid the state’s lackluster demand for new home construction.

To appreciate just how exorbitant these costs are, note that the cost per mile to add a single lane to I-95 along the Stamford/Fairfield corridor ($113m) is comparable to what Madrid, Spain, spends to build a mile of tunneled subway ($150m). The $7 billion requested to reconfigure the Mixmaster interchange in Waterbury is equivalent to the combined grand lists of Newtown, Southbury and Bethel, and would be sufficient to fully fund Newtown's school system for 90 years. The estimated 2,000-3,000 new jobs projected to be created as a result of that project (according to CDOT) works out to around $3 million dollars per job.

The Public Deserves an Explanation for ConnDOT’s Absurd Construction Costs | Manhattan Institute Gov. Ned Lamont has released a transportation plan that sets up the defining fight of his first year in Hartford. The plan authorizes tolls on state highways and dedicates the revenue, estimated at $800 million per year, to nine enumerated highway projects. It also directs the Connecticut...

Reverie Brewing Company, one of Newtown's newest businesses and its first brewery, is hosting The Newtown Bee's candidates meet and greet next Monday at 6 pm. You're invited to join me and other candidates for Legislative Council as well as those running for many other town offices. I hope to see you there!

Cathy Reiss and I joined forces to sell tickets on the second day of the Fall Festival at the Fairfield Hills campus with help from Newtown Parks and Recreation's RoseAnn Reggiano and Amy Mangold. Cathy, along with William DeRosa, is also running for District 1 Legislative Council.

I don't know about you, but it's astonishing to me that as Connecticut's home prices and property taxes drive young and old alike out of the state at the rate of nearly 400 per day, our governor celebrates tax breaks given to construct beach houses in Westport! Connecticut's and Fairfield County's housing problems can't even begin to be solved if this is the focus of the state's leaders.

Instead of tax breaks for the wealthiest citizens excused by an appeal to a green agenda, our state and our towns need housing strategies that are capable of giving our young families, seniors and others the sense that they are wanted and that they have a future here. Image taken from Twitter.

We were fortunate to have perfect weather for this year's Walk to End Alzheimer's at Western Connecticut State University's Westside Campus, where I had the pleasure of walking with State Representative Mitch Bolinsky, John and Vicki Bocuzzi and Deborra Zukowski to honor my grandmother, Doris.

From the CT Examiner comes a detailed look at one town's zoning code that is applicable to many of Connecticut's municipalities. From the article: “There are many mismatches between how land has historically been used and how it is zoned. Further, there are also mismatches between the future vision, and how it is zoned,” said Jason Vincent, the director of planning in Stonington. “We often get the worst-case scenario because we are not willing to have a conversation about anything – assuming an investment idea will go away, or worse, that the current zoning is correct.”

In Newtown, the zoning code creates so many "mismatches" between the regulations and existing land uses that entire neighborhoods have been rendered legally non-conforming. In the southwestern quadrant of the Borough, for example, over 85% of homes sit on lots smaller than the required one-acre minimum. Creating new lots similar to the sizes prevalent as recently as the 1960s and 70s is today forbidden in Newtown, and recent development proposals have instead arisen from deep-pocketed investors with the resources to propose personalized rezonings of specific parcels. Vincent's perspective, and the perspectives of other Connecticut planners quoted in the article, urge us to think about these issues in a comprehensive and forward-looking manner.

https://ctexaminer.com/2019/09/17/70-years-at-odds-with-local-zoning-in-southeast-connecticut/?utm_content=bufferd5d6d&utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook.com&utm_campaign=buffer&fbclid=IwAR1Ha3V0uDzjckeNXsXNU-HBWuCHx_URL_1HhHuoikeNiEZM1bcwpvsCMeQ

70 Years at Odds with Local Zoning in Southeast Connecticut But in reality, Lynde Street didn’t suddenly become commercial. In fact, Mitchell’s side of the street was zoned commercial in 1948 when zoning rules were first put in place in Old Saybrook, explained Christina Costa, who serves as the zoning enforcement officer for the town.

While the focus is often placed on spending per student when it comes to the town school system, this subject can't be considered in isolation from Newtown's falling public school enrollment. Since 2006, total enrollment has declined over 26%, a much more dramatic drop than the state's 6%. Town education budgets, as shown below in inflation-adjusted terms, have been largely stable since 2005, but decreasing student numbers have caused per-student spending to continue to rise. Falling enrollment, in turn, has been the result of a 60% decline in Newtown births since the late 1990s and a collapse in new residential construction after the mid-2000s, among other factors.

There are of course many other things which influence the size of the budget, not least of which are unfunded state mandates, but these numbers undermine the claim heard in some quarters that school resources are stretched to their limit. The current system, with nearly 1,500 students less than just 13 years ago, clearly has room for growth within the existing framework.

Newtown faces unique challenges in maintaining and repairing its roads due to a high ratio of road miles to population for a town its size. While many smaller towns have even higher ratios, the state funds a much higher proportion of their highway budgets. For instance, Connecticut funds around 20% of Cornwall's highway spending, while contributing around 6% to Newtown's.

Even the smaller towns adjoining Newtown, however, have lower ratios despite their lesser size. Compare Newtown's linear feet of paved road per resident (44.5) to Southbury's (34.5), Monroe's (36.4) and Bethel's (23.3). These ratios have consequences for town budgets and, in turn, for mill rates and local property tax burdens. Data for the chart is taken from the Connecticut Department of Transportation and Department of Public Health.

Had fun marching in this year's Labor Day Parade with a great group of candidates. Little Charlie, in the foreground, helped by throwing handfuls of candy to an eager crowd.

Charles C. Gardner updated their website address.