By Brooke Cunningham
We have recently heard repeatedly of the dangers to the kids on the covered bridge this summer. There have been estimates presented of many tens of thousands of dollars for correcting the design flaw resulting from the reconstruction. Finally, good old-fashioned common sense showed up in the form of Mike Kingsbury with a load of wood and a few tools. He did a handsome job of closing up the gap resulting from the redesign, making the bridge safer for the young adventurers continuing the tradition of climbing around on the bridge and playing in the river.
I thanked Mike every time I drove through the bridge for his efforts and I am surprised that there weren’t more thanks for him in the paper. He did after all save the town many, many thousands of dollars by just handling the job. Thanks again, Mike!
Now it appears that the town is going to save us from another new danger. Recently, it has been declared that jumping off the roof of the bridge is dangerous, although nobody seems to be able to remember a single accident with it in decades. The solution? Put a metal roof on the bridge. I doubt it will stop the longtime tradition of jumping off the roof and, if suddenly, the shingle roof is dangerous, what do we think will happen when it is metal, surely slippery when wet? We saw what unforeseen consequences one redesign of the bridge produced. Personally, I would rather repair the damaged shingles every few years than put a historically detrimental, industrially unattractive and potentially dangerous metal roof on our beautiful, old, historic bridge.
On top of that, evidently, we are going to spend more money on a pocket park by the bridge. It appears that there are funds available which we can get by hiring a project engineer first and then spending 10 percent of the total cost of his project, plus paying for maintenance every year going forward. Really? Has no one from the town administration looked at how much people are enjoying the river the way it is?
What is with all of this spending? It seems that we have become a town determined to raise our taxes yearly by spending money on sidewalks we don’t need, parks that are lovely and useful as is, Flemer field that we can’t do anything with, the recreation field that would take 100 years at our current lease rate to break even on ... all because state funds are available. We talk about how high our tax rates are, but we allow this absurd level of spending to continue.
I am sure that I am not the only one who is angry that our children can’t afford to live here already and yet we are allowing this to continue. Instead of applying for money from the state for things that we don’t need and have to maintain forever afterward, why not start applying for grants that grow businesses and support startups, develop intern programs and provide education within the community? I had always hoped that this was a place where my children could grow up and stay, but the current mindset of this town administration is making that nearly impossible. A very sad state of affairs for our children and for us.
So, thank you, Mike Kingsbury, for reminding us that we can, in fact, take care of some things ourselves.
Maybe we can label that the beginning of a trend. Instead of spending money on an unneeded pocket park, and Waitsfield already has thousands of acres of land (which then come off the tax base...), let’s adopt Mike’s way. Let’s give a local garden club some spending money to make the old foundation pretty; let’s give someone local some funds to build us a picnic table and a few benches to put there. We have plenty of talent and skills right here at home that we could invest in. We might even find someone local who could put shingles on our beautiful, old bridge rather than industrialize it!
Cunningham lives in Waitsfield.
