As the world struggles to wean itself off of fossil fuels, the town of Hamden is taking the initiative to try and go green in a new event.
Photo from Town of Hamden Facebook
On Saturday, November 4, Hamden will hold its first-ever “Environmental Services Day.” The event is being held to encourage people to be more eco-friendly with food trucks, free electronics recycling, paper shredding, and a chance to learn about the benefits of renewable solar energy.
Haley Starvaggi, Hamden’s Solid Waste & Recycling Coordinator, said that she was inspired to address environmental concerns after many residents wanted to find an area to shred mass amounts of paper.
The contents of the event, such as hiring an outside company to shred large quantities of paper, were originally planned to be included in the farmer’s market held earlier in the year. When that did not pan out, this snowballed into an event that could educate the town about ways they could do their part in environmental conservation.
“The focus of the event is two things. It’s to reducing energy consumption at their house, as well as take care of recycling, some of those things you can’t put in your curbside bin… you are not advised to put shredded paper into your recycling bin. If you have important documents to shred, this is a more environmentally-friendly way to do it,” said Starvaggi.
Energy Efficiency Coordinator Kathleen Schomaker said that while she is not sure how much money can be saved in the average Hamden house by going solar, you can save money based on how many products using fossil fuels you convert into renewable energy.
An example of this Schomaker gave was that if you converted your house to solar power and then traded your car in for an energy efficient electric car, you would save more money and resources than if you converted your house without getting rid of your gas-powered car.
The event is being held in conjunction with Solarize CT, a partnership between the government and a company that installs solar panels, which is trying to convert people in Connecticut to solar power. They do this by selecting panel installers and help offset costs of converting a home to solar-powered energy with special financing options.
This is not the first time that Hamden has experimented with more efficient ways of fueling the town. According to New Haven Register, Hamden unanimously approved the construction of 4,000 solar panels in the Wintergreen Avenue landfill by True Green Capital, which will help save the town $600,000 in energy costs over 20 years.
Mayor Curt Leng released a statement praising Solarize CT’s mission and encouraged residents to find out if their house is able to be converted to solar power.
“The Town of Hamden is very happy to bring Solarize CT back to our residents for a second round. Hamden is committed to sustainability and this program is a great way for our residents to become involved and take control of their energy bills … It truly is a great way to save money and help our environment too!” said Leng.
Starvaggi said that if it is successful she would like it to happen annually.
“I think our ultimate goal is to attract people with the paper shredding and electronics recycling, and then while they’re here doing those things they would want to do no matter what, then they’ll stop by and get some more information that might get them thinking about improvements they might make around their house to reduce energy consumption,” said Starvaggi.
Environmental Services Day will happen on November 4 from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. at 2750 Dixwell Avenue in Hamden, Connecticut.
The Summit Learning Platform is a free online program the Cheshire Public School District brought into the student curriculum this year. Summit Learning is centered on personalized learning and progress tracking for students. This program allows teachers to customize their instructions to fit student needs and build strong relationships between the teacher, student and his or her family.
Cheshire Public School Superintendent, Shawn Parkhurst, brought in Summit Learning for grades five, six and seven. As of now Cheshire Public Schools is the only district in Connecticut that is using the program. Historically, Summit Learning got together with Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of Facebook, who helped get engineers to build the platform. This program was first used out of a charter school in California and some schools in Washington before going national.
The students from Cheshire access Summit via Google Chromebooks, however, you can access Summit through any computer or tablet. Cheshire does not use Summit full time for every student in every classroom.
–Doolittle School located on 735 Cornwall Avenue in Cheshire uses Summit to help teach social studies and science. This school’s highest education level is the sixth grade.
–Chapman School located on 38 County Club Road in Cheshire used Summit to help teach science and math. This school’s highest education level is the sixth grade.
–Norton School located on 414 North Brooksvale Road in Cheshire uses Summit for all sixth grade subjects. On the school’s website they highlight technology as being an integral part of their learning environment. Norton uses Smartboards, Chromebooks, iPads and Google apps for student learning. This school’s highest education level is the sixth grade.
–Highland School located on 490 Highland Avenue in Cheshire uses it for two out of the five sixth grade classes.
–Dodd Middle School located on 1000 Park Place in Cheshire is just for seventh and eighth grade. Students are broken up into teams by color. The teal color is the only team who uses Summit, especially for math.
Some may argue that Summit is cutting edge and can be personalized to each students needs. Others may say it replaces the teacher role in the classroom and allows for students to have too much screen time. Another argument to investigate is what kind of school districts use Summit. Summit may be used in challenged school districts where achievement is not high. Some schools may offer this charter program for various students who need to do better by taking more responsibility of their learning and adapt skills to be more independent.
Parents in the Cheshire School District have voiced their concerns whether or not Summit is necessary and safe for their children.
One parent says his daughter at Dodd Middle School uses Summit for all her subjects.
“When I talked to the superintendent, who is really responsible for bringing Summit to the schools, he basically said last year in the spring of 2017 he brought it back to the school and talked to various teachers about who was interested about learning about the platform.”
This parent said that he doesn’t think there is a lot of data to support the claims that Summit is a successful program for student learning.
“The schools that are using it are not schools like Cheshire, who have good teachers on its own. I am still on the fence about Summit. I am trying to understand if we really need this yet. It is so new and for next year to potentially have the whole school district using it doesn’t make much sense.”
Summit is divided up into different pillars to how the education system works.
Image from Summit Learning Website
One is personalized learning time. Students work through various modules with learning objectives that has provided content so they can work at their own pace. The module will have notes, articles and YouTube videos to help them study and understand the material before they take a quiz. To move onto the next section, the student must score at least 80 percent.
Two is mentoring time to help students set goals with a teacher at the school. On Summit the teacher can add or subtract material Summit uses and can even display their own material. Students are responsible to set goals for what they want to accomplish each day or week. This is a way for students to be responsible for their own learning.
Three is the classroom. This is part of the student education geared towards critical learning, complex thinking, project and presentation based learning. The material going on during computer time is supposed to correlate to what’s going on in the classroom setting led by the teacher.
Another parent expressed that she went to the schools informational sessions about Summit. She felt if this program was used properly it sounded worthwhile. She said that “personalized,” and “cognitive learning,” were common buzzwords the district would use to sell the program.
“My first concern was the advertisements,” she said. “A lot of the articles the students use have pop ups from third parties, like Web MD, which is concerning. The school district had to put an add blocker onto Summit. These kids are 10 and 11 and on the side of their articles there are links to other concerning topics.
This parent said that whenever she talks to someone in the community there is a different answer and a different opinion. She also said that she was shocked Shawn Parkhurst did not know that these articles were on the platform.
“The superintendent said he would go through each article to approve it appropriateness,” she said. “It is a concern they didn’t even realize this was a problem in the first place. It is a big waste of time that they have created all of this work for themselves since we had a good curriculum before. It was a mess about how the district put it out.”
Image from the document Parkhurst sent to families surrounding the myths and facts of Summit
Image from the document Parkhurst sent to families surrounding the myths and facts of Summit
Image from the document Parkhurst sent to families surrounding the myths and facts of Summit
Three parents said that their children have been complaining about the program, saying that it is too much information for them to handle. They said that this program has caused their children to be nervous about going to school in fear that they will not be able to keep up with their peers.
One mother said that she feels the overuse of screen time in the classroom is detrimental to her son’s development.
“Friends of mine who work in education and work with kids think these students are too young to work with this material and filter what is or is not important,” she said. “They need that face to face interaction with other students and their teacher. When kids are still developing socially and emotionally, still forming habits and commination, they need to see things first hand for their development.”
Shawn Parkhurst said he spoke with teachers in the district and has held information sessions with parents when he decided to bring Summit Learning into the Cheshire curriculum.
“We have had personalized learning as a strategic plan for the past 10 years,” he said. “We have had many teachers who are using Google classrooms and Chromebooks in previous years. We shared it with our team and they shared information about it when it was still at its building level. Teachers saw it as a way to enhance what they were doing and move forward. There was an application process to see if they have the minds and philosophy for this. There is also only development with that.”
When we asked Parkhurst how he felt the school should deal with concerned parents, he advises families to not rely on online research and work directly with their children.
“Regarding the parents feedback, we have been transparent from the beginning that we will provide education night for parents,” he said. Any parent that has requested or reached out to us, we have met with them individually. We recommend that they go to the child itself and to their school instead of researching and finding general information online.”
On Nov. 6 there will be a board of education curriculum committee meeting on 29 Main Street at the board of education offices. The Summit Learning program will be one of the topics covered so attendees can ask questions and have a discussion.
Melissa Kaplan, Hamden resident and English professor at Quinnipiac University, contemplated putting her two children in private school after being told the school district was not good enough.
“I kind of second guessed myself and said ‘What are you doing?’ The whole point is not to run away, but to make the schools stronger themselves and to not participate in that problem, but actually do something about it,” said Kaplan.
Twelve years later, she is making changes to fix those problems and running as a democratic candidate for a four year term as an elected official in the Board of Education (BOE) in the upcoming elections, happening on Nov. 7.
Alongside making changes in the Hamden school district, she is changing the lives of many students at Quinnipiac University.
About three years ago, Kaplan became the Associate Director of the Honors Program at Quinnipiac. Now she is the Interim Director of the program.
Since her move to the town, Kaplan has been actively involved in her children’s education as well as the greater Hamden school district.
Kaplan was sworn in on the BOE in September to fill in a seat that was recently vacated due to an unexpected resignation of another BOE member. She applied for the position with this letter of intent.
Kaplan has always been political; she believes that teaching itself is political, and when it comes to the upcoming elections in Hamden, she believes anything is possible.
“I think one of the things we’ve learned from this past election is that there are no guarantees,” she said. “Hamden is a traditionally blue town and out of the nine districts, eight have traditionally been democratic, but it’s not to say that we don’t have a tough race ahead of us.”
Although the elections are approaching soon, Kaplan has been actively involved with her political career outside of the race.
She recently took her ‘intersexual feminism ideology’ and her activist actions outside of the classroom in various ways.
She was involved with the BOE before running for the position, as well as being apart of other groups such as the Hamden Parent Supporting Education Excellence (SEE) and The Connecticut Parent-Teacher Association (PTA).
One of her duties, due to the current political situation, was ensuring the safety of transgender and non-binary students in the Hamden school district.
“You can’t cherry pick your issues,” said Kaplan. “If you are going to stand there and fight against sexism, that is intersexual, and so it’s also fighting homophobia, racism, classism and all the various classes of ‘isms’ that exist. So for me, advocacy was really very important.”
Kaplan has only been apart of the BOE for less than two months, however, she is very excited about it and looks forward to working on fixing issues within the community.
“[We are] Getting different initiatives passed and dealing with issues of diversity and inequality in our school system and also focusing right now on the state budget and funding and making sure that our students’ needs are taken care of,” she said.
Kaplan has had a voice in the Hamden community as well as within the Quinnipiac community, so she fights for those who do not but need their voices to be heard.
Although the BOE deals with different topics, one of Hamden’s biggest issues of the moment is the financial situation.
“We have a bunch of different committees, some of them deal with curriculum and policy. Others deal with finance, and that’s one I had a lot to learn about,” said Kaplan. “I think that’s also the most important one because we are dealing with a lot of budget cuts and so we need to find a way to make the most out of the little that we’re given.”
Jody Ian Goeler, the Hamden Superintendent of Schools, proposed this budget for the 2017-2018 school year.
Other issues include special needs education and sexism within the school district.
“I think there needs to be initiatives to really provide equity and equal opportunities for students,” she said. “One of my projects also, I’m sure it’ll be met with some resistance, but I’d like to get rid of the sexist dress code.”
Kaplan is the newest member in the BOE and believes she has a lot to learn from her colleagues, who have connections and knowledge and are helping her fight her battles.
“It’s very humbling to be mentored by these people,” said Kaplan.
When it comes to balancing her schedule between the BOE and being a full-time employee at Quinnipiac, she laughs and says it is stressful, however, so far she has been able to manage.
“I think it’s kind of dealing with competing jobs in terms of my time,” she said. “But I think they are also complimentary as well – supporting students in the classroom and advising students, and then supporting students in my school district.”
Although she cannot be in two places at the same time, she makes time for both jobs and for all students she has been involved with, especially her students in the Honors Program at Quinnipiac.
“I absolutely love the students in the Honors Program and it’s a privilege to work with them,” Kaplan said. “As much as students have learned from me, I have learned from them as well.”
Kaplan sees many activist actions coming from her students at the university and she feels proud to think she might have had something to do with their initiative and courage.
“I’m always moved by their acts of activism,” she said. “It’s something as singular as a student coming out in class for the very first time – the courage, the bravery. Or students who create organizations on campus where they feel the need for something where the school isn’t perhaps feeling a need for them so they create that space and that arena for themselves.”
Another thing she loves about her students is their passion for knowledge.
“They are not there for the grade, they’re there to learn and what meaningful learning is something that not only just happens in the classroom, but it transcends,” said Kaplan.
Kaplan is also very passionate about creating a connection between her two jobs, therefore, creating a connection between Quinnipiac students and students from the Hamden school district.
In the past, students from the Honors Program at Quinnipiac have served as mentors for students at Hamden Middle School and Kaplan wants to expand this program.
“I would love to branch it out and have students outside of the Honors Program to mentor in the elementary schools and even the high schools,” said Kaplan.
Kaplan, whether she is working for the BOE or Quinnipiac, wants to maintain the relationship between Hamden schools and Quinnipiac and hopes that more students and faculty take initiative to make that happen.
The 2017 Hamden mayoral race between current mayor Curt Leng and underdog republican candidate Salman Hamid is coming to a close on November, 7, and the results could potentially impact Quinnipiac’s relationship with the town. Since being elected in 2015, Leng says that the relationship between the town and Quinnipiac University has greatly improved and that he regularly communicates with QU’s president John Lahey.
“We meet, we talk, we text,” he said. “We have a regular communication now and that’s really nine tenths of the whole game, because if you’re communicating then you can say ‘hey I have a problem with this and this’ or ‘hey can you help me out with this or this’ and (it’s) going both ways.”
Leng said he has seen this growing communication in other areas of the town as well. For example, he mentioned better communication this past yearbetween the Hamden police and Quinnipiac’s public safety.
The expansion of the student body and increasing amount of student housing, however, is still an issue between Leng and Lahey, but Leng says they have been finding the balance between the town of Hamden and QU.
“It’s a balance of trying to figure out how you can have rules that are appropriate and legal that kind of incentivize locations that make more sense for student development period,” Leng said. “So it’s a matter of trying to plan these things out and the more that you work, I think, with the neighbors, university, town (and) students together, which we haven’t perfected yet.”
Hamid says if he is elected as mayor he will improve Hamden’s relationship with Quinnipiac by discussing housing with the incoming president.
“They should never have been barred from enjoying the benefits Hamden has to offer.”
He added that he will invite QU students back into Hamden for shopping and dining.
“…By working (with) the president of the university to smooth over the issues that have caused division such as student housing. We will use QU security to help ease tensions between neighbors.”
Money
Leng says that throughout his time as mayor, town financing has always held a major role.
“…We really focus on (it) a lot and we’ve been able to strengthen the town’s finances quite a bit,” Leng said.
He says that in regards of improvements in town financing, there is a lot for everyone to be proud of.
“Our bond rating has been upheld,” Leng said. “We had the first budget without a tax increase in ten years this past year, so that took a lot of work and spent a lot of time with our delegation making sure that our our state funding is fingers crossed still coming through.”
Photo Courtesy of Dorah Labatte
As for Hamid, key issues include high taxes, energy efficiency, animal shelter construction, equality in education and resident participation in spending for local government.
“You probably heard over and over of residents complaining about Quinnipiac student housing and so on and so forth,” he said. “That situation wouldn’t have happened if taxes were sustainable in town, because people have either foreclosed on their property or they rent it out to students because there is no other option because they can’t sell their homes.”
One can clearly see the difference in numbers and that on certain issues the two candidates don’t see eye to eye. All will be decided next week on Election Day Nov. 7. Who will you vote for?
As the debris and fallen tree branches are cleared off the local roads in Hamden, citizens will be preparing their costumes to celebrate Halloween on Tuesday evening.
Fortunately, for hopeful trick-or-treaters the rain is expected to be out of sight by Monday afternoon, and there is currently no chance of rain throughout Tuesday, according to local weather reports. However, for those planning on strolling the neighborhoods for candy, you may want to incorporate a jacket into your costume, as temperatures are expected to drop to 35 degrees during the evening hours.
Screenshot from Weather.com
For anyone laying off the sweets and looking for a Halloween scare, Creeperum Haunted House on Marne Street will be open for business and tickets are available on its website. The attraction is recommended for citizens over 13 years of age.
While local firefighters are working to extinguish a transformer fire on Whitney Avenue due to last night’s storm, they also recommend that citizens keep their Halloween decorations away from open flames and heaters, specifically cornstalk materials.
To keep trick-or-treaters safe, stores like Walgreens have helped put together a nutritional guide so parents know what candies to avoid if their children have specific allergies.
With sunset expected before 6p.m., a popular safety precaution for children has been glowing reflectors that can be worn to make trick-or-treaters more visible to local drivers. Many of these safety reflectors are Halloween-themed, and can be found at Party City in Hamden.
Alumni celebration at Quinnipiac kicks off this weekend
By Ryan Chichester
Quinnipiac University will be recognizing its past students and graduates this Friday and Saturday for Alumni Weekend across campus.
According to the Quinnipiac Alumni website, more than 1,000 former students and their families and friends attended last year’s festivities on campus. Festivities included alumni softball games, family block parties in the Alumni Gardens and a tailgate party at York Hill prior to the men’s ice hockey team’s game against Northeastern. The tailgate featured beer tasting, music and a photo booth to capture the memories.
This year, the tailgate will be held prior to the men’s hockey match against Colgate on Saturday night. The weekend is expected to attract both Braves and Bobcats, even those who just recently tossed their hats at graduation.
“I’m very excited for alumni weekend,” 2017 journalism graduate Gabbi Riggi said. ” Not only is it exciting as a recent graduate to come back and see the people that are still in school, but to see the growth that has already happened since I left.”
The university sent out postcards to members of the Alumni Association and advertised the event through multiple social media platforms.
Strong winds, heavy rain and flash flooding impacted many towns and cities across Connecticut Sunday night.
Trees and power lines came down as a result of the severe weather, which came on the five year anniversary of Hurricane Sandy. Eversource Energy is reporting that over 139,000 customers in Connecticut did not have power as of 10:41 a.m. Monday. An additional 4,900 United Illuminating customers are without power, 507 of them are Hamden residents.
A map showing the number of Eversource Energy customers in Connecticut without power as of 10:47 a.m. Monday.
A map showing the number of United Illuminating customers in Connecticut without power as of 10:38 a.m. Monday.
The storm debris created difficult driving conditions and many schools near Quinnipiac closed. Hamden, Cheshire and North Haven public schools closed Monday, according to WTNH.
Despite there being much debris on campus, Quinnipiac did not close or have a delay. Several residence halls have been leaking including Irma, Dana, Ledges, Perlroth and Larson on the Mount Carmel campus and Crescent on the York Hill Campus. The Athletic Center, School of Business and Arnold Bernhard Library are also leaking, according to the Department of Facilities.
A Facilities worker holds a bucket up to a leaking roof in the Dana Residence Hall.
The Hamden Fire Department responded to twenty-six storm related emergency calls overnight in Hamden.
Hamden Police also responded to several transformer fires overnight, one happening on Whitney Avenue near Walgreens.
For more updates on the impact of the storm, follow HQ on Twitter @hq_press
The 2017 Atlantic hurricaneseason has already proven to be extremely active and extremely dangerous. So far this year there have been 15 storms, 10 hurricanes and six major hurricanes (category 3 or stronger). These weather systems have resulted in more than 400 deaths, and more than $188 billion in damages. Connecticut has been spared the worst, but there is still a month to go in the season.
Connecticut’s coastline (photo via Google Earth)
On October 29, 2012, Hurricane Sandy tested the limits of Connecticut’s emergency preparedness programs. According to the National Weather Service, Sandy was a “worse-case scenario for storm surge for coastal regions.” By the time Sandy got to New Jersey, it was downgraded to a post-tropical cyclone, but the storm surge hit Connecticut right at high tide, causing massive amounts of flooding.
The Tropical Cyclone Report created by the National Hurricane Center reports that there was storm surge over nine feet in New Haven, resulting in floodwaters as high as six feet above ground level. Approximately 3,000 homes were damaged, and the state sustained more than $300 million in damages.
Five years later, is the state of Connecticut ready for another hurricane… or not?
Rick Fontana, Deputy Director of Emergency Operations – New Haven
“Our biggest fear in the city of New Haven is a hurricane,” says Rick Fontana, Deputy Director of Emergency Operations in New Haven. “It’s number one. It really is. We’re on the coast, and I think we’re pretty resilient, but when storm surge hits … that becomes a very significant issue.”
In the event of a hurricane, Fontana would work to develop strategies that will lessen the impact of a storm, plan and prepare for different types of storms, and help with the response to and recovery from a storm.
Fontana also serves as one of five regional coordinators in the state for emergency management. His job there is to communicate with the 30 towns in Connecticut’s Region 2 throughout an emergency, and relay information up to the state coordinators.
Quinnipiac’s Plan for Emergencies
Quinnipiac University, located in Hamden, Connecticut, falls under Region 2. Edgar Rodriguez is the chief of Public Safety and is also co-captain of the emergency management team at Quinnipiac. The team is made up of about a dozen members from various university departments, including public safety, facilities, health services, and academics. Rodriguez says the team has extensive plans when it comes to storms.
“We’ve come up with an emergency evacuation plan and we talk about if there’s a hurricane or a storm coming, what are we doing, how are we preparing for it,” Rodriguez says, adding that although the plans haven’t been approved by the state, they are still important to have.
When a storm comes, those plans get put into action.
The team begins a 24-hour-to-landfall. Members track the storm, gather information from the state and submit that information to Quinnipiac President John Lahey and Provost Mark Thompson, who ultimately decide whether students should stay at school or be sent home.
Once that decision is made, the emergency management team starts prepping all departments for landfall. Quinnipiac’s emergency management team only goes through the regional coordinators for assistance if it’s a minor, isolated emergency – such as power outages on one specific campus. In the case of an event as major as a hurricane, the protocol is to bypass the region and work directly with the state.
“The rule of thumb is every town or city should be able to sustain themselves for 72 hours,” Rodriguez says, explaining that Quinnipiac acts as its own sort of town for those 72 hours after landfall, with the emergency management team in charge. “Then after that, you start getting assistance from the state. But the entire time that’s happening, you’re communicating back and forth with the state.”
All the information goes up to the state emergency operations center in Hartford, is organized and then is sent out to the public.
“Every hour [the state is] sending us an update on the storm and we take that update and send it to everybody,” says Rodriguez. He feels that this system of organizing the information is a good way to keep consistency and keep everybody on the same page at a time when there could be a lot going on at once.
A building-Block Approach
Dan McElhinney, federal preparedness coordinator and national preparedness division director for the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), explains that everyone takes a building-block approach for providing and receiving assistance after 72 hours.
“At some point [the town] may have to bring in mutual aid from surrounding communities,” McElhinney says. “When the mutual aid has been exhausted, they’ll ask for county level assistance, then they go to the state … then the state will declare a state of emergency. The governor then gets special powers to extend additional dollars to direct other state agencies to assist the local community. When the state no longer has the capacity, the governor will ask the president for an emergency or major disaster declaration. That’s when FEMA gets involved.”
FEMA’s regions (photo via FEMA.gov)
FEMA is divided into 10 regions, and McElhinney is in charge of FEMA Region 1, which includes all New England states. He says although FEMA can respond in numbers that would outweigh the state help 100-to-1, they are there to support, not to supplant.
“Basically under the Stafford Act, we pretty much have tasking authority over all the agencies and departments to assist the state in response and recovery,” McElhinney says. “We provide a lot of technical assistance, but we are not there to take over.”
Mandatory training
Not only does FEMA provide assistance in the aftermath, but it also provides training services. According to the Quinnipiac website, those who are on the emergency management team have to complete FEMA’s National Incident Management System training. This training is similar to the statewide Emergency Preparedness and Planning Initiative training exercises.
Map of Hurricane Maria on the monitor in the New Haven EOC
“The state of Connecticut has gotten very aggressive on keeping everyone prepared,” Rodriguez says. “Every year in October or November we do a drill. It’s mandatory for every town and every city through the state of Connecticut and the last few years have been some type of a hurricane.”
During the two-day statewide drill, state officials provide updates as if there were a real hurricane approaching. The state sends out maps of the storm and asks participants to respond to ongoing situations.
“You just lost all power in your town, what are you doing? You’ve got multiple trees that are down, what are you doing? Are you opening up a shelter? How are you transporting people? How much help do you have? Is the fire department on standby? And you have to keep reporting back and forth,” Rodriguez says.
Emergency operations center – New Haven
The exercises are meant to be intense, but they’re also meant to replicate a real-life situation so that if and when a hurricane does hit, everyone is prepared. And apparently, you can never be too prepared.
“When a hurricane strikes, people kind of become complacent and never think it’s going to be as bad as it is. We’ve been fortunate, but … our departments on the preparedness level always scale one level higher than we normally would,” says Fontana. “We’re always prepared but we always prepare above and beyond because it’s easier for us to scale back than it is to scale up in the middle of a crisis.”
The training drills are mandatory for cities and towns that want to receive grant money in order to build resiliency in places along the shorelines or rebuild after a weather event occurs.
coastal resiliency and innovative thinking
Giovanni Zinn, city engineer – New Haven (photo via Yale.edu)
Giovanni Zinn, an engineer for the City of New Haven, explains why that grant money is so important.
“There’s a lot more land now and it’s low lying land,” he says. “In the large storms we face two major threats: coastal storm surge, where water is piling up in the harbor and coming up the rivers, and large rain events of six, seven, eight, nine, 10 inches in a short period of time. Where does the water go? When you get both at the same time, you have a particularly bad problem. And there’s no getting around the laws of physics. There are certain situations where you can’t drain the city.”
Zinn says that coastal protection methods — seawalls, living shorelines and storm surge barriers that are employed in some areas of the state — are “extremely expensive” and put financial pressure on local communities. He also said he thinks that those preventative measures are “not really a priority” and the long-term thinking tends to be put on the back burner.
But Guilford town planner George Kral says that hard infrastructure like a seawall is actually discouraged by the state of Connecticut.
“The view is that it doesn’t really solve the problem, it just pushes the problem from one place to another,” Kral says, adding that if anything, the goal is to implement green infrastructure instead.
Towns like Guilford have already completed major projects to raise the lowest-lying roads above flood level, as part of the town’s coastal resiliency plan. According to the plan, “coastal resilience is the ability to resist, absorb, recover from, or adapt to coastal hazards such as sea level rise, increased flooding, and more frequent and intense storm surges.” Kral says the plan has two goals: to educate the public on the the importance of coastal resilience, and to suggest actions local governments could take to make themselves more resilient.
And Guilford isn’t the only place thinking about preventative measures.
David Kooris, Director of the Rebuild by Design and National Disaster Resilience programs (photo via CT.gov)
David Kooris, the Director of the Rebuild By Design and National Disaster Resilience programs for the state Department of Housing, says that after Hurricane Sandy, the federal government reserved about a billion dollars in relief funding to be “competitively awarded to places that demonstrated a new way of recovery that better positioned them to be more resilient for future disasters.”
In 2012, the state of Connecticut had already received $160 million in federal disaster relief money, and was looking for more from the department of housing’s two competitions.
“Teams worked over the course of a few months and put together a proposal to the department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) and to a jury of architects and urban planners to compete for portions of the discretionary funds,” Kooris says about the international Rebuild by Design program. “Seven out of the 10 were awarded funding – the largest being lower Manhattan at $330 million, and the smallest being Bridgeport and the State of Connecticut with $10 million.”
Based on the success of that first program, Kooris says HUD took another chunk of the Sandy money and created a new competition — this time at the national level — which became the National Disaster Resilience program. There were 68 eligible government entities (states, cities and counties) that could enter the competition, and 13 were awarded funding at the end – Connecticut coming in 9th place with $54 million.
Kooris says the purpose of competitively divvying the money up was to “move beyond the standard recovery funding through HUD and FEMA, which more than anything else is just rebuilding.” The programs forced cities and towns to work on disaster prevention, rather than disaster recovery.
“Rarely you get the type of project that is new infrastructure – not repairing what was damaged – and do so in a way that explicitly addresses social and economic vulnerabilities in addition to environmental vulnerabilities,” Kooris says.
Connecticut’s plan involved combining “grey and green approaches” as Kooris puts it, by using “traditional, hard engineered solutions combined with natural solutions that mimic the functions of the environment.” He says that the state is planning to raise roads, build berms and add other green infrastructure to mitigate flooding in Bridgeport, in addition to pinpointing other coastal locations with the greatest number of critical facilities — power plants, roads, hospitals, wastewater treatment — and putting the majority of the investments into protecting those places.
where connecticut stands now
Since Sandy, officials have had five years to revise and strengthen emergency weather response plans.
“We have developed an emergency operation plan that’s worked on on a daily basis,” Fontana says. “Our primary goals … are preparing our residents, making sure that they’re prepared for any type of a disaster and making sure our infrastructure is protected.”
If another hurricane hit tomorrow, there are mixed feelings on whether Connecticut would be ready.
“If it were some kind of extreme storm like a category 5, that is a whole ‘nother ball game. The impact would be severe,” Kral says about the town of Guilford. “Hopefully we’ve done a little better job in terms of planning, but that remains to be seen I guess. If we had 50 inches of rain, we’d have a lot of problems.”
Kooris acknowledges there are still some things that need to be worked on, but for the most part, he says he is “confident that we have implemented targeted infrastructure projects … that reduce risk from future storms.”
As far as Quinnipiac goes, Rodriguez admits “you’re never going to be 100 percent” prepared, but he is confident that the annual mandatory state training has everyone as prepared as they can be to respond.
And in New Haven, Fontana recognizes that a category 3 hurricane “would be devastation to the entire coast” but he is confident in his department, which he says “works every day” and “works hard.”
“We prepare all the time. We plan all the time. We don’t respond all the time, and we don’t recover all the time, but we’re confident that we have the necessary strategies in place to handle a hurricane,” Fontana says.
Adding to his confidence is the fact that FEMA recently awarded the city of New Haven a class 7 rating for flood preparedness and recovery – the highest rating available. Having this rating allows homes in the designated 100-year flood zone to get a 15 percent discount on flood insurance. “So I think that puts it in a nutshell.”
The most important thing through it all? Keeping the lines of communication open, Fontana says, at all times.
“Consistent, timely, good information. I always say, ‘Be first, be right.’”
Curt Leng has been the mayor of Hamden for two and a half years. He was first elected in a special election in May 2015, then ran six months later. Now, he’s running for a third term. HQ Press sat down with Mayor Leng to discuss where he stands on certain issues as well as what he hopes to accomplish if re-elected.
What made you want to become mayor in the first place and why are you deciding to go up for re-election?
I’ve been involved with the town actually for 20 years now. I got involved when I was 20 years old and I ran for council as a 20 year old just coming out of high school, in college traveling back and forth from UConn. I didn’t win my first election that I ran as an independent candidate. And then two years later ran as a Democratic candidate and fortunately I’ve been winning ever since.
I got involved to begin with because actually in high school I had to do ten hours of work on a political campaign. So I went to the local person that was about a mile from my house and found that I really enjoyed it and I enjoyed digging into the issues that people were working on, both the neighborhood and debating them and the pros and the cons and really digging into it.
I learned quickly that you can get involved and you can and people will listen to you and people will you know appreciate the work that you do and you can actually get stuff done even when you’re not in office yet as long as you take that step and kind of open your mouth and get involved. And ever since then I’ve been on that track.
I like working to help people. I find this is one of the one jobs…that you can help somebody every single day. You know a call comes in–hey here’s a problem that I have– you can’t solve everything, there’s no question about that. But usually, several times a day, you’re able to help folks and I think that here at the local level, it’s kind of where the rubber hits the road. There’s things we can actually directly do pretty quickly to help people out.
So you’ve been in Hamden your whole life, correct?
I’m 43, I’ve lived here my whole life, except for when I was at school and my family has been here for a hundred years.
What are some of the initiatives you’ve been able to accomplish in the past two years that you are proud of?
A couple that I’m most proud of have been returning our police to walking beats and bicycle patrols–really focusing on community policing. We hadn’t had walking beats in probably forty years and we have our first walking beat that started two years ago and now we have two regular walking beats and we have 10 different bicycle patrols that go out in all different neighborhoods on the canal, on the shopping area.
Town finances is not necessarily an initiative but it’s one that we really focus on a lot and we’ve been able to strengthen the town’s finances quite a bit. Our bond rating has been upheld. We had the first budget without a tax increase in ten years this past year, so that took a lot of work and spent a lot of time with our delegation making sure that our our state funding is fingers crossed still coming through.
So finances would be number two and number three probably it’s not exactly a specific initiative but I think that there’s a community pride I feel is coming back and I think it’s coming from the ability to communicate more with local government with with I think it’s partly the mayor’s office and I think it’s partly the police department I think it’s partly council members having more interaction with people. And also having a lot more events that people get to go to.
Obviously this doesn’t come easily. What are some of the challenges you faced along the way?
I think every day is like pushing a boulder up a hill. Well, it goes back to finances probably is the main challenge because if the town’s finances aren’t good then it’s kind of the foundation in which everything else is built off of so if the finances are not doing well and if you’re not making sure that the pension is doing better than it was–we have pension reform that’s like three quarters of the way through we have to see that through the end–making sure that your spending is not out of control so that you can keep balancing budgets and keeping the taxes down, you know holding the line of taxes at least. Then you can’t do things like expand bicycle patrols and invest in sidewalks and streets. We’ve done a lot of infrastructure improvement.
In fact in the two and a half years years I’ve been mayor…we’ve paved thirty five miles of road in two and a half years.Fifty-six roads happening right now in the 2017 season and we’ve done probably about a mile of sidewalk so a lot it’s a lot of of infrastructure improvement. Even though we’ve got a lot of roads, I certainly know that we have a lot more to do.
Where would you say the relationship stands now between the town of Hamden and Quinnipiac?
Much improved. You know much, much stronger. I’ve been able to have regular communications with President Lahey. We meet, we talk, we text. Sometimes we’re both busy people and sometimes that ends up being the way that we can connect on certain things. So we have a regular communication now and that’s really nine tenths of the whole game, because if you’re communicating then you can say “hey I have a problem with this and this” or “hey can you help me out with this or this” and going both ways. I think its been a much better situation for everybody because nobody really wants bickering and fighting and and Quinnipiac is a great asset for the town globally. There’s problems with off campus housing sometimes yeah and it’s going to happen with any college in any town USA. Starting last year there was much better communication between our police and the campus security.
How do you facilitate balancing the needs of Quinnipiac students versus the needs of other residents in Hamden?
It’s tough. There’s no be easy black and white you know clear cut type of an answer on this one. You know, encouraging the university to build more housing where it’s fit and where people that will live in the units makes sense and you know there’s another two hundred or so beds that are going to be built up on York Hill which is good. That’ll get a certain number of people in and the truth is that it’s not all of the people off campus at all. It’s a small fraction that make it bad.
There’s many times that I talk with residents and I have someone say actually I students next door and they’re really nice and they came over and chatted and said hey if we have a little party or something on the weekend if it gets too loud would you be able to let me know…people learn how to live in a neighborhood and have a common courtesy for each other.
So it’s a balance of trying to figure out how you can have rules that are appropriate and legal that kind of incentivize locations that make more sense for student development period. So it’s a matter of trying to plan these things out and the more that you work I think with the neighbors, university, town, students together which we haven’t perfected yet; I think you’ll get better and better each year. Because other towns there’s always problems but other towns seem to have perfected it better than we have.
And I talked with folks from Fairfield University as an example and Sacred Heart and it seems like they had very very similar problems thirty years ago or twenty five years ago and you don’t hear much about it at all now so you know trying to follow those models I think is something that we need to spend more time on.
So is there anything you think maybe Quinnipiac can or should be doing differently or students in general?
I think it’s all of us have to really make a concerted effort to do a more formalized town gown committee commission and really commit to having faculty, students, government, residents participate in a positive way so it’s not just an airing of grievances. You know probably quarterly, I would think. And we’ve got kind of a framework of it and it’s something that I’d like to try to accomplish over the next over the next term if I’m still here.
Mayor Leng speaks with Hamden residents during his event titled ‘Mayor’s Night Out’
I went to your event Monday night and you had mentioned SeeClickFix. What are the people in the town of and then concerned about?
Traffic is definitely up there without question…we’ve been doing some traffic calming work so it’s physical improvements to roads. Beyond that, we’ve kicked up enforcement a lot. The enforcement this year compared to last year is we did about 500 enforcement actions in the summer of 2016 and summer of 2017 there was 1388, so almost tripled the number of enforcements and we’re in a bunch more locations with selective enforcement stopping and watching, people go through a light, speed trap, all those type of things.
Graffiti and dumping issues occur in any municipality. If you’re fast with them, then they don’t become a problem if you’re not, they do. So SeeClickFix can be a good tool for that.
Any place that you can kind of get information flow back from residents and from the government to the residents even if it’s not completely productive you know, it’s good. Because the more information flow, the better because people seem to get most frustrated when they don’t know what’s happening.
What do you think sets you apart from Salman Hamid and why do you think people should vote for you instead of him?
Record of accomplishment that they can actually look at and say okay has this person accomplished what he said he was going to and do I think that it’s a good amount of progress that I want to see this direction continue and see what happens with another couple of years of his team together.
And then I’ll probably say that experience. I’ve been involved in in government and I understand municipal finances and I have been involved with the many local and state laws that really do bind a lot of the things that we do some good and some constricting. And without knowing these things and having a pretty fluid comfortable handle on them, it would be really really enormously difficult to accomplish things.
And keeping things positive. I think right now there’s a positive vibe about the town and I think it’s important not only for people’s opinions and you know just being happy and proud of your hometown but it also has a value to it outside of Hamden in that if word gets out more I think as it is now that Hamden is a pretty good place to be for a variety of reasons then families are gonna want to invest here, and buy a house and business are going to want to come here and set up shop and it’s good for our local economy and there’s nothing bad about it. So you know, trying to keep promoting that you know the track that we’re on. I think we’re headed in the right direction is probably the simplest way to answer that.
Have you ever gone to your local coffee shop and the barista knows your name and order by heart?
College students have this happen on a daily basis. On a chaotic schedule going from class, to internships, to extra curricular activities and staying up until 4 a.m., whether in the library or out in the bars, majority of those students rely on coffee to keep them awake.
“I drink coffee to stay awake mostly, and I also really like the taste of it,” said Catherine Healey, public relations major.
According to the American Association of Retired Persons, the average American drinks three cups of coffee per day, which translates to 83 percent of coffee drinkers not being able to imagine their life without their java.
How Many Americans Drink Coffee?
Dana White, Clinical Assistant Professor of Athletic Training and Sports Medicine, has been at Quinnipiac University for 10 years, working directly with students and athletes.
Throughout those years, she has often seen students with cups of coffee in her morning classes and informs her students and athletes to tweet about the dangers of abusing caffeine.
“I teach an 8 a.m. class and I’ll see everybody with their coffees so I’ll tweet it out ‘Coffee isn’t breakfast,’” said White.
The amount of caffeine in drinks varies, according to the National Institute of Health (NIH), but it is generally
An 8-ounce cup of coffee: 95-200 mg
A 12-ounce can of cola: 35-45 mg
An 8-ounce energy drink: 70-100 mg
An 8-ounce cup of tea: 14-60 mg
Starbucks offers six different sizes of coffee, each one with names that only regular customers know by heart
Short: 8 ounces
Tall: 12 ounces
Grande: 16 ounces
Venti Hot: 20 ounces
Venti Cold: 24 ounces
Trenta Cold: 31 ounces
White’s recommendation for coffee drinkers is that they should drink one coffee per day, however most people do not realize the different amounts of caffeine in different sizes of coffee.
“If you go get a ‘Venti,’ that is more than two cups of coffee, that is almost three cups of coffee,” she said. “So one cup might be multiple cups of coffee.”
Drinking too much caffeine, which is very common among college students, can lead to health problems, such as restlessness and shakiness, insomnia, headaches, dizziness, rapid or abnormal heart rhythm, dehydration, anxiety and dependency.
Studies have also shown that drinking more a larger amount of cups of coffee per day might have an impact on your GPA.
In a survey with more than 1,000 college students, it was shown that students who drank only one cup of coffee per day had a GPA of 3.41, compared to students who drank more than five cups a day had an average GPA of 3.28.
Although that are many risks about drinking coffee, there are also benefits to it.
According to Harvard’s School of Public Health, it may reduce the risk of Alzheimer’s and dementia, suicide risk, lower the chance of oral cancers and strokes.
Those statistics might be available to Millennials, however, majority of them do not care about it or choose to ignore it.
According to Bloomberg, Millennials count for 44 percent of U.S. coffee demand, an increase from 34 percent to 48 percent from 2008 to 2016.
Millennials are increasing the demand of coffee in the country and an example of that is the opening of Starbucks on Quinnipiac’s Mount Carmel campus.
White does not think that this event will affect students drastically.
“I don’t know that it’s really going to do any more caffeine damage if it wasn’t here,” she said.
Other students, like marketing major Ryan Lawson, have been drinking a larger amount of coffee since the opening of the new Starbucks on campus.
“I drink coffee every day, and sometimes more than once,” said Lawson as he got a Venti sized coffee at Starbucks.
Although Monday mornings aren’t as busy as expected, Starbucks on campus gets extremely crowded throughout the week.
“Usually in the mornings and around lunch time or early afternoon is when it is the most crowded,” said one worker.
Quinnipiac students have always been aware of the huge lines and waiting time at Au Bon Pain, in the first floor of the cafeteria. However, the workers have been seeing a difference.
“We’re definitely less busy since the Starbucks opened, but we still get a lot of students, mostly because of our sandwiches,” said a worker at Au Bon Pain.
A misconception about coffee is that it gives people the energy they could be lacking of in the moment, however, White thinks this is one of the bigger issues about caffeine abuse.
“The real energy you are going to gain is from calories, and a cup of coffee only has about five calories. You can’t just drink coffee and not eat food,” said White.
The United States spends $40 billion on coffee each year, according to the National Coffee Association, with the average price of an espresso-based drink being $2.45 and the average price of a brewed cup of coffee at $1.38.
“I probably spend around $50 on coffee each month, maybe a little less,” said Anica Lazetic, psychology major at Quinnipiac.
Although Starbucks is considered an expensive coffee shop, the fact that Quinnipiac students can use their meal plan money is very helpful.
“It’s mandatory to pay for $200 for meal plan when you’re off campus, and since I’m always cooking at home, I have been spending mostly of my meal plan with coffee at Starbucks,” said Healey.
Although majority of the students think of coffee in a positive way, White believes there are some measures they need to take.
“I think most college students need to be eating better, sleeping more and calming down, so [coffee] can work against you if you take too much of it,” said White.
