Next Monday, voters will go to the polls in Woodbridge, CT to vote for First Selectman and members of several boards. Municipal elections don’t often get the same attention that national elections do, but they should. Decisions about how Federal money gets spent and how rules get implemented often happen at the municipal level. Yet issues at the local level rarely reach the same level of intensity as issues at the national level.

I’ve lived in Woodbridge for just under two years. It is a great town, and I’ve enjoyed becoming involved in the civic life of our community. As I’ve looked at the coming election, I’ve been trying to get a sense of what the real issues are here. For many, it may be a very simple issue, how much are our taxes and how are the tax rates changing?

A wiser question is what is the value of the services received, compared to the taxes paid to receive them. People will argue about whether or not First Selectman Sheehy’s strong leadership has been ‘proactive’ enough.

There is a pseudonymous email going around by a person who identifies himself only as “Wimps Begone”. He believes that Woodbridge should sell the Woodbridge Country Club Property “to David Reis and have him develop the 50 acres into 55+ CCRC, keep 100 acres as open space, maybe a nine hole golf course and start paying Woodbridge $1 million a year in taxes”.

Mr. Begone has a right to his opinion, and I applaud him for expressing it. I also applaud First Selectman Sheehy for his actions in making sure that all the people from Woodbridge, Mr. Begone, myself, and all of us, have an opportunity to have our say at how the property should be dealt with.

For the right decisions to be made in our town, we do need to encourage people to not wimp out on our political process. At the preliminary budget hearing, Dr. Silberberg and Mr. Luther spoke out strongly about a small part of the Woodbridge Board of Education budget and the process by which it was drafted. I believe they are wrong, and I spoke up at the meeting about how I think they are wrong. It is this sort of public dialog, even when it gets a little contentious, that helps make our community stronger. It is the many volunteers serving on the commissions of our town that helps keep our town working well.

Yet what Mr. Begone is doing is a disservice to our community. He is unwilling to publicly stand up and state his case. Instead he sends emails with false information deriding members of our community. It is actions like those of Mr. Begone that need to be gone from our political process.

What is perhaps more concerning is some of the comments Mr. Colabella made during the First Selectman’s debate. Like Dr. Sliberberg and Mr. Luther, Mr. Colabella deserves praise for being willing to stand up for his beliefs. However, repeating false information during the debate, which First Selectman Sheehy quickly corrected him on, does little to improve our town. Even worse, deriding of citizens giving of their time to make our town better is particularly damaging to our town.

To suggest that a commission, like the Economic Development Commission is impotent because they are not doing things the way Mr. Colabella wishes is an insult to everyone who works hard to make our town a better place. No, such volunteers are not impotent, they are important.

So, what is the real issue that we need to face in our town? We need to keep taxes low while keeping services as good as possible to maintain our property values. We do this by encouraging people to become more involved in our town’s civic life. We do this by acknowledging the hard work that volunteers do to make our town better. We do this by getting out and voting for people that work hard to improve the level of discourse and involvement at the local level.

That is why I am getting out and voting for the whole Democratic Slate. I hope you will do the same.

(Cross-posted at the Woodbridge CT Democratic Party Website).