Ron Pitz of Knox Parks is keeping us informed. He sent me an e-mail with an explanation from the powers that be about the tree removal on the Mass Mutual site. Earlier, he had informed us of the destruction of the trees.

 

Apparently the soil surrounding the Mass Mutual building is contaminated with arsenic and according to the EPA and the DEP, the top layer of soil has to be removed in order to remediate it. The trees needed to be removed to complete this soil remediation process.

 

The fact is, arsenic in soil as well as other soil contaminants like lead, will stay in the soil until the soil is disturbed which releases it into the air. Tree roots will hold contaminants in place in the soil keeping the contaminants locked in place with little or no run off as long as the roots keep the soil from eroding.

 

Disturbing the soil with activities such as removing the trees and digging out the stumps will release the contaminants into the atmosphere and soil will erode washing contaminates into storm drains where eventually they will end up in the Ct River.

 

They have plans to replant some of the trees after the remediation process but this corner will never be the same….The site should have been left intact.

 

If they have plans to turn the corner into residential use then this process could not have been avoided. You can’t have kids playing in contaminated soil……..I have not heard of any immediate plans for the building so why be so quick to destroy such an important part of the essential urban forest?

Yeah - I'll agree the destruction of the trees was quick. And I would be they knew the neighbors might get mad. God forbid the Hartford dispatch Josh King to an Asylum Hill NRZ meeting.

Elsewhere around Hartford, Heather Brandon with a first person view from the Charter Revision Commission meeting last week. City Council representation by district? It is being discussed. And along with that change, I'd like public campaign financing for the mayoral race, and instant runoff voting.

 

More pictures of work on Contaminated soil...

Before I ramble, Ron Pitz over at the Knox Parks Foundation just sent me an e-mail entitled "Elm Trees." It's worth printing:

 

"By any chance have you had the misfortune to go by the old Mass Mutual building in Asylum Hill lately? Those 'caretakers' have destroyed most of the trees on that property which were some of the largest and healthiest trees in Hartford.

 

"That corner used to be the oasis in the urban desert for us. I would go out of my way to drive by that spot and show the inner city young adults in my program those specimen trees. This gave them an opportunity to see what kind of a legacy they are leaving by planting trees and what the small trees they are planting would look like at maturity.

 

"Just imagine the carbon that those giants sequestered and the oxygen that they produced. This is another huge loss for Asylum Hill and the city as a whole....."

 

Ron, I bicycled by there recently, and failed to see it partly because my indignation at that part of Asylum Hill is reserved for the demolition of the last of the old row house buildings on Fraser Place. That's what Ron meant by "another huge loss." Hey, why leave anything standing?

 

I also probably missed the trees because I bicycle at night - it is law school exam time, and you need a break when you need a break.

 

Law school exams represent the worst of the educational process. The system demands that you condense 120 hours worth of learning into a three-hour essay.

 

It's roughly 120 hours because the semester is 15 weeks of classes. Each class represents about three hours weekly of actual instructional time, bolstered by a minimum of five hours preparation (often more) for each class.

 

Compression is somewhat beneficial for real life, but it seems arbitrary. For my last exam this semester, I was allowed one – yes, exactly one – sheet of paper, for the most complicated class I have taken yet. At least we're not killing trees.

To the rest of my meandering column for print media...

 

It's only taken a bit more than five years, but Gov. M. Jodi Rell called John Dankosky this morning and appeared on WNPR's "Where We Live" for 20 minutes.

 

This victory doesn't mean that the Governor actually fielded calls on the call-in show, and Dankosky wasn't as aggressive as I wanted him to be, but I understand he has to build a relationship, and trust.

 

I phoned in, hoping beyond hope that she would spend the full hour talking with citizens. But alas, the Bushian executive ethic still prevails. At least she's not Blagojevich, selling Senate seats or anything. She only hides Mustangs in her garage.

 

Dankosky aired my call. I congratulated him on landing the big fish, and said that it looks like journalism works. New Haven Advocate Managing Editor Andy Bromage has been putting pressure on her, and she appears. Second, Gov., if you're listening, next time, we'd love to have you stick around and answer some questions.

 

Dankosky told me I wasn't helping his case. Oh well.

 

I continued undeterred. Gov., show some real green leadership and move to Hartford for the remainder of your term and bicycle or walk to work. Dankosky prompted me for a thought on mass transit. Sure.

 

We have a track from New Haven to Hartford that serves Amtrak. Why the heck don't we use it for five or six commuter trains a day?

 

Guest Tom Condon of the Hartford Courant's Place section and Heather Brandon of the Urban Compass blog responded. They talked mass transit and being visionary about infrastructure. And they noted well before I got on the air that Gov. Rell only talked about highways, bridges and dams, and Dankosky had to ask her about mass transit.

 

Listen to the show, because it is good morning radio. And Dankosky never gets enough credit. Day in, day out, he's usually got winning fare on the air.

 

On the web, a quick tour gives us Andy Bromage again reporting from the Clean Election Campaigns trial down in New Haven. He's done daily work for both the first and second days of the two-day bench trial. The judge for my case, Stephan Underhill, presided, and I like the way he works from the bench, reading this.

 

Back to studying.

 

Link...

Update: Urania Petit called me Thursday, Dec. 11 to let me know that she ran into the Mayor Wednesday, December 10, in the evening at the Charter Revision Commission meeting. She said the Mayor congratulated her.

 

Mayor Perez, any time you want to call Urania Petit and congratulate her on being the first third-party registrar of voters elected in Hartford’s history, you go right ahead.

 

Perhaps your call welcoming Urania into City Hall as the Registrar of Voters for the Working Families Party would signal to the rest of the city that you respect the will of the electorate.

 

Your spokesperson, Sarah Barr, said that it was merely a mistake that more than a month after this historic occasion, you have neglected to call Urania Petit.

 

"I'm sure that's an oversight that he hasn't called," Barr said in City Hall Wednesday, December 10. "The Mayor wants the people of Hartford to be as well represented as possible."

 

It's funny, because Working Families Party councilmen Larry Deutsch and Luis Cotto found the time to call her. So did Democratic councilman Matt Ritter.

 

Susan Byseiwicz, the Democratic Secretary of the State, contacted Petit to recognize her achievement. Petit has spoken with outgoing Democratic Registrar Shirley Surgeon.

 

"I would be an idiot not to talk to Shirley," Petit said. "She had the leadership role. One of the questions I asked her, what of the projects she was working on, which would she like to see move forward."

 

Surgeon was pleased by the question, and glad that Petit is interested in continuing the project to recruit youth as poll workers. Surgeon was surprised, though, Mr. Mayor, that you had not contacted Petit.

 

Heck, even Mike McGarry, who railed against the concept of a third party registrar, has reached out to Petit.

 

"I feel slighted that the Mayor hasn't reached out to me," Petit said. "Why am I getting the cold shoulder?"

More on why Petit is Ruffling Feathers...

 

Nelson Mandela, like all great men, isn't the saint that we think he is. He has his faults, like all of us. But that quote up above - I learned it from Oxfam.

 

Coldplay at their mediocre concert in Hartford back in August handed out and Oxfam pamphlet containing the Mandela wisdom. And I've had that Mandela quote on my apartment wall, next to the bathroom door, for months. When I first read it, it grabbed me and throttled me. So simple, so much sense. So difficult.

 

So in honor of the economic rights as enunciated in the Universal Declaration, signed 60 years ago today, I post the fist in glove. May we someday see the end of hunger and material inequality. An ideal we may never see, but one worth chasing.

 

Thanks for stopping by. Peace, KK

 

P.S. - Anniversaries are the easiest way to make posts during exams. Trust and Estates down, Admin and Education law left, plus one paper. Posting will be thin until 12/19.

 

P.P.S. - Be wary of too many rights: The rights revolution has contributed in its own way to the atrophy of vital local governments and political parties, and to the disdain for politics that is now so prevalent in the American scene. From Mary Ann Glendon.

Link...

 

Saturday afternoon fun - exam study break. I thought today was the anniversary of the UN Declaration on Human Rights, it's actually December 10 - and I'll try make a special post for that.

 

I wanted to interview Congressman John Conyers, the chair of the House Judiciary Committee from Michigan in honor of the day, especially considering that he was in Hamden and Quinnipiac U. today speaking about the UN Declaration's 60th anniversary. But his press flak Jonathan Godfrey at 202-225-3951 never returned my numerous calls or emails.

 

Thus, we celebrate a different anniversary today - the completion of the Washington Monument, which at 555.5 feet tall, some conspiracy theorists consider to be a symbol of occult and Illuminati power in the United States New World Order business.

 

It is too fun to pass up today, when I am immersed in wealth transfer law in studying for a trusts and estates exam for Tuesday night.

 

Plus, the picture I have to illustrate this illustrious Monument features none other than the great punk rocker and marijuana activist David Peel. Someday I'll find the interview I did with him for Patti Adcroft's magazine 506 class and post it.

 

I met Peel at the base of the Washington Monument after Clinton's Inauguration in 1993 - a fantastic sunny day that I wrote about for a satire magazine at SU called Seriously. One day I'll post that, too.

 

Clinton's Inaugural was back when you could stroll right up to the base of the monument without passing through six degrees of security and submitting to metal detectors and what not. I doubt Obama's presidency will eliminate that security business. The five of us who trekked down to DC from Syracuse for the Inaugural made the monument our rendezvous point because of its visibility and accessability.

 

At the base of the monument, there was Peel, a unique character to say the least. I got his number, because he seemed like an interesting interview for a class assignment, or something. I met him that Spring.

More on David Peel, GG Allin, and Trusts...

 

Where was Hartford Superintendent Steven Adamowski Wednesday night December 3?

 

In a week where education everywhere has been under fire and underfunded, Adamowski was scheduled to be at a HartfordInfo Today-sponsored forum at the Hartford Public Library at 5:30 to discuss "Raising the Bar: Preparing Hartford's High School Students to Succeed."

 

But Adamowski didn't show, and a spokesjerk said Adamowski had a scheduling conflict. So, instead, he sent Joan Massey, Hartford's assistant superintendent for secondary education, to sit on a panel with Connecticut Education Commissioner Mark K. McQuillan.

 

The panel, moderated by Hartford City Councilman Jim Boucher, also featured Milly Arciniegis, President, Hartford PTO Council; Benjamin Cruse, Director of Youth Services, Leadership Greater Hartford and Joshua Hall, Vice President, Hartford Federation of Teachers.

 

Cruse brought with him a dozen or so high school students, and together, the panel drew a crowd of about 85 people, according to Richard Frieder, the Hartford Public Library staffer who organized the event.

 

Frieder acknowledges that HartfordInfo assembled the panel rather quickly two weeks ago, but when he invited Adamowski, the Superintendent accepted. And when Massey showed up last night, she didn't offer an excuse for the Superintendent's absence.

 

"He did not give a reason," Richard Frieder said. Although Frieder did hear it may have been a medical issue, in which case, Adamowski is more than excused. "I didn't know he wasn't coming until Joan Massey appeared and told me he wasn't coming," Frieder said.

Adamowski was in his office today, and his spokesman David Medina said Adamowski had a scheduling conflict.

 

"He had a prior commitment," Medina said, and he sent Massey, who was most qualified to substitute. So, how often does the Superintendent have a chance to meet with the State Commissioner of Education? I asked Medina.

 

"I have no idea. That's as much as I'm going to say." And Medina hung up the phone on me. In that case, the medical rumor seems kind of flimsy.

Luis Cotto, Education News & More on the HS Forum ...

 

Home healthcare providers Companions and Homemakers, once hoped to be the stable anchor of the Farmington-Laurel corner, closed its Farmington Avenue location October, 31, 2008.

 

Perhaps I was distracted by the appearance of a new grocery store, the Green Apple, across the street, but I only noticed Companions and Homemakers left about two weeks ago, when the company marquees disappeared and I saw the ancient sign for the legendary Scolers restaurant reappear on the side of the Willoughby.

 

The phone line to the Hartford Companions and Homemakers office just rings and rings and rings. Someone answered the line at the Glastonbury office right away. She said she wasn’t sure why they departed.

 

Companions and Homemakers bravely moved to Farmington Avenue in August 2006. I can hazard a guess as to why it left – an illegal drug market prospers at that corner. All kinds of riffraff hang out there. Plus, the horrible parking on the corner of Farmington and Laurel makes passing tough, as cars idle in the no-parking zone regularly. Employees probably encountered their share of Asylum Hill weirdness, and let's imagine that the owner grew tired of their complaints.

 

The arrival of a health care facility on the corner signaled a hope for our struggling neighborhood. The one business I don’t want in the neighborhood, the Rent-A-Center, is the only merchant that seems stable outside of the stalwart Chinese food joints, laundromats, bodegas, and our surviving library branch.

 

The usurial furniture and appliance rental store pays its rent regularly, and we should be thankful for regular tenants that provide jobs for the local economy. Yet this Texas-based corporation is not a good neighbor.

More on how Rent-A-Center parks on our sidewalk...

 

T-minus 30 days and counting until 2009. T-minus 24 days and counting until X-Mas. T-minus 18 days and counting until exams are complete, and I have only three semesters left in Law School.

 

I live for countdowns. Advent calendars, page a day calendars, all subtle ways to mark the passage of time. When time does pass, I hope to fill it with interesting activities.

For instance, this past Saturday (t-plus two days ago?) I hit the Tara Donovan show at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston, as I mentioned I might. Her work is stunning - plastic and processed materials dropped into recurring patterns.

 

She mimics nature's math, like the Fibonacci series writ large. Imagine dozens of stacks of a clear plastic drink cups stacked up in a 20 by 30 foot rectangle, so that the millions of cups look like snow drifts. Or styrofoam cups fastened together to resemble clouds, hanging from the ceiling.

 

The best part of the exhibit wasn't the optical illusion created by millions of drinking straws stacked to make an undulating 25-foot tall honey-comb wall hanging. It was the people watching. Saturday at Boston's ICA was Play Date - bring the kids.

 

Listening to parents dialgoue with their children about art is as interesting as the art itself - parenting, I imagine, is more art than science.

 

Parents took the opportunity to check out not only Donovan, but the ICA's permanent collection and the four finalists of the 2008 Foster Prize, an annual award for Boston's most promising artist.

 

My favorite Foster finalist was Rania Matar. Her exhibit featured images from Lebanon, some before the Israeli invasion in 2006, and some after the destruction wrought by the bombing.

 

Her photographs - both black and white and color - capture daily life. While some document the comings and goings of every day people, other detail minutely the wreckage from the Israeli bombardment - scraps of papers, doll parts, and broken dishes. The captions ignore the political context from which the damage arose.

 

I loved "Rocket Hole" (posted above) from 2002, a child's sandal is barely visible under a gaping hole in a wall, caused by an artillery shell. The wall is pockmarked by bullet holes. Through the opening caused by the rocket, Matar reveals architecture across the street.

Happy December - More on Matar...

 

Brilliant idea that Oxfam beat me to: Somali Civil Society. With all the talk about the pirates in the Gulf of Aden, I began to get curious about how the daily life of Somalians is without government.

 

I wanted to go to Somalia on a fact-finding mission. But I have that law school stuff, and a job, and lots of debt before I can consider traveling again. So we wait.

 

And earlier today, I wrote about Obama's soft changes. It's all about tone, and how much does it say that Obama volunteered at a soup kitchen today with his family. Since I've been in law school, I've done so little volunteer work.

 

I tell myself that blogging, going to school, trying to keep my debt to a manageable level and waging my lawsuit is sufficient public service, because when I get out I will fight for justice with more tools. That I need to be in school to improve my ability to push levers of social change.

 

But it seems insufficient, that I am getting mine, I will have a nice dinner with my parents and sisters. That my wealth - however minimal - is protected. I don't have an answer. I don't think volunteerism is enough, though. We must assume Obama understands Eisenhower's warning - that every dollar for the military industrial complex is a dollar robbed from a hungry child. So why isn't he speaking more clearly on it?

Tara Donovan: Amazing artist who won a MacArthur Genius Grant. She has a show in Boston going on now. My sister is in town from Savannah, and we may go check this out. The toothpick cube Donovan made is pretty amazing. Makes me think of like what Frank Gehry might do if he worked with styrofoam cups instead of steel.

 

This has been a bit of a family week. My sister said I surprised her twice today, because a) I have the Dixie Chicks on my iPod (Traveling Soldier is a great song) and b) I said that I am conflicted on Obama because he is giving voice to concerns that I have, and defusing critics on all sides of the equation.

 

In reading some of the stuff I have written about Obama since the beginning of the year, my opinions have veered wildly on him. I think it will be a fun retrospective at the end of the year to highlight my most contradictory thoughts. It seems like nuance is probably the best word to apply to Obama - he challenges us to think.

 

Funeral: My great uncle Dino died this week. He was my maternal grandmother's only brother, and he lived a long (86), happy life, although his wife (Aunt Mary) of 52 years predeceased him by a few years, and those years were sad and difficult for him.

More on Church, Uncle Dino and the horror of war...

 

T he verdict is far from in on Obama. I am trying not to form an opinion of his presidency yet. He hasn't even taken the oath of office.

 

Yet the soft changes his leadership brings are amazing. And I don't use that lightly. He almost sounds like Spiderman talking to Barbara Walters:

That if you're placed in a position of power, then you've got responsibilities to your workers. You've got a responsibility to your community. That if - there's got to be a point where you say, 'You know what, I have enough, and now I'm in this position of responsibility, let me make sure that I'm doing right by people, and, and, acting in a way that is responsible.' And that's true, by the way, for members of Congress, that's true for the president, that's true for Cabinet members, that's true for parents. I want all of us to start thinking a little but more, not just about what's good for me, but let's start thinking about what's good for our children, what's good for our country. The more we do that, the better off we are going to be.

Not only that, but he is calling for captains of industry to forego their end-of-the-year bonuses. His rhetoric of veiled redistribution is thrilling. When was the last time we heard that out of the White House?

 

Now how do we reconcile this language with his appointment of Clinton retreads into every executive branch office he has touched so far? Can the theory actually be right about his leadership being able to change the quality and direction of work produced by Larry Summers and Timothy Geithner.

 

More on Obama, Twice in One Week...

 

A t a recent freshman experience class for student athletes at the University of Connecticut, some wiseguy frosh asked athletic director Jeff Hathaway when they would get paid.

“I love all of you,” Hathaway said, and he told the students they are not at UConn to get paid.

 

Hathaway related this tale to about 50 UConn Law students at UConn's Davis Courtroom Wednesday, November 19, 2008. Hathaway and NBA lawyer Jeffrey A. Mishkin spun yarns about managing the cut throat world of Big East sports for a half hour or so, then opened the floor to questions.

 

My hand shot up, and I wondered if the scads of money - literally billions of dollars flowing into college athletic coffers from television and marketing contracts - forced us to abandon the myth of college athletes as amateurs.

 

"This is a difficult question," Hathaway said. "There are 343 Division I institutions, all of them are very different in a lot of ways.” Even in the 16-team Big East, public, private, Catholic, and secular schools compete, all with differing size budgets. It would be trouble dividing revenues, Hathaway said.

 

“Who gets paid and how much?” Hathaway asked. “There are only three sports that generate revenue for our school. I don't believe there is a time we will pay our athletes."

 

Mishkin, upon hearing my question aimed at Hathaway, expressed relief that I had nothing for him. Not so fast. The NCAA is the de facto minor league for both the NFL and the NBA, I said, do the NFL and the NBA owe a duty to college athletic programs?

 

No. But first Mishkin admitted the theory that Division I basketball and football players are athletes has been “strained." Yet he agreed with Hathaway that college athletes shouldn't get paid. Nor will contracts happen unless athletics and academics dissociate.

 

Such a dissocation may be the best fix. It was first proposed way back in 1989 by then-Sports Illustrated writer Rick Telander. Disgusted with the inhumanity he witnessed covering college football, Telander, who attended Northwestern University on a gridiron scholarship, suggested in his classic tome The Hundred Yard Lie that the top 50-80 sports schools should form a bona fide football minor league.

More on the myth of amateur athletes, and Obama, too...