Tag: poultney

Categories
life politics

Negotiate From A Position of Power

In 2020, a millionaire named Raj Bhakta purchased my alma mater and neighbor, Green Mountain College. He didn’t know what he’d do with the old girl when he purchased it (I had some ideas), but two years later, he has a better sense of things.

According to the development papers he recently submitted to our town, he now “seeks to turn the property into a regional destination for agrotourism, hospitality, small businesses, and post-graduate food and beverage education.” He imagines that “the campus will become the incubator for entrepreneurs developing new businesses who seek to locate in a dynamic and energetic work community.”

The estimated $100 million plan has three phases to be developed over the next decade:

  • Phase 1 (2023-2026) will convert existing college dorms into a 100-room destination hotel and twenty-three new condos, turn the college’s gym into a spa/fitness/wellness center, convert the main cafeteria into a convention center and the library into a “bulk storage tasting space,” and finally, construct a new “antique small craft distillery”
  • Phase 2 (2026-2028) will see the development of a brewery/tasting room, the addition of 40+ apartments, a sports complex, an equestrian center, and outdoor gardens
  • Phase 3 (2028-2030+) will include a post-graduate education center, a roastery, sports fields, improved trails, and a walking garden

The first part of the plan requires developing a significant number of new parking lots and some new road construction (to avoid traffic on the residential terrace beside the property). They hope to shield most of the parking behind three-foot-high brick walls (similar to the walls already on campus) with “dark-sky friendly” lighting. They hope to build enough parking for 549 vehicles (an increase of 412 from what the college had).

Finally, he would like to add a helipad to the circle in front of the college. Because the property anchors the west end of Main Street, the helipad would dominate the view on Main Street.

GMCTo attract investors to the project, Bhakta asked the town in March to stabilize his property taxes for the next ten years. He argued that he already pays more taxes than the college ever did (since the college was a non-profit educational institution), and he’s not asking for a tax waiver — just tax stabilization. He suggested in a presentation to the town that he would use “his current $100,000 tax bill as a base to which a surcharge equivalent to a quarter of a percent of the development’s gross revenues would be added.”

When he made the presentation, he added a veiled threat: a religious group had contacted him about purchasing the property, and if the town didn’t back his development plan, he might have to sell to them; as a religious institution, they’d be tax exempt, so stable taxes with him would be better than no taxes at all.

About a week after the presentation, the town voted to give the select board the power to explore a tax stabilization deal with Bhakta. Still, any agreement would be subject to the approval of the town’s voters.

The tax stabilization deal is perhaps the only leverage the town has over what happens at the former college. We learned the hard way that zoning, permitting, and democracy doesn’t work. Despite the zoning board and the town’s voters rejecting the construction of a Dollar General in town, the developer had deep enough pockets to fight it in court, and the town ran out of money to keep up our appeals. The Dollar General should open at the front gate of our town any month now.

Outside of the helipad (which I’m entirely opposed to from a noise pollution standpoint), I’m not opposed to Bhakta’s plan. It supports the goals of our official town plan, which seeks to “grow Poultney’s outdoor recreational economy, support existing businesses, and encourage new ones.” With a focus on agrotourism, the renovation of dorms into a 100-room hotel, and the conversion of other dorms into condos (I’m guessing for short-term rental purposes), it could bring the tourists every Vermont town needs to survive and thrive.

I have concerns about the destruction of the trees on campus and how the added parking lots will contribute to run-off pollution into the Poultney River. I hope regulations around Act 250, Vermont’s land use and development law, may help balance those concerns.

With all of that, the tax stabilization deal does give the town some leverage over Bhakta’s plan. One of my neighbors suggested the select board could use that leverage to ensure Bhakta hires a certain percentage of contractors, construction workers, and service industry folks from the local pool (however that gets defined). The town could also require he set aside a certain percentage of the 40+ apartments built in Phase 2 for low-income Vermonters. I support both of those proposals and encourage the town’s residents to brainstorm even more.

Bhakta said in his presentation that the town’s support of his development is vital to his success. If that’s true, let’s ensure (in writing) that his development contributes to the town’s success as well.

Categories
life politics

Remembering The Tragic Murder of Ronald Amadon

On October 27, 1985, sometime around 2:30 A.M. in my home village in Vermont, Ronald Amadon, a food service worker at the local college, walked from one of the village’s two bars to his parents’ home about a quarter of a mile away. He had worked during the big Oktoberfest on campus and followed that with some celebrating at the bar. As he approached his parents’ home, he was attacked with a knife by John Kugler, a young man from a New York town just over the border who had recently escaped from a mental facility in New York and was now renting a mobile home in my village.

The Rutland Herald reported that a neighbor heard someone call out, “Help me! Help me!,” but the neighbor was too frightened to go outside. “[Amadon] was screaming his head off,” the neighbor said, “He was very hysterical.” Another neighbor said the victim “sounded like a woman,” while a third heard Amadon cry, “Oh my god!”

Amadon went to a nearby friend’s house, bleeding from his stab wounds, and asked his friend to call the ambulance. The friend asked who had stabbed him, and Amadon replied, “I don’t know who he is, but I’ll never forget his face.”

After calling for help, the friend reached out to Amadon’s parents, who lived just down the road. Amadon’s mother joined him in the ambulance on the way to Rutland Regional Medical Center. Tragically, he would not survive the journey.

Ronald Amadon died at 4:21 A.M. of one stab wound to the chest and one to the abdomen, as well as having cuts on his hand and lip.

Police initially stopped Kugler for a motor vehicle violation before arresting him for the murder. According to the Herald, Kugler said to a reporter, “Forgive me.”

In a later affidavit for the court, police alleged that Kugler told them “he killed Amadon when Amadon came walking past him acting like a homosexual.”

Amadon’s murder was not the only act of homophobic violence in the Rutland region in the mid-eighties. Two days later, a Herald story ran with the headline, “Rights Activists Decry Violence Directed At Gays.” The activists noted the homophobic slaying of a Brandon man in February 1984, whose “body was found on the ice at the base of a 120-foot-deep West Rutland marble quarry.”

On January 25, 1986, the Herald reported that a District Court judge ruled that, following a psychiatric assessment, “Kugler was incompetent to stand trial.” The psychiatrist found Kugler to be “suffering from delusions, paranoia, hallucinations, and possibly the scars of severe drug and alcohol abuse.” The psychiatrist reported that, as a teenager, Kugler used to sniff gasoline “until he nearly keeled over.” He later moved on to harder drugs, such as heroin and PCP.

Kugler was committed to the Vermont State Hospital in Waterbury, where psychiatrists expected him to spend the rest of his life.

Before his attack on Amadon, Kugler had been arrested in New York for assaulting another man with a large rock and a tire chain. Authorities placed him in the Capital District Psychiatric Center in Albany, but he later walked out without being stopped. Despite knowing his whereabouts before his attack on Amadon, Rutland County law enforcement could not return him to New York due to a loophole in Vermont’s laws. As the Herald reported at the time, “Vermont law has no provisions for Vermont officials returning an uncommitted mental patient to another state, as they can with criminal fugitives… With no pending criminal charges, extradition was impossible.”

Six years after the murder, in January 1992, the Herald reported that two psychiatrists found Kugler “was no longer insane and did not pose a threat to himself or others.” A judge ruled that he could be released back into the community but had to remain in state custody.

In July 1994, the Herald reported Kugler escaped from the Arroway halfway house in Burlington and “may be headed back to the Rutland area.” About ten days later, police changed their mind and said he “may be headed to New York.” The police expressed concern that Kugler could “become violent if he is no longer taking his medications” for “paranoid schizophrenia.” He later turned himself in.

But in August 1995, Kugler again escaped from psychiatric confinement, walking away from the state hospital in Waterbury. He had been staying in an unlocked ward and was allowed to roam the grounds. One day, he did not return. Kugler “turned up a week later near Philadelphia, where he was stopped by police for allegedly driving drunk.”

Meanwhile, Ronald Amadon remained murdered, dead at the age of 22, because he “acted like a homosexual.”

As you may know, June is Pride Month. It commemorates the 1969 uprising at the Stonewall Inn in New York, which became the catalyst for the modern LGBT movement for civil rights. As President Biden noted in his proclamation yesterday, “Pride is a time to recall the trials the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer (LGBTQ+) community has endured and to rejoice in the triumphs of trailblazing individuals who have bravely fought — and continue to fight — for full equality.”

According to the Herald, Ronald Amadon “was thoughtful, quiet, and well-liked…a gentle man.” At Amadon’s funeral, Rev. Marshall Hudson-Knapp recalled, “Ron had a love for everyone he knew,” and he recited the lyrics of a song that Ronald had written as a boy, “My name is R-O-N-N-I-E. I’ll love you if you’ll love me. For that’s the way it’s meant to be.”

A friend recalled outside of the funeral, “He was a really special guy. He had a lot of friends.” He also loved antiquing and frequently stopped at area shops to browse. One store owner said, “I remember Ronnie stopping by just a few days before he died. He was a gentle and wonderful boy.”

As my village celebrates Pride for all the LGBTQ+ individuals we call our friends, family, and neighbors, we ought not to forget the ugly, homophobic tragedy that once occurred on our streets. Let us remember the life and death of Ronald Amadon.

Thanks to Monica Allen, who first reported on the case for the Rutland Herald in the 1980s, and to Liz Anderson, who followed up on the case for the Herald in the 1990s.

Categories
life

My New Side Gig

2021 marks my nineteenth year living in this little village in Vermont (excluding three years when I lived about six miles south of the village). Eight years ago, my wife and I bought a house here, and for the last eight years, we’ve been raising our daughter here. My wife works for the local public school, while I work for the local private school.

In short, this little village is our home.

For the past few months, I’ve had a pretty big itch about wanting to contribute more to the community, and about a week ago, I found a way to scratch it.

There’s a great little company in Vermont (and parts of New York) called The Front Porch Forum. They try to help neighbors connect with one another through an email-based forum, and last week, one of my friends and neighbors posted a job opening for a part-time Website Content Manager for the Poultney Historical Society.

I emailed my friend, met her to discuss the position over a cup of coffee, and yesterday, I spent about two hours in the historical schoolhouse the Society calls home.

The East Poultney Schoolhouse (1896)
Photo courtesy of Poultney Historical Society

I was all alone with the collection, and I couldn’t have been happier.

While there are a lot of tasks to help the Society get the website where they want it to be, I decided to spend my first day just going through some of the archives, trying to find an interesting story to share.

Here’s what I came up with: “Our Partisan Divide is Nothing New.”

I look forward to spending many more hours combing through the Historical Society’s archives, trying to find ways to bring the history of our little village to life.

Categories
education life

An Open Letter to Raj Bhakta

 

To: Mr. Raj Bhakta
Re: Your Recent Purchase of Green Mountain College

My name is Kyle Callahan, and I am a homeowner in the village of Poultney.

I am also a 2006 alum and former writing adjunct with Green Mountain College. I met my wife on the campus, and after we graduated, she spent two years there as an AmeriCorps volunteer, helping the college connect with students and teachers in the local public schools.

Later, after we married under the tree where we met on campus, my wife took a position that allowed her to work with students in both our town’s public schools. I took a position at LiHigh School, the progressive independent-school about a quarter-mile east on Main Street from where you recently invested over $5 million.

We settled in Poultney not just because of the professional opportunities that opened up to us, but because we love this community. We love knowing the people who grow our food. We love the community engagement that gave rise to the Slate Valley Trails bike system, the local chapter of the Vermont Association of Snowmobile Trails, and the new REclaimED Maker Space. We love the community involvement on display at Chili Fest, Maple Fest, and our town-wide yard sales. We love the teachers and students we work with every day. We love sitting on our lawn chairs and watching our daughter run through our neighbors’ backyards with her friends.

This month marks our eighteenth year in Rutland County (fifteen of which were spent in Poultney) and our eighth year as homeowners in the village. My wife is now an English teacher in the middle school. Along with still teaching, I’m now the Operations Manager at LiHigh. Our young daughter is now a student in our public elementary school.

Vermont Public Radio reported that you “hope..to resurrect [on the GMC campus] a new kind of school that will benefit students and the local community.”

You’re quoted as saying, “It’ll probably be a work college.” The article continues, reporting that for you, “it can’t just be hands-on farm or tradecraft that’s taught[;] entrepreneurial skills [will be] equally crucial.”

According to the article, you admit your full vision for the campus is not quite clear: “the students of the college are part of the producing of the products that are growing from [Bhakta Farms], that we’re selling that they’re also learning how to sell. In turn…we’re…paying for their school.” 

In other words, an apprenticeship type of school where the students graduate as skilled professionals without any debt. 

The question, I guess, lies in what kinds of apprenticeships your new school will offer.

Clearly, you are a capitalist. Your vision seems to involve generating and selling agricultural products and using the profit to cover the cost of the free labor the students will provide in your agricultural fields and/or your sales and marketing division.

You’ll have to house the labor, educate and train the labor (ideally with skills that will carry over after they graduate), and cover the health and nutrition of the labor. But if the labor works as well as envisioned, your investment will pay off and each laborer will depart after however many years with the skills and credentials you promised, free at last, free at least, and ready to finally earn an income for their labor (assuming, of course, you don’t utilize financial incentives to increase the student’s output during their educational servitude). 

As a graduate of Green Mountain College in the years of its environmental mission, my guiding economic theories lean more towards the democratic-socialism side of the spectrum, but I’ve worked for capitalists my entire life, and I can appreciate the need to make your nut and still have some money to enjoy the finer things in life. From the photographs on your Bhakta Farms website and your interviews on YouTube, you seem well acquainted with the finer things in life (your current “not even a double-wide” trailer/office not included). 

A significant portion of Poultney residents, on the other hand, are not used to such things. According to the 2018-2019 Annual Statistical Report on Child Nutrition Programs from the Vermont Agency of Education (the latest year for which I could find data), over 46% of our elementary-school students and nearly 40% of our high-school students come from low-income families. Our median income, according to the U.S. Census, is $45,500 — which, for a family of four, qualifies them for reduced lunches at the school. This monthly income does not provide enough for food, rent/mortgage, electricity, oil, gas, auto repairs, medical bills, dental bills, clothing, Internet, etc., let alone a $250 bottle of fifty-year-old brandy.

Rutland County, as I’m sure you know, has also been devastated by the opioid epidemic, and we have reached that point in American history where the children of some of those addicts are in our school systems, not to mention the children of our county’s alcoholics, domestic abusers, and child abusers (emotional, verbal, physical, and sexual).

According to the 2017 Study Of Vermont State Funding For Special Education, the “increased demand and limited capacity for community-based mental health and social services has shifted responsibility for providing these services to schools. In the face of their own capacity limitations, schools have responded by either contracting with private providers or paying for students to attend special schools or programs outside the district.”

LiHigh, the school I labor for, is one of those special schools, so I have firsthand knowledge of how limited our community-based mental health and social services have become.

As you consider your vision for the former campus of Green Mountain College, I urge you to explore the “community school” model of education. Endorsed by the NEA and (therefore) a major element in Vice-President Biden’s education plan and (therefore, should V.P. Biden win the national election) a potential major recipient of future federal grant moneys, the model puts the campus at the center of the community. Academics, health and social services, community development, and community engagement all occur on campus.

A trade-school education results in a skilled profession, with graduates often becoming plumbers, electricians, carpenters, farmers, auto mechanics, etc., but a trade-school education can also result in graduates becoming childcare providers, family counselors, addiction counselors, nurses, elementary and secondary educators, and community artists and artisans. The very people most needed by the families in our community.

These professions are not traditionally considered “entrepreneurial,” but a talented entrepreneur such as yourself can teach students to navigate either the nonprofit system or Vermont’s benefit-corporation laws in such a way as to enjoy the finer things in life while also improving the community in which both our families have now invested so much.

Again, as you create what you called “a think tank of experts in education and in other fields,” I urge you to consider the community-school model for whatever you hope to build.

Thank you for your time, and best of luck with the still-developing vision that will, someday soon, dominate my town.

Categories
education life politics

Let’s Not Be Too Late

In Defense of an Undiscussed Idea Offered At the Most Recent Town Meeting About The Future of the Green Mountain College Campus

Last week, my town called a second meeting in as many months to discuss the future of the property currently owned by Green Mountain College. I missed the first 20 minutes because I had to take my daughter to Girl Scouts at the elementary school while the meeting was held up at the high school.

When I returned, the president of the college had already spoken, as had one of the representatives the state had sent our way. Now our town manager had the microphone.

I found my wife near the door of the crowded gymnasium, and we took two of the last empty seats on the floor, off to the side of the podium (see the picture above; props to my friend Bill for looking all relaxed and cool).

The town manager spoke about some of the ways he was trying to alleviate the financial losses that will come to the town proper in the wake of the college’s departure. He’s not the most charismatic speaker, so I found myself instead perusing the agenda.

After the introductory speeches, the moderator took back the microphone and told us about our two goals for the meeting. First, he wanted residents to recall the 30 ideas we’d conceived during the previous meeting, and to take a democratic vote to see which ideas we preferred. Second…

Hang on, we all thought, what’s the point in that? It’s not like we actually have any say on what happens to the campus. It’s “For Sale,” and there’ll be no stipulation in the sales agreement that compels the buyer to respect the democratic will of the town. If its board is willing to pay the sales price, even the evil corporation of Monsanto has every right to purchase the land.

Some among us voiced those thoughts, only to be told by the moderator that “It’s important” for the town to make its desires known. Doing so may attract an investor who shares that same desire. We might not be able to say who comes to town, but we can sure invite whoever we want.

Not everyone appreciated the answer, but the moderator made us move on.

The second goal of the meeting was to use this collective crisis to draw together those who are interested in improving the status of the town and commit ourselves to working together on some kind of shared mission.

To that end, the moderator had arranged six possible ideas, culled from the previous meeting, that his team believed the town itself might commit to, ideas that would still be sound irrespective of the outcome of the campus.

I was one of the people who didn’t appreciate the moderator’s first answer, so I could barely focus on the second goal. One week later, I wish I had.

(To read a full recap of the meeting, read this newspaper article written by one of my former students — you go, Kate!)

But back to the first question. The overwhelming desire of the town is for the campus to be used by some kind of hands-on educational institution, ideally centered on the intersection of sustainability, agriculture, and the trades. It would be a mixed age institution, with classes offered to high schoolers (both foreign and domestic), as well as college age and above (both foreign and domestic).

I love that idea, and if implemented, I would support it with everything I’ve got (especially to build a bridge between the high school where I work and the institution the college would become).

With that being said, I don’t know if another “agricultural, sustainability and environmental education institute” was the most critical idea.

The one I put forward during the first meeting (which received a number of votes at the second meeting but didn’t place in the top three) was for the campus to become the home of a public mental-health facility catering specifically to teenagers.

After the vote, I accepted the results and moved on, telling myself the process was nothing more than an experiment in wishful thinking anyway.

Then tonight, a woman I knew during my college days, offered the same idea on a forum of alumni.

Two people, both of whom live or have lived in Poultney for a number of years and who have direct experience working at and/or are partnered with an individual who has worked at the college, offered their disagreement with the idea.

I just so happened to be in a chatty mood (as I so infrequently am) and decided to engage with their good-faith arguments against what I still considered to be my idea. While doing so, I became disappointed in myself, not because I was arguing on Facebook again, but because I missed my chance to defend the idea in person.

Prior to the vote, the moderator asked anyone in the audience if they wanted to speak out in support of any of the ideas on the wall. Several members did. But for some reason, I did not.

One of those reasons was the exhaustion I feel at the end of every workday. I spend six hours a day working with students between the ages of 11 and 22, 100% of whom require extra supports when it comes to their mental and emotional health. It’s a school that is not only working as hard it can to support the students who come through our doors, but to support the teachers and staff as well (as if there were a difference between our teachers and staff). Additionally, because of a continuous increase in the demand for our services, I also work as hard as I can to grow the school in every way, shape, or form, not to increase my pay, but to satisfy needs of the crisis that exists not only in the nation and the state, but also in my own town, where, despite a stable population of residents, we feel the struggle of the increase in mental and emotional health disorders among teenagers.

Every day, as rewarding as it is, is a hard day, and every day leaves me exhausted.

So I didn’t have the energy to stand up at a town meeting and tell everyone that it’s our kids — not the state’s kids — who need the support of a mental-health facility that caters specifically to teenagers.

In my years of being married to an educator in the local public schools and my years of working as an educator in the town’s two private schools, I’ve spoken of more times than we like to admit “the Poultney Wing” of the Brattleboro Retreat (one the state’s few public, residential mental-health facilities with a floor dedicated to teenagers).

It’s sometimes called “the Poultney Wing” because…

How many people in my town have kids or grandkids who take regular medication for anxiety or depression or some form of psychosis?

How many people in my town have kids or grandkids who are so addicted to their smartphones that they suffer from withdrawal symptoms every time the device is taken away, leading to all kinds of familial and educational crises?

How many people in my town have kids or grandkids who have cut themselves just to feel a different kind of pain?

How many children in my town have retreated from their social lives due to the effects of bullying?

How many children in my town live with the trauma of parental addictions; emotional, physical, or sexual abuse; emotional and physical neglect; the ramifications of an ugly divorce; a parade of wanna-be step-parents; hunger and poverty; inadequate healthcare; etc.?

How many children in my town have attempted or have regular ideations about suicide?

The national increase in mental and emotional health disorders is not a statistic. It’s a fact that my wife and I face everyday on the front lines of our schools.

Our kids need help.

Why not do everything we can to give it to them?

This town should become the first investor.
Whatever we can give, let’s give, and then let’s see who joins us.

Categories
life

Our Real Town Meeting Day

In Vermont, Town Meeting Day is officially March 4th, and on March 4th, my small town of Poultney officially met and cast our ballots on all of the issues before us.

But with the yearly budgets passed and the officers elected, it was time to hold our real town meeting to discuss the long-term future of our town.

With the impending dissolution of Green Mountain College as a legal entity, we have lots of concerns about how our town of roughly 3,500 people will survive and thrive without the millions of dollars the college deposits into the town each year through property taxes, water and sewer payments, mortgages and rents, grocery checks, restaurant bills, hardware supplies, cups of coffee, four packs of beer, etc.

It’s a scary moment, and we need help, which was why representatives from the state of Vermont, various Federal agencies, and a variety of non-profits came to the meeting as well: because people genuinely want to help.

We scheduled the meeting for 10:30 AM on a Thursday, not the most opportune time for anyone with responsibilities, but roughly 200 people still found time to walk away from their jobs and depart from their routines, and show up.

I left the meeting feeling incredibly inspired.

Nothing got decided, and lots of questions remain unanswered, but the sense of democracy I experienced left me inspired.

The youngest attendee was in diapers, and when she started crying, her mother brought her into the hallway, but the mother then stayed by the door, helping others to hear while still trying to listen.

The oldest was…well…suffice to say, I sat next to at least a few great-grandmothers and fathers.

But there was also everybody in between. Recent and not-so-recent college alum (such as myself) who elected to settle in the community. Recently arrived retirees concerned with the health and wealth of the land they’ve chosen to call home. Lifelong townspeople with businesses, political offices, and seats on the chamber of commerce. Radically polyamorous twenty-somethings. Hardworking middle-aged tradesmen. Powerful women of color. A man whose first public thought for the campus was to create a safe-haven for refugees. An orange-blazer wearing member of the select board with a long list of entrepreneurial ideas. A green-flannel-wearing pseudo-intellectual with more dreams than he knows what to do with. A working mother, tasked with cleaning the room after we’ve gone, standing with us, listening and having her say, because she too is one of us.

We started with the challenges.

We asked ourselves, what are some of our biggest concerns? I shared my concern about the vibrancy of the community being diminished without the constant rejuvenation of newly arrived students and deciding-to-stay graduates, let alone the joy dee vivray brought in on the tongues and talents of professors and masters of the cultural arts (I didn’t say it quite like that).

Other concerns were more concrete: who’s gonna mow the lawn once the college is gone? Who’s going to ensure the security of the buildings and prevent them from becoming a haven for vagrants, especially in this area, where we too feel the pressures of the nation’s opioid crisis? How are we going to cover our town’s financial obligations without the influx of the college’s money? How much control do we actually have over the future of our town if anyone can come in and purchase what amounts to a core part of the town’s identity?

Next came the suggestions.

Speaking as a representative of the town’s local therapeutic school, I highlighted the state’s dire need for residential mental-health facilities dedicated to serving our youth.

Others suggested a veteran’s care facility; a federally funded school for nurses that would serve as a pilot program within Sen. Sander’s nationwide call for free colleges; a multi-use facility with a community farm, rooms for rent to (say) graduate students who are looking for an idyll location to finish their dissertations in peace, or to (say) religious groups for retreats, or to (say) small tech companies looking to increase their footprint without dramatically increasing their overhead, or to (say) etc.; the establishment of a new town center with offices and seminar rooms to rent on a regular or even hourly basis, not to mention a town-wide dining hall, a nondenominational chapel, an ample-sized theatre, an indoor basketball gym, a state-of-the-art fitness center, a public pool, a large solar array, etc.

And so many more great suggestions, some more realizable than others, some more radical than others, but all of them exciting, all of them different, and best of all, all of them good intentioned.

We listened to all the good people who want to help.

We ended the meeting by inviting the representatives of the various state and federal agencies, as well as the contributing nonprofits, to share their reflections on what they’d heard. To a person, they declared their optimism for what lies ahead of us, provided we keep an open mind and enter into the process with our hearts and our heads in the right place.

Nothing I experienced at that meeting suggests we will do otherwise.

And so I left inspired, and feeling good about calling this place my home.