The Lincoln Squirrel

News, features and photos from Lincoln, Mass.

letters to the editor

Letter to the editor: contribute to Codman campaign

To the editor:

We write to ask you to consider supporting Codman Community Farms (CCF) with a donation to our Vision 2020 Capital Campaign via our website or a check mailed to Codman Farm at 58 Codman Rd.

Over the last three years, CCF has undergone a transformation. We hired Pete Lowy as Farm Manager in 2016, and under his guidance, the farm has evolved from a small-scale barnyard and hay operation to a vibrant pasture-based livestock operation. Pete and his staff utilize cutting-edge rotational grazing practices with thousands of animals on fields across Lincoln to grow healthy, organically raised eggs, meat, and produce.

This transformation has brought stability to our farm operations, and we are now turning our focus to strengthening our community outreach and education programs, lowering our carbon footprint with a net-zero solar installation, and addressing some of our aging infrastructure. The Vision 2020 Capital Campaign will fund these efforts. You can read more about the projects supported by this campaign, and make a donation by clicking here.

CCF was founded as a non-profit in 1973 by a dynamic group of Lincoln residents who were passionate about preserving the historic property and maintaining its character as a genuine working farm. Today, as it has been since its founding, CCF finances its operations by the sale of farm products, membership support, community events, grants and a relatively small endowment. CCF does not receive any operational funding from the town of Lincoln other than maintenance of town-owned buildings.

We have raised more than 85% of our $350,000 Capital Campaign goal, and as we enter the home stretch we reach out to you, the community of Lincoln, to help us raise the funds needed. Please consider supporting the sustainability and future of this farm with a donation to our Capital Campaign.

Sincerely,

Codman Farm Capital Campaign Committee:
David Alperovitz, Nancy Fleming, Pete Lowy, Jeff Patterson, Ginger Reiner, and Drew Shilling

Letters to the editor must be signed with the writer’s name and street address and sent via email to lincolnsquirrelnews@gmail.com. Letters will be edited for punctuation, spelling, style, etc., and will be published at the discretion of the editor. Letters containing personal attacks, errors of fact or other inappropriate material will not be published.

Letter to the editor: concerns about leaf blower proposal

To the editor:

I offer three of my own concerns about the leaf blower bylaw proposal for your consideration. If you share my concerns, I hope you will vote against this bylaw, regardless of its form or substance, at the Town Meeting.

  • This will cost you money. By definition, this will limit the pool of contractors you can hire from, severely limiting your ability to price shop those services. It’s hard enough to find cost-effective landscaping services here in town; can you imagine how much it’s going to cost when you need to hire one of the handful of “specialty contractors” who only use battery-powered equipment?
  • Not all gas leaf blowers are the same. There are portable ones, powerful push models, and older guzzlers. The largest ones sound like a snow blower or a lawn mower (four-cycle)… are we only limiting the small (two-cycle) ones? If we limit the larger ones, shouldn’t we also limit lawnmower use and snow blower use? What about smaller wood chippers? And larger wood chippers? What about blowers used for tick and mosquito spraying (basically leaf blowers with a tank on the back). Are those restricted? They aren’t technically leaf blowers, but the apparatus is essentially identical. My point is very simple: this rapidly becomes problematic in some pretty obvious ways.
  • Is this a good use of our time? Do we really want the town involved in restricting things like this? It’s a slippery slope. Especially in a town with large lots and large attendant maintenance requirements, we are setting a scary precedent. I personally feel there are many more pressing issues we can attend to.

Sincerely,

Seth Rosen
53 Bedford Rd., Lincoln

Letters to the editor must be signed with the writer’s name and street address and sent via email to lincolnsquirrelnews@gmail.com. Letters will be edited for punctuation, spelling, style, etc., and will be published at the discretion of the editor. Letters containing personal attacks, errors of fact or other inappropriate material will not be published.

Letter to the editor: come learn about ranked choice voting

To the editor:

Our Massachusetts legislators have filed two bills to adopt ranked choice voting (RCV). It may be coming soon, here and around the country. Come join us at Bemis Hall this Sunday, March 10 at 3 p.m. to hear Jim Henderson of Voter Choice Massachusetts and cast your votes in a simulated RCV election.

There are many good reasons to adopt this procedure. Most importantly, it enables a more sophisticated and accurate measure of the will of the people, ensuring that the candidate elected enjoys the support of at least 50 percent of the voters.

If we continue to allow the election of candidates that receive the support of only 40 percent or less of the voters, we are discouraging citizen participation and denying their policy and personal principles. In this time, when there are more candidates presenting more points of view than the traditional two parties can champion, we should encourage a robust, new democratic process.

There are practical reasons as well, since ranked choice voting eliminates the need for runoff elections. What an excellent result, when we can simultaneously better reflect the will of the people and conclude the election on time, without additional expense and distraction from the work we need to do.

The bills filed in our legislature are  S.414 and H.719, which would establish RCV in state and federal elections, excluding the presidential election, and S.420 and H.635, which would make it easier for cities and towns to adopt RCV for local elections. Our state representative, Tom Stanley, has supported all of them. Our state senator, Mike Barrett, has supported the state and federal elections bills. You can click on the bill numbers for details, and also take a look at  Voter Choice MA’s Take Action page for more information.

We hope to see you Sunday!

Sincerely,

Peter Pease (40 Huckleberry Hill) and Barbara Slayter (7 Trapelo Rd.)
Co-chairs, Lincoln Democratic Town Committee

Letters to the editor must be signed with the writer’s name and street address and sent via email to lincolnsquirrelnews@gmail.com. Letters will be edited for punctuation, spelling, style, etc., and will be published at the discretion of the editor. Letters containing personal attacks, errors of fact or other inappropriate material will not be published.

Letter to the editor: come to Saturday event on climate action

To the editor:

Climate change is a matter of grave concern. I applaud the work of Sen. Markey and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in their efforts to jump-start a bold response to global warming with their Green New Deal. The proposal still lacks metrics and clarity and is not likely to be approved by this Congress, but it’s making an important contribution by bringing climate change — as if wildfires, hurricanes, drought, and rising sea water are not enough — into the public discussion.  

We citizens need to put pressure on our president and our Congress for effective action in reducing carbon and creating a clean energy economy. We also need to focus on what we can do within our own local communities and in our own state. What steps will enable Massachusetts to have a green, carbon-neutral energy system? What organizations can we work with to increase our knowledge and our effective advocacy in regard to climate change?

350 Mass is a Massachusetts-based, grassroots climate movement supported by the Better Future Project, a Cambridge-based nonprofit organization. It aims to address problems of climate change in the context of creating a more live-able world for all of us. 350 Mass engages in political advocacy, direct action, and creating alliances. It is gaining widespread recognition throughout the state for its work addressing climate issues.

This Saturday, March 2 at 10 a.m. in Bemis Hall, the Lincoln Democratic Town Committee has invited Andrew Gordon, the legislative coordinator with 350 Mass, to lead us in considering how we can most effectively amplify our voices to support effective policies on global warming. Lincoln, with its approved plan for construction of a net-zero school, is in the vanguard of effective community action. Let’s find out what else we can be doing at the state and local levels, as well as to support our legislators in key national policy decisions. We invite you to join us for this discussion on Saturday.

Sincerely,

Barbara Slayter
Co-chair, Lincoln Democratic Town Committee

Letters to the editor must be signed with the writer’s name and street address and sent via email to lincolnsquirrelnews@gmail.com. Letters will be edited for punctuation, spelling, style, etc., and will be published at the discretion of the editor. Letters containing personal attacks, errors of fact or other inappropriate material will not be published.

Letter to the editor: response to leaf-blower proposal critique

To the editor:

As a member of the Leaf Blower Study Committee, I thank Mr. Deck for his thoughtful critique of our initiative (Lincoln Squirrel, February 20, 2019). In truth, I find more common ground than I might have expected, and have only two points of disagreement.

(1) Mr. Deck says his own leaf blower use has no impact on his neighbors. I wonder if that is truly the case — I know from my own neighborhood experience that the sound of gas-powered leaf blowers several properties down from my home carries way farther, and is significantly more intrusive, than the users perhaps know.

(2) The civil disobedience Mr. Deck proposes to practice should the leaf blower by-law pass is a seriously slippery slope. By this same logic, perhaps we could dispense with those annoying stop signs by the library, for example. Reasonable courteous Lincolnites would simply defer to each other voluntarily at that corner. Maybe — but not likely. As a community, we recognize the need to balance individual rights against larger common interests. We believe the proposed leaf blower by-law does that, and we invite Mr. Deck to throw in with us.

Sincerely,

Robin Wilkerson
31 Old Winter St., Lincoln

Letters to the editor must be signed with the writer’s name and street address and sent via email to lincolnsquirrelnews@gmail.com. Letters will be edited for punctuation, spelling, style, etc., and will be published at the discretion of the editor. Letters containing personal attacks, errors of fact or other inappropriate material will not be published.

Letter to the editor: proposed leaf blower bylaw is an “overreach”

To the editor:

In a recent posting to the Lincoln Squirrel (“Leaf blower issue comes before voters again,” February 18), proponents of a Town Meeting proposal to limit the use of leaf blowers describe their proposal as noncontroversial. I disagree, and I strongly urge Lincoln residents to oppose it in its current form.

The proposal limits my rights to use my leaf blower responsibly and with no harm to my nearest neighbors. Instead of a ban that can’t hope to anticipate all reasonable exceptions, the committee should seek for the town to adopt leaf blower use guidelines and focus on education instead of rules that limit their reasonable use.

I agree that the wanton use of leaf blowers can be both an environmental and health problem, but many Lincoln homeowners such as I live on the edge of a forest where leaves blow in and become lodged in gutters and corners around the house. This happens year round and I sometimes use a leaf blower to help dislodge them. I don’t use lawn services that overuse them. I don’t blow dirt off my driveway into the air. I live hundreds of yards from my nearest neighbor. As a result, when I use a leaf blower, it causes none of the harm that the proposers of this ban refer to. I can’t always limit my use to the hours proposed. None of these restrictions should apply to individual homeowners using leaf blowers themselves on properties over two acres.

It’s great that this group of citizens has been able to get the town to use leaf blowers more carefully in public areas and to get more people to use electric leaf blowers. I believe that the first step as described in this article has achieved a good result for us all. These efforts should continue.

This next step as proposed is an overreach. I understand that it is well intentioned, but it goes too far and limits the ability of homeowners to act reasonably — even if it simultaneously discourages unreasonable use. If the proposal is passed by Town Meeting, my only alternative will be to ignore the ban and use my leaf blower when I need to. No one will know, especially in winter when everyone is indoors over a quarter-mile away with their windows shut. But each time I have to do that, I’ll rue the day that the majority of my neighbors somehow found themselves justified to deny me the right to act responsibly on my own property.

We’re better than this. We can do better than this.

Sincerely,

Mark Deck
11 Boyce Farm Rd., Lincoln

Letters to the editor must be signed with the writer’s name and street address and sent via email to lincolnsquirrelnews@gmail.com. Letters will be edited for punctuation, spelling, style, etc., and will be published at the discretion of the editor. Letters containing personal attacks, errors of fact or other inappropriate material will not be published.

Letter to the editor: say no to MBTA fare increases

To the editor:

I object to MBTA fare increases for the following reasons:

  1. Raising MBTA fares in Massachusetts on basically privatized public transportation that is neglected, decrepit, badly needs massive updating, and has already very costly fares unjustly penalizes those who most need public transportation to get to work and is not good for all the people of the Commonwealth. The people know this and are not happy. Even the MBTA estimates that this fare increase will reduce its ridership by 4.8 million riders annually or 1.3 percent, and thus increase the use of carbon-spewing cars and traffic in Boston in general. Why would this be advisable in light of the global climate catastrophe we are now facing?
  2. In light of this impending catastrophe (see this morning’s sequence on DemocracyNow about this in detail), it would certainly be better to start providing public transportation that is not only free but uses renewable energy (solar, wind) as many other countries like China are already doing.    
  3. Make public transportation free for all to encourage its use, as Boston City Councilor Michelle Wu recently suggested. This is not a “luxurious” choice; it is not something we cannot afford. We cannot afford to not do it now, if we are to even slightly mitigate the sixth extinction we are in the midst of. There is much to be found via Google about cities that have made public transportation free for all and how much it benefits people and businesses as well as the environment.
  4. True leadership that actually represent the people of the Commonwealth would agree with the following: “A developed country is not a place where the poor have cars. It’s where the rich use public transportation.”

Written comments about the MBTA fare proposal will be accepted through February 28. They can be mailed to: MBTA, 10 Park Plaza, Boston, MA 02116, attention: Fare Proposal Committee. Comments can also be submitted using the MBTA website, by e-mail at fares@mbta.com, or by phone at 617-222-3200, TTY 617-222-5146. The public hearing will be held on February 27 from 6:30–8:30 p.m. in the MBTA Board Room, State Transportation Building, second floor, 10 Park Plaza, Boston.

Raising MBTA fares is not a good decision. Real, concerned, informed, caring leadership would know this. 

Sincerely,

Jean Palmer
247 Tower Rd., Lincoln

Letters to the editor must be signed with the writer’s name and street address and sent via email to lincolnsquirrelnews@gmail.com. Letters will be edited for punctuation, spelling, style, etc., and will be published at the discretion of the editor. Letters containing personal attacks, errors of fact or other inappropriate material will not be published.

Letter to the editor: ban e-cigarette sales at Town Meeting

To the editor:

The 2019 8th-grade Warrant Article Group. Left to right): Andrew Craig, Aleco Buendia, Isaiah Jones, Emily Appleby, and David Christenfeld (click to enlarge). 

This year the 8th-grade Warrant Article Group (WAG), which consists of Emily Appleby, Aleco Buendia, David Christenfeld, Andrew Craig and Isaiah Jones, would like to ask Lincoln voters to support our proposition to ban the sale of e-cigarettes in town.

We had hoped to ban all cigarettes, but after we took a survey and talked with Donelan’s, we concluded that the town would not support such a total ban. We compromised, and now want to ban any future sales of e-cigarettes because there is a growing use among teenagers. Currently no one sells e-cigarettes in town.

To get our petition onto the warrant, we each collected ten signatures and will now take our idea to Town Meeting. We have learned a lot about town government while working on our citizens’ petition. We hope you will attend Town Meeting which is where we will discuss this more and ask for your vote.

Sincerely,

David Christenfeld
50 Old Winter St., Lincoln

Letter to the editor: Picker running for library trustee

To the editor:

I am running for the open seat of Lincoln Library Trustee with a three-year term and I respectfully ask for your vote at the March 2019 town elections.

The Lincoln Library is an esteemed, well patronized, core institution in our town that provides valuable services across all age groups. It is served by a highly professional, competent, and experienced staff. It is one of the centerpieces of our community. If elected, as a trustee I would focus on working with the other trustees and staff to help establish priorities for library spending, collections, programs, facilities, staffing, and new initiatives. This needs to be done within constraints such as budget, space, and staffing.

I believe that it is very important for the library to maintain a good and current understanding of what services the people of Lincoln would like it to provide in this rapidly changing world. I would also work with the team to look at collaborations with other town boards and non-government organizations in town to look for new opportunities and to strengthen existing collaborations.

I look forward to your support on election day.

Sincerely,

Dennis Picker
58 Page Rd., Lincoln

Letters to the editor must be signed with the writer’s name and street address and sent via email to lincolnsquirrelnews@gmail.com. Letters will be edited for punctuation, spelling, style, etc., and will be published at the discretion of the editor. Letters containing personal attacks, errors of fact or other inappropriate material will not be published.

Letter to the editor: Susan Taylor running for School Committee

Dear neighbors,

I ask for your vote on March 25 for the two-year position on the Lincoln School Committee. With your support, I hope both to bring the perspective of my years in Lincoln community service and to pay forward the great benefit that Lincoln’s commitment to education has given to my now-adult children.

My husband Gary and I have been active in the Lincoln community since we moved here in 1990. I now serve on the Scholarship Committee and as a trustee of Farrington Nature Linc (a children’s program based in Lincoln). I’ve been a Lincoln Public Library trustee and president of the Lincoln League of Women Voters. When my children were students here, I served on the Principal’s Council, the METCO Coordinating Committee, as a Girl Scout leader, and Sunday school teacher, and as active supporter of Lincoln sports, drama, outdoor recreation, and music for children.

I believe that as technology and cultural diversity broaden and challenge the ways we provide education, community engagement and critical thinking become even more valuable. All of us are needed to provide the inspiration, guidance, experience, financial oversight, safety and affection our children should have from their home town and school.

I can think of nothing more vital to Lincoln than the strength of our schools, and I look forward to working with you for all our children and for “the village” that loves them.

Sincerely,

Susan Hands Taylor
2 Beaver Pond Rd., Lincoln

Letters to the editor must be signed with the writer’s name and street address and sent via email to lincolnsquirrelnews@gmail.com. Letters will be edited for punctuation, spelling, style, etc., and will be published at the discretion of the editor. Letters containing personal attacks, errors of fact or other inappropriate material will not be published.