The member chairing Farmington's Green Efforts Committee offered a diagnosis in July that most volunteer boards would recognize: the committee has plenty of people ready to work and no reliable way to put them in the game. "A lot of us are like, I'm ready. Put me in, coach. And it's not happening," she told the room. The frustration was not with the committee's ideas, which are plentiful, or its people, who volunteer weekly. It was with the machinery in between. "We just need a structure that allows us somehow to take the ball and carry it."
That diagnosis, more than any single agenda item, was the real work of the July 7 meeting. The Green Efforts Committee is an advisory body of volunteers, and it has spent recent months generating more green initiatives than a volunteer committee with a single staff liaison can carry. So this meeting was about subtraction.
The chair opened by asking for focus, "given the limited resources of the committee, and the limited resources of town staff, because it's Garrett and Garrett and Garrett." The Garrett in question is Garrett Daigle, the assistant town planner who serves as the committee's staff liaison and, by the chair's own arithmetic, its entire back office. Against that constraint, the committee narrowed a sprawl of ambitions into four goals it could plausibly finish: waste reduction, climate resilience and clean energy, dark skies, and habitat loss. Public education, which the committee had been treating as a fifth goal, was folded in as a method for reaching the other four. Nothing was put to a vote. The goals took shape by agreement around the table, which is how this committee tends to move.
The budget is part of the backdrop. Next year is a revaluation year, the chair noted, which makes it "really tight," and the committee was asked to think about whether it wants a small budget line to make its work easier, a question that has to reach the town manager before year's end. But the spine of the argument was that money is not the binding constraint. "I don't think it's just a money problem," the chair said, "unless the red tape is so strong that there's no way around the system."
The clearest of the four goals is town-wide composting, and the committee has a concrete way to move it. Bree Quinby, the member driving the effort, wants to bring in USA Waste, the West Hartford hauler, to present at the committee's August 4 meeting on what a town-wide program would cost and how it would actually work. The model is West Hartford's: drop-off bins, made by a company called Metro, that Quinby said "look like a library" and could sit in front of Town Hall or, fittingly, the library.
The complication is that composting is usually sold as something that pays for itself, and Farmington's own experience says otherwise. Sam Kilpatrick, the school district's director of facilities, told the committee that the schools' composting program has been a net cost increase, not a savings. The reason is mundane and important: the district's dumpster hauling is billed at a flat rate, not by weight, so diverting food waste out of the trash does not lower the bill. The only savings come from cutting the number of pickups, and only at the edges. Westwoods went from four pickups a week to three, by his recollection, and Union should be able to drop one. "It is still a net cost increase," Kilpatrick said. He agreed to pull the exact figures. The committee knows this terrain firsthand: at an earlier meeting it voted to fund the full $4,500 for a compost table at Union School.
Some of the committee's frustration is that even its visible work stays invisible. Members who staffed the committee's table at a recent town fair, one of a string of efforts that includes a spring cleanup that drew 89 volunteers and 2,200 pounds of trash, came back with the same report. "A theme that I heard was people had no clue we existed," one member said. "They had no idea somebody in Farmington was working on that." The committee's whole public-education push, the one it just demoted from goal to method, is aimed squarely at that gap.
None of it is new ambition. A year ago the same committee was described in this paper as having a wet spring and big plans. The plans have not been the problem.
No vote was taken on any of this, because there was nothing to vote on yet. What the committee set instead were dates: USA Waste on August 4, a clean-energy presentation in September, and a September deadline for members to come back with research on each of the four goals. Whether the structure finally holds, whether the committee that keeps saying "put me in, coach" gets to run, is the thing the next two meetings will actually test.
This coverage is supported by Farmington Storage, 155 Scott Swamp Road, the only storage facility in Connecticut with Museum air. A committee with more good ideas than shelf space is a familiar problem. So is knowing that some things are worth keeping under the right conditions, at institutional grade. 860.777.4001 📦
Jack Beckett has covered enough Farmington committee meetings to know that the hardest part of local government is not deciding what to do but deciding what to stop doing. He is on his third coffee and counted the goals twice. ☕
*The Farmington Mercury covers the town nobody else is covering: the zoning board that runs late, the police log that is technically public record but functionally invisible, the volunteer committee quietly deciding what happens to your town's food waste. We publish slowly, deliberately, and without apology. Always last to breaking news, thorough about everything else. Find us at farmingtonmercury.com and tell your neighbors. #WeAreFarmington 📰