Don Lowe First Selectman Column 07 20 2026
The Fireman’s Ball is coming up on Saturday, August 1. It will be held at the Sherman Green and will feature live music, the best roast beef ever along with all the fixins’, door prizes, and tables full of people having a wonderful evening. Doors open at 4:30 and dinner starts at 6:30. Come early, grab a table, and bring some favorite hors d’oeuvres. The theme and the music are from the 60s and 70s, and I volunteered to play about 45 minutes of dinner music. After that, a band will be playing the hits of the 60s and 70s! Dancing is encouraged. Tickets cost $40 and all the profit goes toward supporting our women and men of the Sheman Volunteer Fire Department who do so much for us.
We had the threat of another severe storm this past weekend and, fortunately, it fizzled out although there was a lot of rain. Now that cleanup is mostly completed from the storm two weeks ago, we are examining potentially troublesome trees and making a list. This is a challenging activity as there are so many trees that could potentially fall. In fact, there are simply a lot of trees, period. It’s interesting, because the majority of our trees are now mostly in their mid-to-late growth stage and that doesn’t bode well for when we have accompanying high winds and rain. Our publics works crew, along with the State crews, and Eversource are all working together on assessing trees for cutting and trimming.
Our new Senior Center project is moving along and is positioned better than it was previously. The delay we experienced while we go through the process of procuring a new architect will be a blessing as far as timing. I write this on Monday (you read it on Thursday) and on Tuesday night the Senior Center building committee will be pouring over the responses from our request for proposals for architects. We received 14 of them. We will choose finalists to interview, and from that choose a new architect. At that point we will be moving firmly forward. We are shooting for construction to start in late spring of 2027.
The Board of Selectmen’s regularly scheduled meeting is on this Thursday, July 23 at 7pm in Mallory Town Hall. The agenda is on the Town website. The meeting will mostly be recaps and updates on current projects including the school renovation/repair and the Senior Center. Regarding the Sherman School project, which is coming along nicely, I will be giving future updates on that in this column.
Please be careful of phone scams, which are happening more and more. If something doesn’t sounds right, if you are being threatened, or if you are being hurried into a decision, please note that it’s probably a scam. Hang up, block the call, and move on.
Here’s hoping for no more windy, rainy storms!
