The evening of 2025-07-14 was a meeting of the Mendon Town Board.
There was a crowd at the meeting, which is always nice to see. Seemed to be for multiple reasons: Public Hearing on signs, presentation on Climate Smart Communities, hopeful future elected officials. At least that looked to me as to be the reasons for the extra people.
There was no action taken on the Public Hearing for signs. Technically tabled, but that’s really just leaving it open for next month. There were multiple comments on the subject. Mostly about how stopping certain signs is good, but also a few warning against accidentally shooting ourselves in the foot (figuratively speaking) if the restrictions are too broad.
I made the comment that we should keep the code simple (KISS). Which means, in this case, leave signs as unregulated as possible. Declare a sign free zone around roads (15 feet was in the proposed code), reserve the right to take them down if deemed unsafe (which itself is a debatable term). But besides that, it’s your property. Have fun with it.
As an aside, it’s never popular speech that needs protection. It’s unpopular speech that the first amendment was made for. This issue is apparently being drive because of one guy. And it doesn’t get much more unpopular then an opinion of one. I really should get out to see the signs in question.
Melissa from the Office of Aging gave a presentation. I saw something similar when she was at the Village a while back. Watching this time I noticed all her numbers appear to be percentage based. Which had me wondering, how much does birth rate come into play here? Or younger people moving out of state? People have been aging for as long as there have been people. Is this becoming an issue here and now as a side effect of bad policies? I would expect a bell curve here (more or less). But if we stop having babies and ship the younger away? I could see that creating the scenario that was described.
I don’t have anything specific to say about the Climate Smart Communities presentation. It felt rather bureaucratic and only tangentially environmental. Which did have me thinking about a trend I have noticed when climate comes up. There seem to be two camps here. One is all about human flourishing, and improving the climate is one way to do that. They tend to be open about their goal. The other looks more like a death cult, and their approach to climate matches. As you would expect, not so open. While I can’t prove which camp this particular initiate lands in, that it wasn’t blatantly pro human flourishing likely means it’s subtly anti human. Which is a shame (and a situation where I would like to be wrong).
The Municipal Snow and Ice Agreement was adjusted. At first glance this didn’t look good for the budget. But as it was explained, this is revenue. Reimbursement for work already done. Which makes it a good thing for the Town.
There was discussion around the former Critic’s property. Freely admit I don’t know all the details here. My sense of it was the Village is giving (or selling?) the sidewalk/retaining wall along the Library driveway to the Town. But the future potential owner of the rest of the property also wants to use the Library driveway? Which could necessitate enlarging the driveway, and by extension moving the sidewalk and it’s retaining wall. Overall, I got the impression the Town was fine with taking ownership of the sidewalk to their Library. But details needed to be ironed out. Still, good to see the parties involved work on it.
And was an amusing discussion on making plans for the nations 250th birthday. Or not? As one Board member put it, July 4th is when everyone leaves Mendon. Which roughly matches my experience. I find that holiday a great time to hang out at my residence, and enjoy the relative peace and quiet.
And those are my Observations From Audience Land for the July 14, 2025 meeting of the Mendon Town Board.