Enough Reason
Weekly Update 6/18/2023 to 6/24/2023 #178
A few days ago, I had a Mattie Stepanek quote that stayed on my mind through the day and is still there a few days later. Before I venture down this rabbit hole though, let me share some of my week serving as the mayor of the best smalltown in America.
Ninety-nine point forty-seven percent of all 911 calls were answered by Seymour Police Department Dispatch within ten seconds during the month of May. Thank you to everyone at SPD for all your hard work keeping Seymour safe. I appreciate your dedication, and I am sure many others do as well.
An hour before the most recent Board of Works meeting, we opened bids from five companies looking to do an estimated $2 million in road work for the Crossroads Community Matching Grant 2023-1 that we received earlier this year. Three of the five bidders came in within a few thousand dollars of each other. Now we go through a review process to make sure all the documents are in proper order and prepare to award the job in July. While we are on the topic of road projects, we were able to open the latest phase of Burkart Boulevard on 6/23/2023. This should help reduce traffic volume on a few area streets and speed up travel for area residents as people adjust to the new possibilities. One random piece I explored was that you can leave a couple of the parking lots at Valeo Plant 1 and reach the intersection at Rally's before you hit a stop sign or stop light.
Less than ten minutes before the Board of Works meeting this week, I asked intern Brandon Rodriguez if he would like to officiate the meeting. As I expected he would, he jumped at the chance. Obviously, he has no voting powers, but he did a good job leading the meeting. I have said it before and will say it here again. The future is bright for Seymour because we have many very confident and very talented young people growing and learning who care about our community. They amaze me as members of the Mayor’s Youth Council and have amazed me, even more, the last two summers as interns at City Hall. A huge thank you to our youth, and I look forward to seeing all your accomplishments over the years.
This week, I had a chance to work with the crew at the Airport one morning before meetings. They gave me a very brief how-to on mowing and turned me loose to help get some grass taken care of. It would have been easy to get aggravated and complain about getting stuck or even the technical difficulties I had while there. Instead, though, I chose to find the positives as I worked. Things like getting to enjoy the outdoors and singing at the top of my lungs because no one could hear me over the mower. I chose the positives because each day, even with its struggles, is a blessing. Not long ago someone passed that I had been blessed with a chance to get to know over the last few months. Over those months, we would sometimes talk of his life as he reflected on it, and more often than not I would leave our visits looking much deeper into myself than when I arrived. While I said thank you for the visit as I would leave, I doubt he realized how much I appreciated the chance to get to know him. Today, I opened by mentioning Mattie Stepanek. He didn't get a chance to do many of the things most of us will. He didn’t get his driver's license or own his own home for you see he passed due to Dysautonomic Mitochondrial Myopathy in 2004, just a month before his 14th birthday. He did, however, leave us his poetry. The quote that has been on my mind is this. "If you have enough breath to complain about anything, you have more than enough reason to give thanks about something."