The Clinton Town Council held a regular meeting on Wednesday, January 7, 2026, at 5:00 AM UTC. The meeting covered several items including public comments, a library project update, approval of a historic documents preservation grant, a budget calendar, a public works line item transfer, and two executive sessions. The council also heard a suggestion from the town manager to videotape future budget workshops.
All right, good morning, everybody. Welcome to the town council regular meeting. Uh Wednesday, January 7th, 2026. We'll start with the pledge, Dennis, if you don't mind leading us. Thanks, Dennis. Next item on the agenda, item number two is visitors. Do we have any visitors that like to speak? Hey Matt. How are you? Please come to the table. Say your name and your address, please, and I got a brief disclaimer to tell you. During the public comment and the council will listen without reply. This approach ensures fairness and order while showing respect for your input, which we value and will consider carefully. If a response or action is needed, the town manager will follow up with a meeting or the council will place it on your matter on a future agenda. So there won't be interaction. Understand. Matthew Williams, 91 Ironworks Road. I wanted to uh bring to the council's attention concerns that I have regarding um planning and zoning and its sort of current makeup and operation. So I've had a numerous experiences there over a number of years, as you know, I'm involved in a lot of projects in town. Uh I am very well versed in the zoning regulation, the detail of it. Not only Clinton's, but many, many regulations. And I've been to a lot of a lot of commission meetings and a lot of approvals and a handful of denials here and there over my years. And she and I have even talked about this a little bit here and there. I think she's leery of overstepping her bounds as not being one of the elected officials. Um however, in my experience, in a lot of bigger miss municipalities, town planners in many cases, and I'm not saying that say this is appropriate, they really run the meeting. And what happens is that commission members who come once a month oftentimes forget detail of testimony that was given in prior hearings or hearings that were closed in any particular matter, which is understandable. And I think that um if Abby was asked to um sort of monitor where they forget things, and I'll just give you a recent experience was with the proposal that I had brought, and they had asked me to make an amendment to this uh text amendment uh application that I had. And then after the hearing was closed, that amendment was was uh thoroughly debunked by one of the members, and uh which didn't make any sense to me that they asked me to put it in and then they tore it apart and made it one of the reasons why they denied it. Um so I think that those for those reasons I think a town planner could speak up and just bring it to the attention of the of the chairman. Um that um you may want to recall the minutes and testimony prior, and those are the things that I think are not necessarily happening, and it wasn't just that application that you know I've seen this happen before. You have a young um relatively inexperienced commission. The uh chairman, um Mike Rossi is a wonderful guy who is very knowledgeable. Um there's also one other strong very personality on the commission who um if you just watch any of the tape or listen to the meetings, you will see um really dominance dominates and steers the commission in my opinion most most commonly in a negative way, not in a proactive way. And I think that um perhaps that can be dealt with in some way, shape, or form. Um but really the purpose of my comment is about asking the town planner to be more involved in the meeting uh so that she can help the uh chairman um keep things you know on task and make sure because unfortunately they may make decisions that might put them at uh risk of liability if they ignore testimony. Um the second thing is I just wanted to um strongly encourage you to approve an appropriation that I think was brought to you or is in the works for rewriting the regulation. I think that that's been long overdue. Um, you know, going back, I don't know how long ago it was Willie Fritz was first selectman, but I mean I remember telling Willie years ago that regulation I think really hinders development and investment interest uh in the town, and I work directly with people who are you know consider spending their money on any specific property, and it isn't necessarily changing what the zoning says. It's a matter of clear um removing all the ambiguity and contradictions that are within it. It it's not a um it's not uncommon that um these regulations are written over time by members of the commission or planning or whoever uh and the town attorney, but what happens is you end up with this very convoluted thing where people don't really know or understand what the intent is. And um it also puts a lot of pressure on your administrators when people don't know that. So um I would just strongly encourage you to approve that when that comes forward, it really needs to be done, and I think it'd be a great thing for the town because I think it will really help um you know motivate people to to do things, you know, if there was some clarity there. So all right, thanks for your comments. Uh it's valuable for us to hear from a person with your skill or expertise in our town. So thank you for letting us know what you're thinking. I appreciate you having me. Thank you very much. All right, next um a motion to approve the minutes from the meeting of December 17th, 2025. Do I have a motion? So moved.