Business Options

With Mizza’s closed and the Corner Store a question mark, surely Norfolk needs to revisit the future desires expressed in last year’s 2023! symposium. These basically were for the familiar Our Town scenario – a town of every social class and full of small retail businesses – flowers, candy, books. Sweet…

Now it seems that we need a Chamber of Commerce to talk us towards this dream, unless we can find something like Canaan’s Railroad Days to lure more spenders here. (That Railroad Days may not help much in January is a boring detail.)

Instead of more chatter, like the Economic Development Committee, why not try a fresh approach? First, ask the handful of business people here who have made a success over time – people like George Auclair, Marc Tonan, Al Boucher and Bella Erder – what makes a business succeed in Norfolk? Who are their best and most profitable customers? What are the core problems of businesses in Norfolk and in Connecticut? What would make Norfolk and Connecticut a better place for business?

If their answers suggest that more weekending New York lawyers is a Norfolk solution, let’s think about how to attract more New York lawyers. Look at Salisbury – not Canaan. Salisbury is a year round success.

Then let’s ask ourselves honestly whether we would start a business in Connecticut – let alone Norfolk – if we had other options. Most surveys show Connecticut around 49 out of 50 as the worst state for business. How can we get Hartford to reform taxes and regulations? And cut the cost of schools? These are the economic death stars for the Conn. economy. Let’s tackle real problems and not waste time on fantasies.

Tony Thomson

Pesticide Dangers

In response to Lindsey’s column last month in Norfolk Now (“Emerald Ash Borers,” August 2014), I wanted to share that there are hundreds of scientific articles linking the use of dinotenfluran and other neonicotinoid pesticides with the decline of honey bees, known as Colony Collapse Disorder, as well as links with the decline of other wild pollinators, like bats.

Neonicotinoid chemicals, or neonics, are systemic pesticides: once applied, they enter the entire system of the plant and are then expressed in the flowers and the pollen, which is how bees and other pollinators get poisoned.

The European Union (EU) banned the use of three major neonics in 2013. Bayer Corporation is suing the EU over this ban, but there is little evidence that corporations care about the environment as people do. At least half of the food we eat is pollinated by bees or other pollinators, and the current crisis causing the collapse of entire populations will have effects on humans.

Losing ash trees to the Emerald Ash Borer is serious, and alternative treatment methods, like botanical oils, should be investigated. But killing off all the pollinators won’t help us, or the trees, in the long run.

Martha Klein, MPH