On the rink delay, the puck stops with Fred

Newsletter Volume 3 • Number 32

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After so many years and so many missteps, it comes down to a failure of leadership

Mr. Camillo has ignored years of warnings that project plans were ill defined, lacked professional estimates of construction costs, and failed to address neighborhood concerns. Last year, the RTM’s Budget Overview Committee (BOC) “universally agreed that oversight is a problem with this project,” committee notes say, and urged Camillo to create a building committee, similar to school projects.

That’s why every RTM member who spoke agreed that we need a new rink, plus somewhere for skaters to go while it’s built, but so many voted against Camillo’s plan.

Mr. Camillo’s first leadership mistake was to appoint a “Rink User Committee for Design and Planning,” stacked with, you guessed it, rink users. At their initial meeting in April 2021, Committee Chair Bill Drake identified the park where the current rink is, the parking lot, rink, and ballfield as their mandate, saying “our task is to optimize all of those.” Byram residents and RTM members countered that you shouldn’t have rink users redesigning a public park.

Shortly after that, the RTM slashed Camillo’s request for $950,000 to “finalize” rink plans. Lucia Jansen, then chair of the BOC, highlighted a lack of information about what was planned, where it would go, and agreed with community stakeholders who felt shut out. “They want a vote,” Jansen told the rink committee.

A year later, in 2022, Mr. Camillo told his committee that the new rink would go on its existing footprint, but added a wrinkle. He first wanted money to design a temporary rink elsewhere, while Drake indicated “everyone would naturally prefer that this second rink be perennial.” Two rinks now?

“We think we’re getting it back on track,” Camillo said.

But the RTM overwhelmingly voted down funds for that, too, because like the new rink, it came with scant information on where it would go or how much it would cost. “No one, not even rink committee members, knows,” said Jansen at the time.

In 2023 Mr. Camillo flipped, citing a questionable “community” survey stacked with rink users that favored flipping the rink and the park’s ball field. Cost estimates gyrated wildly from $21 to $11 million, prompting jokes that the town had a Groupon half-price deal. The finance board and the RTM deleted rink funding again.

  • “No changes have been made” to oversight, the BOC wrote
  • The Rink User Committee produced no professional cost estimates
  • Neighbors still objected that their concerns about flipping the rink hadn’t been addressed
  • And while the rink project spun, a frustrated Greenwich melted down

The First Selectman doesn’t seem to have learned much from all this. He says he will be asking for money again, this time to get a cost estimate to validate his contention that the flip is cheaper than rebuilding the rink in place. 

If it were just about the cost, that might fly in the next budget round. But the truth is it’s about much more than that. It’s about leading a community toward consensus, which any figure skater can tell you is hard to do if you’re just spinning.


Riverside School tops concerns at budget hearing

Budget season kicked off on Tuesday as the First Selectman and the School Superintendent presented their respective budgets to the Board of Estimate and Taxation (BET). 

The presentations were followed by speaker after speaker pleading with the BET to preserve funding in the budget to renovate Riverside School. The principal, teachers, parents and students described the nearly ninety year old school as overcrowded and unsafe, and a turnoff to prospective families. 

A lack of fire sprinklers and an elevator puts students at risk, a shortage of classrooms hinders learning, and an undersized cafeteria gives students only minutes to inhale their lunch, according to the comments made at the hearing.

Now it is up to the BET to decide whether to heed these requests. Notably, breaking with tradition, half of the Republican BET caucus did not attend the public hearing at Town Hall, one of only three opportunities for the BET to hear directly from residents.


Action Calendar

Grab your cowboy boots, put on your best dancing hat, and come join us for a fun-filled night of Country Line Dancing! 7:00 – 9:00 p.m., First Congregational Church of Greenwich, (108 Sound Beach Ave, OG). Tickets here.

Greenwich Democrats monthly meeting. You won’t want to miss this one. Special guest speaker, Patti Russo, Executive Director of The Campaign School at Yale, will get us fired up about the upcoming municipal elections. When Patti speaks, winning doesn’t just feel possible, it feels inevitable. 7:30-9:00 p.m., Greenwich Town Hall Meeting Room.


Friends in the medical field alerted us to how Trump’s gag order and funding freeze is affecting their ability to apply for federal research grants. “By slowing or stopping the process for funding, this pause has the potential to wreak havoc with the conduct of life-saving health science,” said Megan Ranney, Dean of the School of Public Health at Yale. Learn about it here.


Volume 3, Number 32 • January 30, 2025
Paid for by the Greenwich Democratic Town Committee.
Greenwich Democratic Town Committee P.O. Box 126 Greenwich, CT 06836