Two of the items on the agenda for tonight’s council meeting are:

The City Manager’s report on Historic Preservation

Resolution endorsing the creation of a Main Street Program for downtown Middletown

These two items have the ability to be the final nails in the coffin of “Downtown” Middletown.

The area known as “Downtown Middletown” was so described because it once fit the definition of “the business and commerce center of a city”. For many years now, our city officials have been doing everything in their powers to exclude business and commerce from ever again thriving in this area. They have forsaken business and commerce for the sake of the arts, crafts, antiques, and a type of “faux preservation” and phony restoration of fractured history the way they wish it was (as opposed to the way it actually occurred).

Instead of trying to maintain, cultivate and restore a healthy climate for business and commerce, they have chosen to squander the public treasure in an effort to create an "arts district" combined with a quaint Currier & Ives type of Dickensian postcard “village center”. They have consistently and miserably failed.

Tonight they will begin the second phase of their “incremental” efforts to indoctrinate council to force the hardworking taxpayers to foot the bill for the hobbies of the wannabe elite of our city.

Neither “Historic Restoration” to make Middletown seem to be something that it is not, and never has been, nor the “Downtown Plan” which will help to preclude any business or commerce that city officials cannot find a way to block on their own, will benefit more than a very few residents of the City of Middletown.

For far too long already, a few “bad actors” at city hall along with the city’s wannabe elite have been fighting to keep business OUT of the former downtown area, and using the taxpayers’ own money to do so.

Council and the administration should concentrate on how to use our money to keep our city safe and repair our crumbling infrastructure instead of finagling ways to spend our scarce dollars on the fun and games that the elite want, but cannot afford to provide for themselves.

Bill wrote: … all common sense solutions and hybrid proposals that bring together the best of different ideas get flushed away in laughter as the political operatives would rather create a shadow game of political football, name calling, etc. There are some ideas from both sides of the aisle that I would like to see developed more fully and discussed but it gets lost in all the game-playing.

Bill,