Behind the tally sheets

Here’s my favorite part of covering elections: deconstructing the results. If you’re following along at home, the results quoted here are the hand and machine tallies as they stood Tuesday afternoon. Nine provisional ballots are excluded from these results.
Herewith, in no particular order and with no guarantees of relevance, a few observations on the exercise [...]

Your Wekepeke wishes

This week the Times & Courier is restarting what we hope will be a weekly feature, a Web-based opinion poll. The poll will appear every Monday as the first item under “More Headlines” on the Wicked Local Clinton and Wicked Local Lancaster homepages.
What should Clinton do with the Wekepeke land? ( surveys)
This [...]

Sterling 5, Nestle 0

That’s not quite how the discussion went, but no matter how you spin it, Clinton selectmen voted unanimously tonight to reject Nestle’s bid for Wekepeke water. Selectman Joseph Notaro Jr. said he didn’t like the “risk-reward tradeoff” of the deal — specifically mentioning the threat of lawsuits from Sterling residents, and the lower-than-anticipated payments Nestle [...]

Water on the brain

More Wekepeke brouhaha over the past week, as the saga of a salacious boy and his overactive water drill threatens to eclipse Tom Brady, “fashionisto” (66 reader comments as of Monday afternoon!), as the top story in New England today.
A quick run-through:
First there’s this NECN video report on the controversy. Not much we didn’t already [...]

Much ado about ‘nothing’

Lance Harris over at No Drumlins feels “insulted” by Selectmen Chairman Robert Pasquale’s comments to a Sterling selectman last week. Talking about local opposition to Nestle drilling for water at the Wekepeke reservation, Pasquale said Sterlingites’ fears were “concern about nothing” and that “those people up there in Sterling have a lot of time on [...]

Independent thinking

Say what you will about Patrick Brodrick’s writing style or his politics, but he’s done something today a lot of his critics thought they’d never see — criticized selectmen Mary Rose Dickhaut and Kevin Haley.
He doesn’t detail any policy disagreements with them, or paint them with the demonic brush he uses for Clinton’s other three [...]

Safe at school

The nomination papers are in and Clinton has five-way races for two seats each on the select board and Parks and Rec. Commission, and open-seat battles for collector, solicitor and Planning Board.
The development I find most interesting is the lack of a race for the town’s second most important board, School Committee, after the rocky [...]