“When the winds of change blow, some people build walls and others build windmills.”

Chinese proverb

I would have never thought I would see the changes in the world that have occurred in my lifetime, especially in the past decade or so. Some changes have been good and some have been bad, but perhaps the worst part is the changes that didn’t occur but should have.

I began my adulthood during the Vietnam War whether I wanted to or not. That was the first serious change to my life and laid the foundation for the rest of it. It’s not that I like change, but rather that I probably became aware of why some changes are needed. Some changes only happen because people become fed up with the status quo, which is something I believe in.

Here’s one change I would like to see happen right here in Windham, and it involves the town budget process. It used to be that the town council as a whole was the budget committee, and it’s high time to return to that process.

There are a couple of good reasons why I think a budget subcommittee should no longer be used. The first is that the budget committee meetings for the most part were never televised. If I had a better back, I probably would have made some of those meetings just to see how the budget discussions took place. I suppose I could ask for the minutes of the meetings, but many of Windham’s committees don’t have minutes of their meetings and maybe it’s time to expand Windham’s community television station so more committee meetings can be televised.

The other reason I think that the Windham town councilors should all be on the budget committee is the fiasco that happened during the budget discussion meeting of 19 May. Well, sorry to report that only three out of the six councilors attended the meeting, and since that’s not a quorum, the meeting abruptly ended. I must state that this meeting was actually a workshop and therefore wasn’t a formal council meeting. There weren’t going to be any votes taken, and so I wonder why a quorum was even necessary. It sounds like the Windham Town Charter still needs some tweaking, but I hate to think how long it would take to form a committee and then go through the process of making the necessary changes to it. It’s not the first time something like this has happened.

One charter change I would like to see occur is making the workshops and formal meetings where voting happens both equal as far as councilors’ attendance goes. Right now a Windham town councilor who skips workshops has no strikes placed against him. I know that things can go wrong and councilors cannot make a meeting for one reason or another, but when absences occur on a frequent basis, then something does have to change. I feel that workshops are just as important as formal meetings as they give councilors plenty of information for deciding how they will vote on an issue instead of going by personal instinct. Sorry to say I have seen plenty of that with Windham’s councilors, and that is truly a shame.

Another change I would like to see in Windham is that the town sell the soccer fields located off of the Gambo Road to the Windham Youth Soccer Association. This is an association that has done things right and knows what their goals are without costing the taxpayers of Windham a fortune, which is something I salute. It’s well known the town of Windham has had an immense problem with not only scheduling maintenance of its facilities but providing proper funding for that as well. I have already stated it several times the town can’t even maintain the skate park as small as it is, or turn piles of dirt into a BMX bike park.

Lane Hiltunen of Windham wonders what changes will happen in the November elections.