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As Good Stewards

My husband Jon and I attended a public hearing on March 13 conducted by the Guilford Board of Selectmen to vote on instituting an ordinance to ban fracking waste in Guilford. After unanimously passing the ordinance, the Board of Selectmen received a standing ovation by the more than 50 people who attended the meeting, many of whom spoke in favor of the ordinance.

On Monday, March 26 at 6:30 p.m., our Madison Board of Selectmen will also conduct a public hearing to field testimony from residents about a similar ordinance to ban fracking waste in our town. I encourage your readers to join Jon and me in our efforts to see an ordinance enacted to ban deposits of radioactive and carcinogenic waste in our town. We feel we have a calling to raise consciousness about this issue among our townspeople and to protect our friends and neighbors from contaminating fracking waste that could be brought in and used as de-icer on our roads or fill in our town lands. We in Madison, living near the shoreline, have a responsibility to model for other towns the protection of our fragile coastal waters and a duty to protect our other natural resources and the health of our townspeople from the long-term consequences of whatever short-term gains there might be for allowing cheap fracking waste to be dumped here from Pennsylvania or New York.

I hope your readers will attend the Board of Selectmen meeting on March 26 as good stewards of this beautiful town, in which we are most privileged to live, and stand with us, as others have done in 37 Connecticut towns, now including Branford and Guilford, to support a fracking waste ban ordinance and to protect our town in a way our Connecticut legislature has failed to do.

Nancy Leckerling

Madison