BayPath Summer Concert Series

Tomorrow night (July 7) is the first of a series of BayPath Summer Sunset Concerts.

Tuesdays at 6:30 pm Rain or Shine

Come enjoy the outdoors and gather with friends and family on the “Longmeadow Green” In case of rain, concerts will be held in the Community House. Bring some lawn chairs, your blanket and a picnic lunch and enjoy a wonderful array of soft, family oriented music. Refreshments will be available for purchase. Come and relax and enjoy the sounds of music during the summer.

Concerts are FREE!

Here is the schedule....

Premiere Brass Quintet Classical and Big Band - July 7
Sponsored by Berkshire Bank. Enjoy classical and light popular music as the history of brass musical instruments come alive through performance, lecture and show and tell. The concert reviews the history of brass instruments such as the trumpet, trombone, french horn and tuba with performance demonstrations on the following historic instruments: Keyed Bugle 1820, Ophicleide - 1835, rotary valve Eb cornets - 1860, Eb rotary valve tuba 1870, Two Valve Cornopean - 1850 , two valve french horn - 1830.

Chicago Push Polka - July 21
Sponsored by Hampden Bank. Under the direction of Lenny Gomulka, Chicago Push, since their inception, have continually received awards from various radio stations across the country, booster clubs, promoters within the field, and organizations such as the International Polka Association, United States Polka Association and the United Polka Association. Performances throughout the years have generated the granting of keys to many city's. Lenny Gomulka & Chicago Push, noted for their unique arrangements and innovative musical techniques, have mentored many aspiring bands and musicians.

“A Ray of Elvis” A tribute to the King of Rock and Roll - August 4

Sponsored by PeoplesBank. Ray Guillemette Jr. is one of today's leading, premier, Elvis Tribute Artists. Let this 9-time, International 1st place Elvis Presley Impersonator rock your world with his striking look, outstanding vocal range and unabashed excitement. Ray delivers with the style and energy that was Elvis. Put on your blue suede shoes for a night of dancing to the songs Elvis made infamous of the 50’s-70’s.

Do you have something to share?

We are looking for stories of local interest to Longmeadow residents. If you have a newsworthy event, controversial issue or other item that you wish to share with other Longmeadow residents, please consider sending it to us for posting on the LongmeadowBuzz blog.

LongmeadowBuzz is an open forum for publicizing and discussion of local topics of interest to the residents of Longmeadow, Massachusetts. If someone is interested in contributing an article to the forum, simply send the information (including any photos, links to YouTube videos, etc.) to LongmeadowBuzz@comcast.net. Please include your name and address since we are limiting participation to Longmeadow residents. Let us know if wish your name/ address to be included with the posting. We are discouraging anonymous postings since we want this venue to be like a web based "letter to the editor".

Anyone can post a comment to a posting but we disencourage anonymous entries. All comments on this forum are moderated to eliminate objectionable content.

The LongmeadowBuzz blog is not supported financially or in any other manner and all opinions are strictly those of the listed author and do not represent official town policy.

Send any questions or other inquiries to LongmeadowBuzz@comcast.net.

Congratulations to Tracie and Dan

Baby born in Mercy hospital parking lot...

This was the headline on WWLP's website when my wife said that this story was about Tracie MacKenzie who works at Dr. Howard Hausman's dental office at Williams Place.

We watched the video and sure enough it was.... view the video below for details and click the link above to read the full story.

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I guess that Tracie will not be picking blueberries next week as she had planned!!

Smoke Detector Safety Tips

Lt. Jay Macsata with the Longmeadow Fire Department shares smoke detector safety tips on WWLP video.

Longmeadow Police Log

One of the many things that my wife and I value in Longmeadow is the relative tranquity of its neighborhoods and the lack of serious crime that plagues larger cities like Holyoke and Springfield.

After reading the Police Log which is published in the Longmeadow News each week, I had to chuckle at some of the items that appeared during the past three weeks. According to the Longmeadow News there were a total of 600 calls for service and here are some of the highlights...

Monday, June 1- 12 pm, A dead turtle was reported on Longmeadow St
Tuesday, June 2
1:07 am, A minivan with males looking through the trash was investigated on Plesantview Ave and Longmeadow St
9:43 pm, A dead possum was reported on Frank Smith Rd
Wednesday, June 3-
6:34 am, A Lawnwood resident reported rabbits running loose in the neighborhood.
Thursday, June 4- 10:54 am, Campaign signs reported on public property on Williams St and Dwight Rd
Saturday, June 6
9:35 pm, A Wildwood Glen caller reports males in the bushes. An officer reports a man in the yard with his dog.
10:24 pm, An officer investigating suspicious persons in the meadows found a couple fishing.
Sunday, June 7
1:02 pm, A Kenmore Drive resident reports a neighbor walking around in the nude in the backyard.
8:07 pm, A suspicious man was reported on Longmeadow St. The man was riding his bike home.
Tuesday, June 9- 6:20 am, A deer was struck by a vehicle on Converse St but was gone on police arrival.
Thursday, June 11- 4:35 pm, A caller reports and out of control 12 year old son on Field Road.
Friday, June 12
12:26 pm, A Mayfair Drive resident reports receiving a fake check in the mail.
11:50 pm, A Williams Street caller reports a daughter not home or answering her cell phone. She left her boy friend's house and was found on Crestview.
Satuday, June 13- 9:26 am, A Meadow Road caller reports a German shepherd in the garage,
Sunday, June 14- 11:42 am, A coyote was reported on Tabor Crossing
Wednesday, June 17- 6:43 pm, A dead rodent was reported on Frank Smith Road
Sunday, June 21- 6:10 pm, Police reported to call about a hawk on Laurel Street that was possibly shot. The hawk was not shot and does not have a band.

From the details of some of these calls it would appear that we need to hire a Wildlife Officer and let our Police Department concentrate on more serious matters. :-)

Tigers Capture the Longmeadow A.L. Title!

The Tigers of the Longmeadow Little League's American League fought off a tough Mariners team on Saturday at Strople Field to complete a dream season. The 2008 Tigers finished in last place and this year, with many returning veterans,the Tigers finished first in the 2009 regular season and rode its #1 tournament seeding to three straight playoff wins and a league championship.

The only team in the league that defeated the mighty Tigers this season was the Orioles, who actually did it twice during the regular season. Luckily, the Tigers broke the Orioles' code in the final regular season contest to lock up the number one seed and defeated them decisively in their playoff matchup.

The Tiger front office is eager to keep this squad together for next year. No doubt, the National League coaches will be swarming, but the Tigers coaching staff has high hopes of re-signing its veterans. When asked if he intended to pursue free agency after this season Tiger slugger Jeff Mueller replied,"I like ice cream." After his spectacular catch at a pivotal point in the championship game, Tiger outfielder Chris Scheidecker will no doubt be fielding many endorsement offers. Thankfully, the Tigers have an option on his contract for next year.

Tag Sale Addicts

This morning's Springfield Republican insert contained an interesting article by Maureen Sullivan about local tag sales. For those of you who do not normally engage in this Friday/ Saturday (and sometimes Sunday) hunt for treasure, you might be surprised at the number of people that do it.

Tag sales are a seasonal event starting in early May when the weather turns warmer and ending in late October when leaf raking and colder weather return.

For the past four years, I have been posting FREE tag sale listings on the LongmeadowBiz website and introduced a feature called Tag Sale Map Locator to make the journey easier. It is a map of Longmeadow with all of the upcoming tag sales marked and day coded (Fri/Sat/Sun).

This Saturday (tomorrow) has an abundance of tag sales (12 different ones) in Longmeadow. Many diehard "tagsalers" create their own map so I usually take some time handing out the free computer generated tag sale maps in an effort to teach these "diehard" addicts. Don't count on me being there to give you one. Take the time now to print your own copy!

Don't forget.... we usually have the most complete list of tag sales.

Check the new listings every week (usually posted by Thursday night) and if you are planning to have your own tag sale, submit your free listing (and save the cost of advertising in The Reminder or Springfield Newspaper!).

What's the best mix for Longmeadow?

In my opinion, our present situation, in which we behave as individualistic citizens within a form of government designed for communal notions of citizenship, is contributing to ugly local politics and public cynicism. If consistency between form and function is too unrealistic, maybe efforts to transform our town's politics from our present inconsistency to another less destructive one would be more realistic.

Maybe we'd be better off with a form of government designed to provide "public services" in an efficient and professional manner that is consistent with our dominant behavioral assumptions (i.e. that taxpayers should get a fair deal), and a renewed townwide commitment to encouraging citizens to see the town as a family and to be active family members who put the interests of the town family on at least the same plane as the interests of their nuclear family.

I think behaving like communitarians (each citizen considers himself a legitimate policy maker whether or not elected to office) in an individualistic system (professionalized municipal government) may be more productive than the reverse, which is our present condition.

One of the reasons my family left Springfield to come to Longmeadow was that the imposition of the Finance Control Board exacerbated and further legitimized an individualistic-consumer mentality among citizens, reducing community membership to a financial arrangement in which residents come and stay because the city provides a "good deal," and reducing political activism to competitive special interest advocacy. The destructive flip side of this approach is that residents, like consumers, have less incentive to maintain civic (read brand) loyalty when times get tough. Rather, the "rational thing to do" is find a better deal elsewhere. Those who stay, on the other hand, are drawn into a political competition for resources, rather than a deliberative democratic debate about the public interest.

The Duquettes came to Longmeadow because of the schools and because of the opportunity to live in, and even help shape, a community held together by a shared identity and spirit. The opportunity remains, but it requires a renewed commitment by our community's leaders to be more fully realized.

Priorities reveal competing notions of citizenship & community

Our dedicated and talented webmaster, Jim Moran, wrote a post in this space prior to our local election in which he argued for a "balanced" approach to leadership and the distribution of town resources, as well as to the consideration of our town's priorities. The argument was reasonable and fair minded, and it also reveals the dominant notion of Democratic citizenship and community in Longmeadow today.

Despite our founding as a classical democratic community where citizen participation in politics was embedded in our community's institutions and culture, we are now a thoroughly liberal individualistic "community" that expects elected officials to govern in the interests of voters. The classical notion of citizen governance alive at Longmeadow's birth lives on in the laments of the few active members of our community, and more importantly, in our form of government - the town meeting. Unfortunately, the present incompatibility between our operational theory of citizenship and our form of government has caused considerable harm our politics. Frustrated by (and unaware of) the conflict between our behavioral and theoretical assumptions about community and citizenship, many townspeople become angry and bitter. The result is more acrimony in our politics and more townspeople opting out of politics to avoid the bickering. This leaves us often with the worst of both worlds; elite participants operating in a system designed for mass participation. One need only look at the Masslive Longmeadow forum to see how this arrangement deranges the perceptions of some residents.

Longmeadow's politics has too often been reduced to a competition for scarce resources; a competition that pits different constituencies in town against each other. The most enduring rift seems to be between those for whom our schools are most important, central to our town's character and identity, and those for whom our schools are important, but no more so than other town "services." Our language clearly illustrates both this division and the reigning individualistic assumption that this dispute requires "balance" and a "fair distribution" of resources between "competing priorities/interests." We talk about the "town-side and the schools-side. We seem to agree that notions of our town's priorities should be clearly articulated by leaders and should be funded according to their order of priority. These linguistic themes are treated as common sense and we are thus thoroughly entrenched in a liberal individualist political culture, without any consciousness of how this liberal approach clashes with our participatory governing institutions and communitarian aspirations.

If the people of Longmeadow wish to live in a liberal-individualistic political community that sees politics as a competition for resources between disparate visions of the public interest ("ambition v. ambition") it can and should do so, but it cannot continue to be operationally Madisonian and institutionally and rhetorically Tocquevillian. Either we must change our institutions and expectations to fit our present liberal-individualistic behavior, or we must seek to re-invigorate the more communitarian notions of democratic citizenship and community upon which our town was founded and our form of government was designed.

Should we define the public interest of our town the way every place else seems to in America, as the result of compromise between competing and distinct interests? Or, should we try to re-build the notion of citizenship and community that made Longmeadow distinct from other places; a notion of community in which members equate their self interest with that of the community, much like family members. An effort to revive "self interest rightly understood" would be my personal preference because, among other things, it would help mitigate the disconnect between the standards by which we judge politics in our town and the institutions and procedures through which we conduct it.

Election Day is Tuesday, June 9

This will be a very important town election for Longmeadow.

The voters of Longmeadow will be electing the leadership for the executive branch of our town government. They will be choosing 3 of the 5 members of the Select Board. In addition, there will be the election of a new member of the Longmeadow School Committee.

If you have been reading the "Buzz", you know that the financial crisis that has affected the rest of the world has had a direct impact on Longmeadow. The town's revenue sources have decreased significantly while at the same time the cost of operating our schools and delivering town services have increased. In addition, the town infrastructure including our schools, DPW facility and equipment, water/sewer systems, etc. are in critical need of repair or replacement. There will be important choices to be made and we will be electing three people who will be key players in the decision making.

Below are my choices for election day. You may not agree with some or all of them.... all I ask is for you to be an informed voter and get out to vote next Tuesday, June 9!