I'm not a politician. I don't even play one on TV, which you certainly know if you ever watch community access and see my joke-cracking and fumbling during our meetings.
I love this town. Jericho is an excellent place to live and play, and okay, it sounds cliché, but it is a great town in which to raise a family. That's why I'm here. Good schools, clean rivers, community-mindedness, lots of other folks move here for the same reason.
When I met my husband, we lived and worked in Portsmouth, NH. Also a great town surely, but for us, not a settling point. From a purely financial perspective, it just wasn't possible. He was a talented but underpaid staff photographer for a small daily newspaper. I was an enthusiastic marketing professional working for a non-profit. Portsmouth is a popular 2nd home spot, and a lovely haven near the water and just 45 minutes north of Boston. So, in 2000, there were very few "starter homes" available and the ones that were, were still wildly out of our price range.
Consequently, we decided just months after getting married to move to New Jersey where Ryan made a big career jump to chief photog at a major paper in NJ and I found a dream job with the Broadway magnate Shubert Organization. Work bliss ensued...until 9/11 occurred and we were swiftly and emotionally caught by the baby bug that happened post-trauma. So there we were, 2 little kids and living in New Jersey.
When Lucy was born, a nurse in the hospital, in the wee hours of the morning post-partum, opened up to me about raising kids in NJ. In my tired and elated haze, her sentiments lodged into my psyche. She told me that her 13 year old son had just had a near-breakdown before going to a birthday party because she wanted to buy a present for the birthday boy. Apparently, in the NJ suburbs, the only acceptable gift at such a gathering is $100 cash. The nurse, a single mom, was not happy about this, but the obvious distress and pressure her son conveyed persuaded her to oblige.
The point is: from then on I was focused on getting us BACK TO VERMONT. I grew up in East Thetford, where you knew everyone in town. Pre-facebook, but still: no privacy. Only after I left for college did I realize that my town defined who I was and how I lived. The rest of the world (I've lived in plenty of places across the U.S.) is a vast sea of social rules, disparate communities, and mazes to navigate. Only in Vermont could I feel truly at home and happy. Especially in raising my beautiful kids.
But here's the thing: in 2006, when we moved to Jericho, there was only one house on the market that we could afford. We live in a 1200 sq ft ranch just off of Route 15. Hard work and good intentions, minus a trust fund, get you that. And I'm not complaining. We have a roof over our heads, good schools to shuttle our kiddos off to every day, and jobs in nearby Burlington.
The Jericho Town Plan has been carefully written by the Planning Commission and submitted to the Selectboard for approval. I read it. I listened carefully as our Town Planner, Seth Jensen, made his presentation about the document. And I couldn't help but think that it kind of left my family out of the plan. And if I felt left out, lots and lots of other families--families with 2 working parents, with homes right on the busy and non-scenic Route 15--also are left out of this plan.
So the plan talks about preserving the rural and historic nature of Jericho. But it doesn't talk about the other Jericho, where people live in areas that are targeted for commercial development, where our neighborhoods are made up of affordable ranches or split-level homes, where we deal every day with the increasing noise, pollution, and safety hazards of a major commuting thoroughfare that blazes past our properties.
I hesitantly voiced these concerns and requested that the Town Plan address the lives of all residents of the town, not just those that want to preserve their pristine surroundings. I asked that we include language in the Town Plan that acknowledges these concerns. We added a statement about endeavoring to preserve livability for all residents of Jericho. It's not a lot, but it's something.
