Comfy Shirt
Weekly update #316 2/8/2026 to 2/14/2026
If I asked you to grab your favorite comfy t-shirt, I would guess you just got a visual of it in your mind. Before I get to that part of the weekly update though, let me share some of my week serving as mayor of the best small town in America.
Each month, I seem to have one week that has several more meetings than the others, and this was that week. One of those meetings was the quarterly meeting of the Redevelopment Authority. Until last year, RDA only met as needed, but as changes happened at the state level, we had to change the process. The RDA was updated on outstanding bonds related to the Shields Park Pool, Fire Station 2, Department of Public Works building, and the newest phase of Burkart Boulevard. All of these items have details set when they are issued and can not be changed without going through a process that requires several votes to change. Thank you to the three members of RDA and Clerk-Treasurer Boas for attending these quarterly meetings and keeping the state-level requirements met.
Later that same night, Seymour Common Council met and had several items on the agenda that were needed to keep us in compliance for our annual audits. One was an adjustment to the salary ordinance, as Water Pollution Control had previously moved from a purchased uniform to a uniform allowance. This was approved in 2025 but overlooked for the 2026 ordinance. The next item was to give the funds generated from the Shields Park Pool bond a line to be deposited in and bills to be paid from during construction. The bond closed within the last day or two of 2025 and was set to be on the agenda for the meeting that was cancelled in January due to snow. The last item was to move just over $900,000 from the General Fund to the Rainy Day Fund. When Clerk-Treasurer Boas and I started in 2020, we had around $6000 in the Rainy Day Fund. With this deposit, which was generated with interest income, we now have around $2.1 million in the fund. Thank you, Darrin, for all your hard work in increasing this fund over the last several years.
Back to that comfy t-shirt from the opening sentence. I doubt that it is a shirt you recently bought and fell in love with. It is probably a shirt you have had for several years that just seems to fit how you like it. It has stretched in just the right areas. Twenty years ago, for me, this would have been a race shirt from some bicycle motocross national in a nearby state. As the years have gone by, I think I have retired all of those, and now it is a Til Valhalla Shirt with a positive message on it. Still, though it didn’t come out of the package that way and took some time to gain its spot. I believe friendships are similar to these as well. We do sometimes grow in different directions and lose touch, but for those friends that we seem to pick up just where we left off in the past, they didn’t get there immediately. The friendship grew over time and probably even stretched at times to get where you are now. This week, I hope you stop endlessly scrolling social media and reach out to an old friend and catch up for a minute. Will Rogers had this to say about old friends, "To talk of old times with old friends is the greatest thing in the world."