A personally maintained gateway to research, plain-language explainers, and civic reference material.
This site collects work by a private resident — not the official town site — covering municipal budgets, school finance and operations, the town charter, and other matters that come up in public deliberation. Each entry below links to a longer piece of work; brief annotations describe what is there and why it might be useful.
§ I · The Town Charter
The governing document & plain-language guides
The Charter itself, restructured for online reading, alongside a set of topic-by-topic explainers that translate it into ordinary English with cross-references to Connecticut state law.
The current Charter itself, presented as an interactive TiddlyWiki with cross-linked sections. This is a personal rebuild of the official PDF — the same text, restructured for online reading and cross-referencing — and is the source the plain-language guides below refer back to.
For historical reference: the prior 2022 Charter is also archived as a TiddlyWiki. It was not subjected to the same level of review as the 2024 revision and is preserved here only for comparison; do not rely on it as current.
Charters are written in legal language and organized by subject matter rather than by the questions residents actually ask. These guides take six of those questions in turn — how the budget works, how meetings are called, who runs the town day to day, what happens when money is needed mid-year, how appointments and removals work, and what gets elected when — and answer each one in plain language.
Browse the six guides
The Annual Budget ProcessFrom the October planning conference through the May referendum: the five key players, the timeline, and the contested question of Board of Finance authority over the school budget.
Town MeetingsThe three types of town meeting, what triggers each, what a quorum is, and the full list of subjects that require a Special Town Meeting.
Governance StructureThe council-manager model: how authority is divided among the Board of Selectmen, the First Selectman, and the appointed Town Administrator.
Spending Beyond the Annual BudgetSupplemental and emergency appropriations, the capital reserve fund, and the rules around bonds — including the unusual 15%-turnout floor for bond referenda.
Appointments, Vacancies, and RemovalsHow appointed officials are selected, how vacancies are filled, how members can be removed for cause, and the attendance rules that trigger automatic resignation.
ElectionsWhich offices are elected, when, and for how long, including the three different minority-representation frameworks and the new four-year cycle for Selectmen beginning in 2027.
§ II · Reports
Original analysis
Longer, sourced pieces compiled to inform specific budget or policy conversations. Each draws directly on official town, regional, or state documents, and each is footnoted to the underlying source.
A side-by-side reading of seven years of Andover budgets — General Government, the Andover Elementary School board budget, and the RHAM regional levy — with comparison against CPI inflation and Social Security COLAs. Includes year-by-year detail through Town Meeting and the May 5 referendum.
What RHAM's class sizes actually are today, measured directly from the master schedule, compared to peer Connecticut secondary regional districts both historically (CT Mirror's 2012–13 dataset) and today (NCES 2024–25). Examines the gap between RHAM's enrollment decline and its staffing decline as the source of currently small classes.
Revenue, cost, and net-position figures for the Andover Elementary School preschool program: FY 2024–25 actuals from the audited financial filings, and FY 2025–26 anticipated figures from the Board of Education's monthly packets. Methodology and known data gaps are described inline.
A public-records analysis of the active business holdings of State Rep. Steve Weir (R-55), built from Connecticut Secretary of State filings, the Glastonbury and Hebron assessor databases, the Connecticut Apartment Association's own member directory, and contemporaneous reporting from CT Mirror and NBC Connecticut. Identifies seven business entities tied to him personally — including the $1.69M industrial parcel at 60 Village Place in Glastonbury that he himself describes as where he spends most of his time outside the legislature — and traces the May 6, 2026 demise of SB 274, the Concierge Apartments response bill, which never received a House vote after he and other Republicans threatened to run the clock out. Includes a four-session pattern review of his housing votes and a careful assessment of the Connecticut ethics-law question.
§ III · Other resources
Reference material
Longstanding reference works and archives that don't fit the report or charter-guide format but are part of the same project.
An anonymous flyer was distributed with the May 2, 2025 Rivereast News Bulletin in advance of the town budget referendum. It contained a number of factual errors and several claims that were not merely wrong but defamatory; published without attribution, it could not be answered through ordinary channels. The budget failed narrowly at that referendum, and the Board of Finance subsequently scaled back the Board of Education request.
This site is a structured response. It reproduces the flyer page-by-page and walks through the specific claims under an Issues section, citing the underlying records that contradict each one. Compiled by Scott Sauyet with help from others.
Recordings of public meetings — Selectmen, Board of Finance, Board of Education, and others — collected in one place and indexed by date and body. A useful supplement to the official meeting minutes when the precise wording or tone of a discussion matters.