EDC Chair: 'Poor Fiscal Oversight' Killed the Garbage Museum

Editor's note: The following is an op-ed from the town's Economic Development Chairman Neil Sherman regarding the closing of Stratford's Garbage Museum. At a meeting late last month, the museum's board of directors decided to deny any further fundraising efforts and close the museum immediately due to financial shortcomings.

By Neil Sherman

Perhaps there’s another story to the closing of Stratford’s Garbage Museum than the one the CRRA Board of Directors is circulating, a story that rolls the cover off the sad workings of the CRRA’s ineffective management and unimpressive Board of Directors.

The result is a closed Garbage Museum here in Stratford -- I notice its counterpart in Hartford is not closed -- and the loss of an education tool teaching an important lesson to Fairfield and New Haven County’s children: that recycling is a critical responsibility of 21st century urban life.

We’ve also lost something here in Stratford -- 25,000 guests every year, guests coming into our community and being introduced to Stratford. As Chairman of Stratford’s Economic Development Commission, those are 25,000 future customers for Stratford businesses, or more if they brought family and friends back to enjoy that museum.

And how did this abrupt closing happen? Why all of the sudden was there a flurry of news articles and activity to try and save the Garbage Museum? Why were we suddenly pleading with our friends at Pepsi to keep the Museum’s doors open?

Someone needs to ask the question: Why didn’t we hear that the Garbage Museum was in trouble at the beginning of the CRRA’s fiscal year on July 1, 2010? Could it be that someone at the CRRA perhaps dropped the fiscal oversight ball? How come we haven’t asked that question?

Why shouldn’t we ask the CRRA Board why they didn’t stay on top of its own fiscal health -- its primary responsibility? Why didn’t the Board understand the Museum’s fiscal health? Why was it that suddenly in May that the fiscal health of the Museum came glaringly and embarrassingly to light?

You only have to check through the public records of the CRRA’s May 2011 Board minutes to see the confusing welter of information that was suddenly dumped on the table at the Board meeting. It seems it was then the failure to assume responsibility for the Garbage Museum
began. It seems it was then that the CRRA Board fled from its fiscal oversight responsibility and dumped the health of the Garbage Museum directly (and without much guilt) into Southwestern Connecticut’s lap?

The president of CRRA Thomas D. Kirk, and its chairman, Michael Pace, First Selectman of Old Saybrook, have some serious questions to answer about Stratford’s Garbage Museum, don’t you think.

Does the policy the CRRA endorsed in their education speak to continued support by their organization for Stratford’s Garbage Museum? It certainly says so. We had a lot of communities in Southwest Connecticut come to the table to support this valuable educational resource and all the CRRA Board did was turn their back on these fine (not to say generous) gestures.

Maybe it’s time to dump these questions and the responsibility for the closing of the museum into the CRRA Board’s lap and see how the Board likes it. The CRRA Board closed the museum under the guise of fiscal prudence. Perhaps the museum has been closed because of a lack of appropriate fiscal planning and understanding.

Maybe they’ve closed the Museum because it’s easier to run away from the responsibilities outlined in their own Educational Policy? We need to get answers to these questions, don’t you think?