A Wrapup

A few followups on this week's hot topics...

The shooting issue clearly hit a cord around the Fitchburg blog community. In some ways, politicizing this issue would work. If someone turned it into their big issue, and railed on it non-stop, every week (like on a Tuesday night, perhaps...), and made sure the appropriate followup was made.

PD's don't like to give out their staffing and patrol patterns, it tips off the bad guys and all that, but I'm confident that it's safe to say the department can redeploy some resources in the bad areas. Hey, here's an idea, corrdinate an all-out effort in one small area on a Friday night. It doesn't have to necessarily lead to 50 arrests, but it regularly (like a couple of times a week) and you start making gang business hard to do.

We blew some electronic space on the commuter rail issue this week, and since then things haven't gone well on the Boston-to-Fitchburg rail. There was a big delay on Wednesday when a Shirley man was killed by a train, but that obviously doesn't go into the MBCR's loss column.

This morning, however, is a different story.

Save Fitchburg got up an hour early today to catch the first train in order to get a headstart on the long weekend. Save Fitchburg got to work 30 minutes later than usual. How can the first train of the day have mechanical problems? Doesn't anybody check this stuff at the last run of the day before or real early in the morning. By South Acton, the first train of the day was picking up passengers for the two following that. Ridiculous. Information was at a crawl (the message boards when we pulled into Lincoln said the train was 10-15 minutes late. At that point it was almost an hour).

Certainly, things happen, but today was a joke in terms of shuffling things around and getting people into the city in a timely manner. You'd think they'd have a plan for these things. To make matters worse, Save Fitchburg was probably the last person on the train to actually show a pass or ticket. An hour-and-a-half late, and we still had to pay. Brutal.

Finally, some good feedback on the question of what questions should be asked of state rep candidates (feel free to hit the comments sections for all the details). One we really liked was the income tax rate question about lowering from the current rate to 5 percent.

While our liberal tendencies don't mind the minor bump, we don't like the fact that the tax rate was supposed to rolled back years ago, and the current rate is in direct conflict with the will of the voters, who approved the move to 5 percent in a statewide vote. Essentially, we want someone who's not going to listen to the will of the people, and not make boneheaded, greedy moves because leadership says so.