The Daily Five: Stellar School Staff, Burglaries Update, Sewers, and No More Stonewalling!

1. We should get a break from the rain today. Weather.com is calling for a partly cloudy day with a high of 79 degrees and just a 20 percent chance of rain. The overnight forecast is pretty much the same but temperatures will dip to 67 degrees.  

2. Salem Resident State Trooper Kevin Seery, who is also a member of the East Lyme Board of Selectmen, said that , a Red Dodge Ram truck, that they believe was used in the over the holiday weekend and they have their eye on two "persons of interest."

The ice cream store break-in happened close on the heels of in East Haddam, leading police to believe the two robberies may be connected. 

Seery also said that arrest warrants will likely be coming soon for . The chief suspect, Lyme-Old Lyme High School graduate Justin P. Weissinger, 25, is currently incarcerated on unrelated charges. 

3. Two outstanding members of the Lyme-Old Lyme School District staff were honored at last night's Regional School District 18's Board of Education Meeting. Kinney Newman, preschool teacher at Mile Creek School in Old Lyme was named the district's 2012-2013 Teacher of the Year and Joan Bonvicin, secretary at Lyme-Old Lyme Middle School, was named 2012-2013 non-certified staff member of the year.

Bonvicin, who has worked for the school district for 41 years with unabated enthusiasm, says she really enjoys seeing people she remembers as students coming into the school with their own children now. 

4. No more stonewalling! For as long as the current Old Lyme Board of Selectmen can remember, a stonewall on a property along Four Mile River Road has been on the agenda.

A few years back, home owner Darian Sheffield rebuilt a stonewall in a way that changed the boundaries of his property. The Old Lyme Zoning Board of Appeals brought this to the attention of the Board of Selectmen about five years ago and the issue had been perennially on the agenda ever since.

Now, finally, the issue has been resolved. Sheffield has relocated the stonewall back along the official property lines. If they accomplish nothing else, Old Lyme's Board of Selectmen members say they look forward to not seeing this item on the agenda anymore!

5. At last night's special town meeting, East Lyme property owners voted to approve bonding for $680,000 for the rehabilitation of 2,400 linear square feet of a 24-inch concrete gravity sewer pipe at the intersection of Rope Ferry Road and Gallup Lane to the bottom of Logger Hill Road. The money will also be used to reline and reconstruct the 10 existing manhole covers and repair about 750 feet of 36-inch congrete gravity sewer pipe on Logger Hill Road. 

Waterford and East Lyme share the use of the sewer pipes but by contractual agreement, East Lyme is on the hook to pay 62 percent of the $1.9 million cost of repairs. East Lyme First Selectman Paul Formica explained that the town would be tapping money banked in the sewer depreciation account and would use funds collected from sewer assessments to cover some of the costs.

The town has enough money in the sewer assessment fund to cover the costs outright but opted to use bonds to pay the balance because interest rates (which are at about 2 percent right now) made the most financial sense. 

Tapping into the sewer assessment fund would leave a "perilously low balance" should East Lyme encounter a sewer emergency, Formica said. The loan will be paid back by rate payers who use the sewer system, and not by taxpayers who may or may not be connected to town sewers. 

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