92 Days, 3 Hours and 30 Minutes To Go: Empty Supermarkets, Lawns and Libraries

This story has two points for the price of one.

I was walking down a street in Merrimack and saw the inhabitants of one of that street's houses on their driveway: a teenage girl and an elderly woman each with a lemonade and an elderly man with a beer.

It was a beautiful day, so I decided to walk on up and say hello even though they weren't on the list.

At first they thought I was a salesman, but I quickly let them know I wasn't selling anything or asking for any money, that I was only a local guy running for office and wanted to let them know about myself. The elderly couple each took one of my brochures, and I thanked them and started to walk away.

By about the time I reached the end of the driveway, the elderly woman yelled to me "Hey, Andrew, come back here for a second!"

She liked the fact that I had lived here all my life. Then we started to talk about our town, and she started to talk about how nobody in town seemed to mow their lawns anymore.

I can understand her statement to a point, but there is a vast variation in terms of the status of lawns here in Merrimack. Some houses in town probably have thousands of dollars spent on them every year, some houses in town need machetes and various inoculations to be navigated through.

I don't think that's what she was getting at though. What I think she was trying to get to the heart of was our towns' past in regards to not liking to invest in itself.

For just about my entire life, a warrant article was on the ballot every year to get a new library. While I don't have the statistics, I'd have to assume that our town's library is the smallest in the state if you go by square footage per capita.

I'd estimate that Berlin's library is about the same size as ours, even though our town around three times as many people. Keene has slightly fewer people than we do and i'd be willing to guess that its library is five to ten times larger.

Yet each year, the article for a new library fails. In 2006, not only did the article fail, but an article to empty out the capital reserve fund for building a new library was emptied for tax relief.

So, while I can understand the people who disagreed with this woman (she was a registered Republican I later found out) in regards to a fair tax burden on our taxpayers, but I definitely understand where she's coming from in that we do not invest in ourselves as a town nearly enough.

She then went on to talk about the proposed mall and asked why we were building it when the Old Shaw's Plaza had been empty for years and the Commons shopping plaza had been empty for years until it began to finally began to fill up a year or two ago.

I don't believe that we should tell businesses and industries how to run their operations, and I don't believe that we should invest wastefully (the library is worth an article on its own), but in the end, if we do invest in ourselves as a town, and for that matter, as a state, not only will it be easier for us to find tenants for places like the Old Shaw's Plaza and what we had with the Commons, but attract new businesses and industries to Merrimack that will recoup any investments we make.

Like the old lady with the lemonade might say, we need to make sure we start mowing our lawns.