Opinion: Middletown Green Community Center Engaged Residents

The following was submitted by Joan Hedrick, Board member of the Middletown Green Community Center
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Bobbye Knoll Peterson’s call for more input from residents of the North End into the proposed re-use of 51 Green Street is welcome.  However, her implication that the Middletown Green Community Center somehow hijacked the narrative so that their voices were silenced is off base.  MGCC has been in conversation with residents of the North End for eighteen months; half of the members of our Board are residents of the North End.

By providing an alternate vision and a grass roots coalition that supported their desire to maintain an institution of community cohesion, MGCC amplified their voices—voices that, as Bobbye Knoll Peterson notes, neither the city nor St Vincent de Paul  made a significant attempt to engage.  As anyone who attended the meetings of the Economic Development Committee and the Planning and Zoning Committee on this issue knows, the mothers of the North End raised strong and articulate voices in support of MGCC’s proposal to maintain a community center.  That they were not well represented at the March 4 Common Council meeting was in part a result of not being able to get into the crowded Council Chamber—and some may have been home with their children.

We hope that St. Vincent de Paul will meet with the residents of Ferry and Green streets and take their concerns seriously.