What do you know? There is one rational adult in a position of responsibility in Connecticut, New Britain’s 33-year-old Republican mayor Erin Stewart.

The Hartford Courant reports:

New Britain’s controversial Christopher Columbus statue won’t be heading to storage — at least not yet.

Mayor Erin Stewart on Thursday vetoed the common council’s decision to take down the statue, meaning the issue will drag into January or possibly beyond.

After learning of her decision Thursday afternoon, a top council Democrat said he’ll try to get his colleagues to override it next month.

In a statement condemning “cancel culture,” Stewart warned taking down the monument would set a bad precedent. …

The veto was the latest twist in a local culture battle that began with the nationwide campaign to pull down Columbus statues after the George Floyd protests in June.

Republican leaders and Italian-American groups in New Britain largely pushed to keep the city’s statue in McCabe Park, while Puerto Rican activists, the New Britain Racial Justice Coalition and council Democrats argued it should be moved off city property.

The arguments largely mirror those in cities across the country: Columbus’ defenders portray him as a brave explorer and symbol of Italian-American heritage, while critics say he was a genocidal slave trader and racist.

But earlier this month, several council Republicans sided with Democrats in a 10-4 vote to take it down.

Stewart said Thursday that they never explained how the city would pay to remove it, nor what would replace it at the park. She signaled that she might reconsider if the council provides detailed answers,

“If the council is going to retire Columbus, they ought to have a concurrent and concrete plan for what will go in its place,” she wrote, saying anything less would be an affront to Italian-Americans.

Democratic Alderman Chris Anderson, one of the most outspoken voices demanding removal of the statue, said Thursday afternoon that he’ll look to override the veto next month. That would take 10 votes; currently the council has 14 members because Democrat Emmanuel Sanchez’s seat has been vacant since he resigned last week.

If the Republican aldermen who voted with Democrats also vote to override the veto, they’d prevail. But the GOP caucus has long been loyal to Stewart, and Alderman Sharon Beloin-Saavedra was the only Republican who has appeared passionate about removing the statue.

RTWT

I think she has a good chance of winning. There are a lot of Italians in Connecticut. And how come the Puerto Ricans, descendants of the Spaniards after all, are on the wrong side? Did some Marxist professor convince them that they all descend from Caribbean cannibals?

We left the 1712 5000+ sq. ft. house we lived in most of our adult lives. Local real estate taxes, over 20 years, went from $2000-a-year to $10,000, and the CT economy went into the tank. Nobody retires in Connecticut with the taxes being what they are.

Terry Kirkpatrick tells us that there is now a “People who have left or are leaving Connecticut” Facebook group and reports on the “CT Death Watch.”

Buy U-Haul stock. Connecticut residents are growing pessimistic about the state’s living conditions, according to a survey. A record percent of respondents (47 percent) also said they will likely leave the state within the next five years.

Even in banks? Connecticut to help 10,000 felons get a job in three years.

We like illegals. Gov. Ned Lamont is directing police in Connecticut to not cooperate with raids by Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

Glad to help out. While Connecticut lawmakers sold the progressive tax as a way to provide middle-class tax relief and reduce property taxes, neither occurred. Instead, everyday taxpayers have been hit with recurring income and property tax hikes.

Tax those movies. Governor Lamont’s budget seems designed to accelerate the decline. It increases spending by $2 billion while extending the state’s 6.35% sales tax to everything from digital movies to laundry drop-off services to “safety apparel.” It adds $50 million in taxes on small businesses, raises the minimum wage by 50%, and provides the country’s most generous mandated paid family medical leave.

Pajamas Media reports that, last Wednesday, the homies were dropping like flies all over the New Haven Green. It seems that a bad batch of synthetic pot recently arrived.

Residents watched in horror as more than 70 people collapsed near a city park in Connecticut Tuesday night into Wednesday, overdosing on what authorities believe was a tainted batch of synthetic marijuana. Vomiting and hallucinating drug users dropped like flies throughout the day as emergency crews raced to the New Haven Green to save lives.

“We have a guy laid out in the alleyway, unresponsive, eyes wide open. He’s out cold,” one bystander hollered, according to the New Haven Register. …

An emergency medical technician for the New Haven Fire Department told the Register that he’s never had such an abnormal day at work in the five years he’s been there.

“This was a particularly odd, rare occasion where (there was) call after call for man down, obviously with symptoms of some kind of overdose, and at the time of getting that patient packaged and transported to the hospital, we’d see another immediately fall down, right there,” Lt. Ernest Jones said. “At that point, we’d go help that patient, and while helping that patient, another person went down. So it became a domino effect.”

RTWT

What is striking about this is the fact that, within living human memory, Connecticut’s cities were truly extraordinary examples of ancient culture, high civilization, and prosperity. There would be found in each of them many of the wealthiest and most famous of American businesses and industries. Factory workers lived in homes that bankers in other states might envy.

Today, Connecticut cities still have government and universities, sitting there surrounded by the deserts created by the bad political policies of the former and the bad ideas of the latter. The old population descended from 17th Century Puritan founders has fled to the suburbs or out of state. Connecticut cities are populated by government-dependent blacks and Puerto Ricans.

Hot Air catches the burghers of New Canaan in denial.

Here’s an odd little story which is probably going to be cropping up more and more in blue states in the near future. The town of New Canaan, Connecticut is instituting a change this summer. Their Board of Realtors has passed a ban on “For Sale” signs placed in front of the properties where residents are selling their houses and moving away. Why is that? Well, if you ask the local government they’ll tell you that there’s simply no need for the signs anymore. Savvy shoppers are looking for houses online and besides… those signs are an eyesore anyway. …

So the official line here is that online browsing has made the signs redundant and people don’t like the look of them. But how much of that is true? I know from personal experience that shopping for a house may certainly include doing some online browsing, but that doesn’t give you a full picture or inform you about the real feel of the house and the neighborhood. Driving around and scouting nice neighborhoods looking for For Sale signs is part of the process for most people. So what’s the real reason that New Canaan doesn’t want all of those For Sale signs lining the streets?

One hint can be found in the comments from local resident Shawn Gardner who said, “The amount of them is giving buyers an idea that this entire town is for sale.”

That seems to be the dirty little secret here. They don’t want people to know how many people are fleeing high tax areas like Connecticut.

RTWT

We got out of far less expensive and fashionable Newtown around 2000. Our real estate taxes which were $2000-per-annum when we moved in had risen to $10,000-per-annum, and Lowell Weicker’s state income tax had ruined the business environment. My wife and I had wound up commuting an exhausting one hour and 45 minutes each way to Manhattan.

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The Colt Model 1855 Sidehammer Pocket Revolver, made up until 1870, is also known as the Colt Root Revolver after its designer engineer Elisha K. Root (1808–1865). This presentation example is stocked with wood from the Connecticut Oak tree, in which legend has it, the Charter for the Colony of Connecticut was hidden from Governor Andros who intended to confiscate it, in 1687. The then 7-to-8-hundred-year-old tree was felled by a violent storm in 1856.

WFSB:

Avon [Connecticut] residents called police after a bear tried to get into a home this weekend and one neighbor got the whole incident on camera.

Neighbors talking to 911 dispatch stated that the bear was trying to gain access into a home on Stagecoach Road.

“My neighbor across the street just came over in a panic. She’s a little old lady, screaming that a bear got on the back porch and is slamming on her glass door,” one call to 911 stated.

Members of Department of Energy and Environmental Protection were not called to the scene. They said a bear “spent considerable time on a deck and was reluctant to leave.” This incident was especially terrifying for the female homeowner who was baked brownies as the bear pressed up against her glass door.

“We have a bear attempting to get into a house and he’s not afraid of noise, screaming or yelling or pounding,” Avon resident Bob Belfiore said when he called 911.

DEEP said a neighbor, who was later identified as Belfiore, rushed to help his neighbor get the bear to go away. The animal made its way onto the deck’s railing before standing up and peering in.

“Though it looks cute on the railing, this bear was angry about not being able to get at the food,” Belfiore said.

At one point, the bear was able to open up the screen door, but thankfully couldn’t manage to open the glass slider. Belfiore told Eyewitness News this bear was persistent.

“He actually left the kitchen area and went to a second set of doors off the deck,” Belfiore said. “And I tried those and then went to a third set of doors into the living room and attempted to get into those.”

Avon police did head up to the house after getting the 911 calls, but the bear had already left the area. There were no reported injuries.

“It was a rather harrowing experience although it looks cute in the photos,” Belfiore said.

RTWT

Pamela Constable is a Washington Post correspondent and a typical traitor-to-her-class Baby Boomer, who grew up in WASP-y, privileged Connecticut only to rebel against her parents’ values and become a Social Justice Warrior Holier-Than-Thou. Now, rather late in the game, she is beginning to understand that her parents sacrificed and struggled without complaint to obtain for her the privileged life-style she so despised, and she is beginning to see that the old-fashioned WASP virtues of hard work, good manners, emotional restraint, and good taste have quite a lot to be said for them.

My childhood was a cocoon of tennis and piano lessons, but once I reached my teens, disturbing news began filtering in from the world beyond. An alumna of my elementary school gave an impassioned speech about her summer registering black voters in the South. At boarding school, a current-events teacher introduced me to McCarthyism and apartheid, and I watched the funeral of Martin Luther King Jr. Filled with righteous indignation, I memorized Bob Dylan songs about poverty and injustice and vowed to become a crusading journalist. Above my study carrel, I taped the famous journalistic directive to “comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.”

The most convenient target I could afflict was my parents, who seemed more worried about their daughter turning into a hippie than about a world full of rampant wrongs. I wrote them earnest letters railing against capitalism, country clubs and colonial exploitation. I accused them of being snobs and racists and scoffed at their preoccupation with appearance. If they were hurt or offended, they never let it show, in part because I kept getting A’s and dutifully stood through numerous fittings for my debutante dress.

I hardly saw my parents during my four years at Brown, a tumultuous time that included the bombing of Cambodia and the resignation of Richard Nixon. Soon after graduation I was gone, immersed in big-city newspaper work. I spent a decade writing about alcoholics and juvenile delinquents and slumlords. Eventually my reporting took me even farther afield, to impoverished or war-torn countries such as Haiti and Chile, India and Afghanistan. It was an adventuresome and stimulating career, but it was also a kind of private atonement for having grown up amid such privilege. I rarely told anyone where I was from.

Over time, my relations with my parents settled into a long-distance detente that was affectionate but formal. We sent each other thank-you notes and avoided talking about politics. Yet even though I had run as far from Connecticut as I could, every time I called from another war zone or refugee camp, they always asked eagerly, “When might we see you again?” The guest room was always waiting, with a few ancient stuffed animals on the pillow.

Still, it was only after witnessing the desperation and cruelty of life in much of the world that I began to reexamine my prejudices against the cloister I had fled. In some countries, I saw how powerful forces could keep people trapped in poverty for life; in others, how neighbors could slaughter each other in spasms of hate. I met child brides and torture victims, religious fanatics and armed rebels. I explored societies shattered by civil war, upended by revolution, and strangled by taboo and tradition.

Visiting home between assignments, I found myself noticing and appreciating things I had always taken for granted — the tamed greenery and smooth streets, the absence of fear and abundance of choice, the code of good manners and civilized discussion. I also began to learn things about my parents I had never known and to realize that I had judged them unfairly. I had confused their social discomfort with condescension and their conservatism with callousness.

Read the whole thing.

It was widely predicted that historical purging would proceed farther when recently a nation-wide campaign of execration broke out targeting the Confederate flag.

The Connecticut Post confirms the accuracy of those predictions, reporting that:

Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson are history in Connecticut.

Under pressure from the NAACP, the state Democratic Party will scrub the names of the two presidents from its annual fundraising dinner because of their ties to slavery.

Party leaders voted unanimously Wednesday night in Hartford to rename the Jefferson Jackson Bailey dinner in the aftermath of last month’s fatal shooting of nine worshipers at a historic black church in Charleston, S.C.

The decision is believed to be unprecedented and could prompt Democrats in other states with similarly named events to follow suit.

“I see it as the right thing to do,” Nick Balletto, the party’s first-year chairman, told Hearst Connecticut Media on Wednesday night.

“I wasn’t looking to be a trailblazer or set off a trend that’s going to affect the rest of the country. Hopefully, they’ll follow suit when they see it’s the right thing to do.”

Democrat Party annual dinners nationally have long been named the Jefferson and Jackson Dinner, since Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson are, historically speaking, indisputably the two greatest presidents and the two greatest American leaders associated with that political party. Unless, of course, you are a contemporary subscriber to the Marxist “critical studies” approach to history. In which case, you recognize the democrat party’s notoriously libertarian early icons stood for essentially everything you are against: particularly limited government and individual and states’ rights. Worse yet, both were Southerners and thus slave owners. And General Jackson was notoriously unsympathetic to Native American Rights, defeating the Creek Indians in war and deporting the Cherokee to a designated Indian Territory which would one day become Oklahoma.

What do you do, if you are a radical left-wing democrat obliged to face the reality that your party’s two greatest leaders were ultra-libertarians with little to no commitment to equality-at-any-cost? Obviously, you vote that history out of existence.

WFSB:

Hundreds of Connecticut residents lined up Monday to make sure their weapons will be legal in the new year.

The state’s new gun laws are supposed to protect the families of Connecticut, but some said the laws are only causing problems for law abiding citizens.

People started lining up at the State Department of Public Safety in Middletown early Monday morning. The line wrapped around the building and people were registering up until the building closed at 4:30 p.m.

The controversial, wide-ranging gun control law was passed in Connecticut in April after the mass shooting inside Sandy Hook Elementary where 20 children and six adults lost their lives.

Now anything the state considers to be an assault weapon or magazine holding more than 10 rounds needs to be registered by Wednesday or it will be illegal in the new year.

If an assault weapon bought before April is not registered by Tuesday, owners will have to sell it to a gun dealer, render it permanently inoperable, or turn it in to law enforcement.

“If you get caught with a banned assault weapon after tomorrow night then you’re going to be prosecuted as a felon,” said Mike Lawlor, who is the governor’s undersecretary for criminal justice.

I am so happy not to be living in that state anymore.

Roger Kimball lives in one of the Fairfield County, Connecticut towns bordering Long Island Sound, and his neighborhood was hit by Sandy. He has to repair his home, and consequently ran into the nightmare regime of building codes and zoning regulation that prevails everywhere in developed portions of America.

Our first exposure to the town zoning authorities came a couple of weeks after Sandy. We’d met with insurance adjusters, contractors and “remediation experts.” We’d had about a foot of Long Island Sound sloshing around the ground floor of our house in Connecticut, and everyone had the same advice: Rip up the floors and subfloors, and tear out anything—wiring, plumbing, insulation, drywall, kitchen cabinets, bookcases—touched by salt water. All of it had to go, and pronto, too, lest mold set in.

Yet it wasn’t until the workmen we hired had ripped apart most of the first floor that the phrase “building permit” first wafted past us. Turns out we needed one. “What, to repair our own house we need a building permit?”

Of course.

Before you could get a building permit, however, you had to be approved by the Zoning Authority. And Zoning—citing FEMA regulations—would force you to bring the house “up to code,” which in many cases meant elevating the house by several feet. Now, elevating your house is very expensive and time consuming—not because of the actual raising, which takes just a day or two, but because of the required permits.

Kafka would have liked the zoning folks. There also is a limit on how high in the sky your house can be. That calculation seems to be a state secret, but it can easily happen that raising your house violates the height requirement. Which means that you can’t raise the house that you must raise if you want to repair it. Got that?

Read the whole thing.

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I blogged about a second-hand horror experience with building codes back in 2011:

One day, while I was still living on the SF peninsula in San Carlos, I went outside to get something from my car, and the pretty Oriental young lady who lived in the house across the street (whose name I did not even know, we had only been on waving-hello terms) ran crying into my arms.

She and her husband, a silver-haired, distinguée executive-type who drove an S-class Mercedes, had purchased the typical run-down 1960s-era California spec house across the street from our rental for something north of a cool million. They then proceeded to gut snd completely rebuild the place. Construction activity had been going for about two years, and seemed finally to be nearing completion. I thought these neighbors seemed likely to be about to take up residence just about the same time I was scheduled to depart.

My neighbor began sobbing out her story. A building inspector from the city of San Carlos had just left. He had disapproved of the nails used to attach the wire-mesh to the outside of the house which had already been covered with stucco cement and painted. Because the city didn’t like the contractor’s choice of nail, my neighbors were going to have to give up plans to move in. They would be obliged to tear off the entire new exterior surface of their house, and re-attach new wire mesh and stucco, and paint the whole thing all over again. It would take months to do the demolition and exterior covering again, and it would cost a lot of money.

Beyond the many tens of thousands of dollars all that extra construction was going to cost, they’d have to do an additional move (their lease was up) and pay thousands of unnecessary dollars a month for another rental house. My neighbors had been hit with six figures in extra expenses by the local building code enforcement system over a nail.

No wonder the poor girl was sobbing. She probably felt a lot like Richard III.

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In all the suburban enclaves of the community of fashion, layers of officials have erected regulatory empires funded by the tax dollars of the generally oblivious ordinary citizen. No rational person would buy a home burdened with exorbitant levels of taxation which he can only actually use with the grudging permission of hostile and tyrannical officialdom, but one always discovers the character of one’s place of residence too late.

Really, the best choice is the complete reverse of what most people desire. Instead of living in the most toney neighborhood, surrounded by affluent neighbors with prestigious careers and elite educations, you want to live in a rural township: the kind of place lacking in prestige, fashionability, and good restaurants, where your neighbors are all rednecks and poor. That kind of township will have next to no government, taxes will be extremely low, your neighbors will be friendly, and you can hire labor at cheap rates.

My old TVR two-seater sits in front of our Newtown manse one Xmas season back in the 1980s

We commonly look backward in imagination trying to visualize dramatic events that occurred in our home neighborhoods in a distant past, long before our own lifetimes. It rarely occurs to us to imagine bad things happening in future times, after we are gone.

In my case, it seems to be the future that you have to worry about.

In 2008, a Mexican illegal immigrant, Luis Ramirez, died as the result of a beating at the hands of white teenagers. The altercation occurred on the same block where I grew up in Shenandoah, Pennsylvania. I had personally ceased living there decades before, when I went away to college. My father also eventually moved away, to take up residence on a farm I acquired in Central PA, and we sold his house early in the 1990s.

The latest mass shooting occurred on Friday in Newtown, Connecticut. Karen and I moved to San Francisco from Newtown in 2001, but we had lived there for twenty years.

We moved to Newtown in July of 1982, from Redding Ridge, where we had been renting a small house located on a dirt road bordering several miles of uninhabited watershed property. I had a couple of pools of the Aspetuck River to call my own and fly fished for trout nearly every day during the season.

Redding Ridge was a very nice high-end suburb, but it was indubitably a suburb, and back then Newtown still seemed, by comparison, authentically the country. Newtown (the second largest town in land area in Connecticut) had plenty of open land, working farms, and included the headquarters of the local hunt.

Karen and I had been riding weekly at an equestrian center in Southbury, and one day near our home we helped recover a lost horse and made the acquaintance of several people from the Fairfield Hunt. Newtown was where aspiring equestrians wanted to be, we thought, and we concentrated our house searches there.

As soon as we started house shopping in Newtown, we came upon a white elephant property which seemed ideal for us. It was the sort of thing you refer to architecturally as “a remuddle.” The original house dated back to 1712, but had been enlarged in the 1820s, then later Victorianized. We owned a lot of books and needed and desired a lot of room, and this house had over 5000 sq. ft.

Newtown is what was referred to historically as a “hill town.” The original colonial settlers established themselves on hilltops because the local valleys were swampy and malarial. Newtown had been founded in 1710 as the product of what might be referred to as “agricultural sprawl.” The original settlement site in Stratford had been completely divided up, and the grandsons of the original settlers of Stratford Colony (founded 1639) needed more land for new houses and new farms, so new settlements were established in the remoter, inland quarters of the original colony, each built as a parish around a new Congregational meeting house.

Newtown was too far from Manhattan for convenient commuting but, by the early 20th century, the Connecticut hill towns were able to attract summer visitors from the city with cooler temperatures and New England quaintness.

Newtown never became a major historical site. Rochambeau’s French Army marched through town on its way from Rhode Island to Virginia during the Revolution. Charles Goodyear allegedly invented his process of vulcanizing rubber while resident in Newtown, and the game of Scrabble was later invented there.

Mr. & Mrs. Clarence Narramore, the last aboriginal descendants to own our house, added an additional pair of wings to the house in 1929 and (one week after the Crash) opened for business as a tourist hotel and family restaurant, serving chicken and steak dinners for $2. The inn and the original 16-acre home farm survived up into the early 1960s.

The old house had on the order of twenty-odd rooms (depending what you counted as a room) and in some portions definitely reeked of antiquity.

We lived there from 1982 to 2001.

When we took up residence in Newtown, Karen was working for an IT consultancy in Stamford, and I was commuting into the city on Monday and coming home on Friday. In the end, both of our businesses were sold. Lowell Weicker became governor and introduced the income tax, and the economy of Connecticut went to pot. The income tax cost Connecticut its competitive advantage in the Tri-State region, and (at least for a while) people stopped starting service companies in the readily-commutable lower coastal towns. By the late-1990s, both Karen and I were involved in new start-up companies and doing an exhausting hour and 45 minutes each way commute to Manhattan.

The fields and farms which attracted us to Newtown were all subdivided and covered with new subdivisions. The local roads were choked with commuter traffic, and our taxes which had been roughly $2000 a year in 1982, with a new sewer assessment, were now more like $10,000.

The fox hunt and the fields we had once ridden over were long gone.

The quaint colonial town aspect of Newtown had become, in our eyes, an ironic hollow shell.

The truth of the matter was that Newtown was a bedroom community. Its residents were typically an exhausted set of far-commuting executives, pushing the outer envelope of possible commuting distance. They got home at 7:30 or 8:00 (if lucky) on week nights, and staggered off to bed. Life consisted essentially of Saturday and Sunday morning and afternoon. The cynical boosters and looters making up the town’s political leadership set could do anything they pleased. Nobody else had the energy to go out to weekday town meetings. Taxes went up 10-12% per year, good times or bad, and development just kept on rolling. Newtown had no retired old people. The taxes were too high. If you retired, you sold your house to the next commuter and moved to some low tax Sun belt location.

ABC News spun the story depicting Newtown as “an adorable little town,” the sort of place where psychological disorder and violence seem unthinkable. In reality, I expect for many Newtown is the scene of a characteristically desperate American struggle to retain some of the characteristic amenities of rural and small town life while making a decent living.

Places like Newtown are often high-pressure environments in which people live in something somewhat resembling the country, but with all the same anonymity and anomie characteristic of the big city. Residents commonly rapidly come and go. Most of us barely knew our neighbors. And nobody really had the time to develop a community social life.

I expect places like Newtown are even less agreeable for children and teenagers. They can’t go anywhere without a car. There isn’t much of anything for them to do. And, the ethos of upper middle class competitiveness, materialism, and compulsory achievement broods over all. You obviously don’t hear about shooting massacres very often, but the usual vandalism expressing adolescent bitterness and resentment of adult authority can be seen everywhere.

As liberal politicians and the mainstream media try to use the massacre in Newtown, Connecticut to prove the need for more gun laws, World Net Daily notes that Connecticut already had gun control laws.

The state of Connecticut already has certain gun-control laws in place, at least three of which the shooter broke, as he could have only obtained the weapons through illegal means.

According to news reports, Adam Lanza, 20, shot his mother Nancy Lanza dead at their family home before driving to the Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, where he gunned down more than two dozen people, 20 of them children, and then killed himself.

The Associated Press reports Lanza brought three guns into the school: a Glock pistol, a Sig Sauer pistol and Bushmaster rifle, which the New York Post further reports was a semi-automatic “assault rifle” chambered for a .223 caliber round, matching casings found at the crime scene.

Lanza, therefore, if you count theft, murder and breaking and entering – since CBS New York now reports it likely Lanza broke into the school through a window to circumvent a locked-door and intercom security system – would have violated a half-dozen laws in his crime, including the following gun-control statutes:

First, Connecticut law requires a person be over 21 to possess a handgun. Lanza was 20.

Second, Connecticut requires a permit to carry a pistol on one’s person, a permit Lanza did not have.

Third, it is unlawful in Connecticut to possess a firearm on public or private elementary or secondary school property, a statute Lanza clearly ignored.

Fourth, with details on the Bushmaster rifle still sketchy, it’s possible Lanza may have violated a Connecticut law banning possession of “assault weapons.”

Of course, these laws were violated because Lanza did not own any of the firearms in question, but rather stole them, and he clearly had no regard for the law in committing his crime.

The Associated Press reports the weapons were registered to Lanza’s first victim, his own mother, according to a law enforcement official not authorized to discuss information with reporters and spoke on condition of anonymity.