Recently, Manchester Life posed the following question to each of the candidates running for the Board of Directors:What do you see as priorities in Manchester over the next two years?
Below is Dave Sheridan's answer, published in this month's edition (emphasis mine):
PRIORITY ONE: Town Directors and Town staff must continue to explore every possible way to deliver services as effectively and efficiently aspossible to residents, so as to maintain our high quality of municipal services with the least possible impact on local property taxes. This requires sound management, constant planning, critical analysis, and consistent policy direction.
PRIORITY TWO: Manchester must continue to invest in public safety. Wemust continue our efforts to put more officers on the street for lawenforcement, and expand our community-oriented policing efforts designedto prevent crime from occurring in the first place.
PRIORITY THREE: Manchester must continue to invest in maintaining and re-building its infrastructure - roads, curbs, sidewalks, bridges, townbuildings, water and sewer lines, streetlights, etc. Current funding levels are inadequate to stay ahead of our maintenance needs, let aloneour need to rebuild or replace aging infrastructure that is obsolete orworn out.
PRIORITY FOUR: We have two huge question marks for Town facilities that we must erase by building a bipartisan consensus for future action. First, what is our strategy for tackling needed renovations at the eight remaining elementary schools? How much will it cost? How will we payfor it? How long will it take? We need to answer those questions overthe next two years. Second, we need a strategy for how we will address the inadequacies of the current Mary Cheney Library. Can we expand thecurrent facility, or will we be required to build a new facility atanother location? The answer to those questions also must be found inthe next two years.
