Former Catamount Chrysler Dealer CHARGED WITH FRAUD

The Office of the United States Attorney for the District of Vermont stated that Sean Johnson, age 41, formerly an accountant in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, who moved to Vermont about two years ago, was charged July 17, Tuesday, by a federal Grand Jury with 15 counts of wire fraud. An arraignment has not yet been scheduled.

According to the Indictment, in late 2003 Johnson bought the Chrysler Dodge automobile dealership in Morrisville, and in early 2004 planned to buy a Chevrolet dealership in Waterbury. In connection with both transactions, he is charged with embezzling money from investors and clients. Many creditors in Lamoille County were ultimately left without payment, also. The Morrisville dealership operated during 2004 as Catamount Chrysler Dodge. The Waterbury dealership never changed hands. The Indictment charges Johnson with a "scheme to defraud," alleging that after he arranged for large amounts of money to be deposited in Vermont bank accounts to acquire and run the dealerships, he diverted money from those accounts for other purposes. The indictment alleges he diverted the money to Florida and elsewhere for personal expenses, for other business expenses, to repay debts, and to repay losses suffered by other victims. The personal expenses included payments for luxury items, such as expensive artwork, a BMW automobile, a DVD player with two video screens for a Land Rover, and furniture for his new house in Florida.

Each of the 15 fraud counts carries a maximum penalty of 20 years imprisonment. In the event of a guilt finding the actual sentence would be determined by a sentencing court. The United States Attorney stated that the indictment is an accusation only and that Johnson is presumed innocent until proven guilty.

William B. Darrow is handling the case for the United States.

Common Acres Provides Recreation Once Again

by Mickey Smith

Looking for a new identity, Gene Leon, the new owner of what was formerly known as Common Ground Amusement Park, has re-opened the summer recreation park and campground as Common Acres Campground Recreational Park.

Since buying the property at a foreclosure auction, Leon and his wife, Nadi, have been hard at work cleaning up and repairing the Hyde Park recreational facility.

Leon explained, as he offered a tour of the grounds, the place had fallen into vast disrepair over the past couple of years. He estimated he has had 30 tons of trash – in the form of garbage, scrap metal, and cut and fallen trees removed from the grounds in an effort to reopen the campground.

The campground, he said, was his primary focus in the beginning. He said there were seasonal campers ready to go, so he wanted to make sure things were up and running, and safe and clean, when they arrived.

He said at first it was a bit overwhelming and he had trouble figuring out where to start. The road through the campground needed a lot of work, and what was estimated to be a one-day job, soon became four days, as they had to dig down to the base and haul in gravel.

Friends and family have helped with painting and some locals who have enjoyed using the facility have donated flowers to help spruce up around the buildings and the miniature golf course.

Mini golf was one of the first things back on line. Leon elucidated that he had to reconnect the water lines to get the fountains and pools back in business, but he now has it back the way it looked in its early days.

Leon said the Houles, the founders of the park, have been great through the process. He said Bob Houle has helped teach him what needs to be done to keep the place running, and has shared ideas about the future of the park.

“I wasn’t planning on running a campground,” said Leon citing the knowledge he has learned from Houle.

To date, Leon has not made any big changes… other than removing the bumper boats because the pool was beyond repair. He said by selling the boats online he was able to come up with extra money to help get other parts back open. Six new go-carts are on order, and will complement the three carts that were left. Some boards on the walls needed to be replaced, and he said there is still a little patching to be done on the track.

The paintball course has been slightly expanded, even though he said they really had to go in and clear everything out and start over again. By doing so, he expanded the boundaries – rounding the borders.

An ATV trail that ran through the lot is being converted for mountain biking in an effort to add more privacy and serenity to the camping experience.

In the future, Leon hopes to open the park up to more community friendly attractions. He plans to build a pavilion where the bumper boats once floated, something that would be available for outdoor gatherings, small concerts, and the like.

He hopes to include a small café/lounge in the main building, and is in hopes to make the facility year round. Cross-country skiing and snowshoeing can be available on the premises and snowmobile trails are accessible from there. He wouldn’t even rule out the notion of offering winter camping.

He said he looks at all the of tasks he tackles at the park as an art project, and hopes they all flow into making the park a truly enjoyable adventure for all. But, he said it will take time, as there is only so much he can get done in the first year.

Independent Woman Trapped by Car Hood

By J.B. McKinley

JOHNSON– Saturday, July 7, was not a good day for Judie Cotnoir, of Johnson. While working under the hood of her car a sudden gust of wind slammed it down on her arm hard enough to shatter her upper arm bone and trap her standing upright. The hood was latched. If that wasn’t bad enough, she simply could not extract herself and stood in the same spot until 9 or 10 o’clock Monday morning – two feet from her cellphone!

It is lucky that Judie is a strong independent woman who chainsaws her own winter wood and is in all ways very active.

There she stood, not visible from the road, as day and night came and went, as did rain and thundershowers. Her dog never left her side. She did have the slight advantage that her car was parked under an open-sided carport.

Monday, Judie was found, transported to Copley Hospital and sent on to Fletcher Allen Healthcare where she has undergone several surgeries. It’s not known how soon she will be able to use her arm again as it was badly injured halfway between her elbow and her shoulder.

Being neighborly, Gayle Tatro has organized a benefit raffle for Cotnoir. Since she has no back-up heat source and may not (probably will not) be able to finish her wood supply, the raffle’s goal has been set at $8,000 in order to provide her winter’s heat.

For more information, call Gayle Tatro at 373-5344.

Centennial Library to Receive New Roof

by Amy Kolb Noyes

MORRISVILLE – The Morristown Centennial Library will receive a new roof next month. The bids are in and the Library Trustees and the Morristown Selectboard have selected Hutchins Roofing Company, of Barre, to install a 50-year asphalt shingle roof at a bid cost of $28,525. Last March, Town Meeting voters approved spending up to $30,000 on the library roof project.

Library Board of Trustees Chair Sue Sargent presented the project to the selectboard for its approval Monday evening, July 16. Sargent also outlined for the board new library addition plans, produced with the help of local architect Paul Trudell. The new layout includes a three-story addition to the back of the library. However, the roofline of the addition would not exceed the current building height. Sargent said the ceilings would be low on the basement level, where the children’s area will be located. However, she said Vermont’s Historic Preservation folks do not want the roofline of the 1913 library building to be exceeded.

“That’s one of the reasons we’re putting the kids down there, because they’re shorter,” Sargent joked.

The existing basement room will serve as a children’s activities area. The children’s books will be shelved in the basement addition.

The main floor will be the adult portion of the library. The old section will have a reading area and a place for adult activities while the new portion will house the adult collection and include a new side entrance, an elevator and two sets of stairs.

The new top floor, in the addition portion only, will include a large community meeting room, restrooms, a room for the library’s extensive Vermont collection and newspaper archives, a kitchenette, restrooms and storage. The community meeting room will be approximately 660 square feet, which Sargent said will comfortably seat about 45 people.

The Library Trustees hope the Alexander H. Copley Trust will fund the “Copley Community Room.” The trustees of that fund had previously pledged $120,000 to build a community meeting room under an older, now-defunct library addition project.

The entire library addition project is estimated to cost $2,475,000. The library trustees have applied for a $500,000, 3:1 matching grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. To meet the required match, the library board plans to fundraise $500,000 and ask the town to bond for $1 million at Town Meeting next March.

“We’re going to do everything we can to make sure the bond request that we make is as low as we possibly can,” Sargent told the selectboard.

If the NEH grant application is approved, Sargent said they hope to start construction next year. A grant decision will be made by November 1. Sargent said the library trustees are still working on a “Plan B” in case the grant falls through.

First Update on Morristown Ancient Roads

by Amy Kolb Noyes

The story that follows is the third installment in a summer-long series on identifying ancient roads in Lamoille County. Ancient roads, as referred to in Act 178, are former class 4 roads or trails that are no longer identified as roads by a town. Ancient roads remain public places and are often used recreationally. Act 178 gives a specific timetable for towns to identify ancient roads it wishes to maintain. Those not identified will eventually be considered abandoned and rights-of-way returned to the landowner.

MORRISTOWN – Steve Rae has spent the first half of 2007 plugging away at identifying Morristown’s “ancient roads.” This week he gave his first progress report to the selectboard, including five recommendations on how to proceed with the project.

Last year the Vermont Legislature enacted Act 178, requiring towns to identify and record all legal town roads and trails on the town highway map filed with the state. Towns have until 2009 to complete the project. Any roads or trails not identified by the deadline will eventually be discontinued.

Morristown received a $5,000 grant from the state to help fund its ancient roads research. Morristown hired Rae with that grant money. To date, Rae said he has expended about $1,000. He said his work, thus far, has mainly involved researching and collecting information on all the legal roads in town.

Rae has been pouring over town records, transportation maps and other documents. Rae has also been working on a method to map surveys as overlays onto aerial photographs in order to compare descriptions in legal documents and old surveys to mapped existing road locations. Rae said he has a personal interest in this part of the project, and therefore has not charged any of this type of work to the town’s grant.

Rae reported he has not encountered any major issues thus far, and has been able to find most of the needed historical records. Some interesting facts Rae uncovered include the first road surveyed by Morristown was “the North-South road,” which is (with some alteration) now the Stagecoach Road. That survey was conducted on June 11, 1800. The following day the East-West road was plotted “with the intent of creating a road from the Johnson line to Elmore,” Rae explained.

“I estimate that, over the ensuing 200+ years, there have been surveys for over 500 roads legally laid out, altered or discontinued,” Rae stated in his report.

Rae suggested the town records be scanned and put on CDs. He said this would protect the old records from repeated handling, as well as making them easier to research. Town Clerk Mary Ann Wilson concurred with the recommendation.

Rae said the next step of the project should be asking residents to bring to the town any possible ancient roads they would like to “make a case for.” He suggested a committee be formed to consider such requests on a case-by-case basis.

The Morristown selectboard voted unanimously to adopt the following recommendations made by Rae, and authorized him to complete the tasks with the assistance of existing town staff. Rae’s recommendations are as follows:

1. The town should compile a list of all relevant records that can be identified.

2. The town should digitize as much of this data as feasible, to provide an easily accessible database for potential research.

3. The town should publicize the opportunity for interested citizens to identify and recommend roads for inclusion in the town road system.

4. The town should produce a brief summary of documentation necessary to support any recommendation for inclusion and make this available to researchers.

5. The town should authorize the formation of a review committee to organize, access and pass on recommendations to the selectboard.

Responsive Classroom Returns

by Amy Kolb Noyes

MORRISTOWN – Does your elementary school student start his or her day in the classroom with a “morning meeting?” Have you heard stories of some creative “greetings” from that day? Has your child’s teacher ever started the year by asking you what you’d like your student to accomplish that year? If so, that teacher has likely been trained in, and embraced, “Responsive Classroom.” Responsive Classroom is a mode of teaching that integrates social and academic learning. The Responsive Classroom model emphasizes guided discovery in teaching, involving families in learning, and outlining clear rules and logical consequences.

After a four-year hiatus, the Responsive Classroom Institute came back to Morristown Elementary School last week. The school started hosting the summer institutes in 1995. Returning with the popular educator training was former MES guidance counselor Susan Titterton, who now works for Northeast Foundation for Children, running Responsive Classroom trainings. Titterton, an Elmore resident, said she was enjoying being back at her old school.

“This is the best site that I’ve ever worked at,” said Titterton. She noted the school layout is conducive to the summer workshop, the staff is helpful, the meals good and the school kept clean.

Titterton likens the Responsive Classroom approach to a three-legged stool – the three legs involving approaches to “building community, instructional design and effective management and discipline.”

Titterton has been presenting Responsive Classroom workshops for about seven years. In that time, she said the educators taking the training in Vermont have expanded from primarily classroom teachers to administrators, paraeducators, and specials instructors such as art, music and physical education teachers. Titterton said that is because many Vermont schools have embraced the classroom model and decided to take Responsive Classroom techniques school-wide. Many teachers who have taken a weeklong Responsive Classroom workshop are returning for RC2 and RC3 level training.

Responsive Classroom is in vogue in Vermont, but is also gaining popularity throughout the country. Teachers came to the Morristown workshop last week from as far away as California, Chicago, Virginia, Ohio, Pennsylvania and even the American School in Beijing, China.

New Wolcott Offices This Fall

by Amy Kolb Noyes

WOLCOTT – If all goes as planned, the Town of Wolcott will have a new, and vastly expanded, town office building by October. A town-employed job foreman, a local contractor and a prison work crew are combining efforts to transform the old School Street school building into a municipal office building and a new home for the Wolcott Historical Society. The job is already well underway.

One of the first orders of business was to remove a breezeway connecting the original two-room schoolhouse from its addition wing. The newer structure is being renovated into town offices and meeting space. The historic school building is the new home of the Wolcott Historical Society. Despite the weather, the project is steadily progressing, according to foreman Bob Bovat. The structures are separated and construction of the municipal building is underway.

Bovat gave the News & Citizen a tour of the construction site Monday, July 16. The building was a hive of activity, with interior walls being framed, finishing touches going on the new roof, and the dimensions for a new vault being mapped out on the floor.

Contractor Tyler Maynard’s three-man crew is working with a 10-man crew from the St. Johnsbury Correctional Center to revamp the school into offices.

“It’s nice to have the additional hands on deck,” Maynard said of the prison work crew. He added of Bovat, “Bob’s kept a great, clean worksite.”

“This is going to be pretty much a new building when it is done,” said Bovat.

The office building will include offices for the various town departments, including the Town Clerk’s Office and the Zoning Administrator. There will also be space for a research table near the 20’ x 22’ temperature- and humidity-controlled vault. The building will include a room where the public can conduct data research, a large conference room, handicapped accessible bathrooms, a kitchen, a utility room, storage, and employee workout room. The municipal building will be equipped with a handicapped accessible shower and a generator, so it can be used as an emergency shelter for the town.

Bovat said they are making every effort to have the new office building complement the adjacent historic structure. The crew is currently framing out large windows to complement the school building windows. Next week, landscapers will come in to begin working on the lot’s notoriously poor drainage.

Bovat said the total budget for the project is around $250,000. Each morning he checks in with Selectman Fred Martin, who is overseeing the project for the selectboard.

“He’s doing a fine job,” Martin said of Bovat. He added, “He’s got a good crew.”

Bovat said the town contracted with the St. Johnsbury Correctional Center to have ten men per day on the job, for a total of 22 weeks. In exchange, the town is paying the prison $12,000.

“That alone is saving the town hundreds of thousands of dollars,” said Bovat.

The crew comes with its own supervisor and a cook who prepares all their meals and snacks on-site.

Once the building is framed the finish work will begin. The work camp will also be putting up sheetrock and exterior vinyl siding.

Bovat is also running a sort of community recycling project onsite. He is maintaining a scrap pile on the worksite that residents are welcome to come pick through. In addition, he has saved all the salvaged doors, casings, windows, sinks, lights, toilets, ceiling fans, and the like in one room of the historical society’s building. In a couple weeks, Bovat will be moving it all out onto the lawn for people to take by donation. The date of the “sale” has yet to be announced, but Bovat said it will be advertised. That will also be a great time for folks to stop down and see all the work that’s been going on at the old School Street Center!

Things look this way to me Editorial by J.B. McKinley

Employers There is Hope

Here’s a different perspective on an oft discussed subject. Have you ever asked a business owner, “how it’s going?” and had him or her immediately go off on a long diatribe about not being able to get good help? Well, personally, I can’t count the times this subject has arisen within my hearing. Of course, we probably all listen with half an ear and nod our agreement. Or, maybe we are in a new employee search and have our own horror stories to share.

OK, so what’s the new angle? It’s this, there are young people out there who are qualified, ambitious and even pretty d____d hardworking. Don’t believe me? I have proof.

Here at the News & Citizen, as well as in a dozen or so businesses around Morrisville and the county, Upward Bound has currently scattered high school juniors to their internships. These are students who are college bound and trying to get a real world look at potential careers. I can’t speak for the other businesses, but our young man is bright, polite, and ready and willing to learn and work.

But, beyond even Upward Bound, we have had a second young man – all on his own initiative – come by the office and arrange an internship! Now that, to me, is impressive. Certainly I would not have done such a thing at his age, nor would more than a handful of people I’ve ever known. He, too, is talented, can write and is enthusiastic.

Regardless of whether either of these two interns decides to make a career in journalism, they will be good employees.

So, there it is, my two cents added to the pot of that oft-heard polemic – there is hope.