Sherman Connecticut News

Demolition by Negligence

The Banality of Sherman’s $42.8M Crisis

Don Lowe's Eye On The Wrong Ball

In the autopsy of any municipal financial disaster, human nature often searches for a mastermind. Faced with the staggering reality of a $42.8 million taxpayer burden to rescue the Sherman School, it is tempting to believe the crisis was carefully orchestrated—that town leadership engaged in calculated sabotage to force a massive capital project upon the public.

But as internal communications and administrative behaviors come to light, a far more dangerous, and much more banal, reality is emerging: Nobody was steering the ship at all. The crisis was born of pure, oblivious negligence and executive surrender.

The Accidental Confession

How a Political Shield Became an Indictment

Recently, Board of Education Chairman Matt Vogt went to great lengths to insulate First Selectman Don Lowe from the mounting school crisis. In a written defense, Vogt pointedly clarified that the First Selectman never refused funding for school repairs, nor did the Board of Selectmen demand catastrophic budget cuts that led to the building's decay.

Vogt intended to clear the First Selectman of malice. Instead, he convicted him of profound executive negligence. It is a textbook case of demolition by neglect.

Don Lowe has served as the First Selectman and chief financial overseer of Sherman since 2018. If his administration never intervened while the BOE systematically downgraded and deferred critical maintenance, it means he watched a localized repair issue metastasize into a generational tax burden and completely surrendered his executive authority. He rubber-stamped a decaying status quo.

The Smokescreen of Retribution

Micro-Tyranny as a Mask for Macro-Incompetence

How does a municipal executive survive for decades while allowing a multi-million-dollar infrastructure collapse? By manufacturing enough local conflict to ensure nobody looks at the ledger.

Don Lowe is not an observant mastermind orchestrating the downfall of town infrastructure. Rather, he is an executive suffering from profound institutional blindness, masked by a fierce protection of his own political power. He operates through a highly punitive administrative style—holding grudges and exacting revenge against anyone who dares to question the facade.

Those who stand beside the administration do not do so out of loyalty or shared vision; they do so because they understand that stepping out of line invites immediate, punitive retribution.

This is the dark mechanism of the Sherman Caste System. The administration routinely pits different factions of the town against each other, cultivating an environment of constant social and political friction. It is a calculated distraction. When a town is busy fighting itself, it takes the focus off the First Selectman's abdication of leadership.

The historical record shows an executive perfectly capable of manipulation, passive-aggression, and gaslighting when his personal authority is challenged. He is willing to leverage local, state, or federal resources to exact revenge on individual dissenters—even when no law is broken and no ordinance violated.

He will dispatch town security resources to monitor a taxpayer legally walking through a public park, but when faced with a Board of Education demanding a $42.8 million blank check, he simply folds. He will spend a quarter of a century failing to monitor the roof over the town's children, but will watch his critics like a hawk.

He is hyper-focused on the optics of control, but completely negligent regarding the actual machinery of governance.

The $42.8 million Sherman School bond is not a monument to political sabotage. It is the bill that comes due when a town's leadership spends its energy settling petty scores instead of managing the public's assets.