Rutland Region

Downtown gets two new stores
By Lani Duke
RUTLAND—Black Moon Games has opened at 9 Evelyn St. in downtown Rutland, specializing in tabletop board and card games, role-playing games and miniatures. It also has a large gaming space in which to play.
Stephen and Allison Willoughby opened home furnishings store Kindred Spirit at 53 Merchants Row earlier this summer. Stephen Willoughby describes Kindred Spirit as “an alternative home store” specializing in “eclectic, hard-to-find items.”
New faces appear on the job scene
RUTLAND—Rutland Mental Health Services has hired James DiCosimo, CPA, as its new chief financial officer. He has served Onandaga Community College in Syracuse as assistant vice president for finance since 2009 and has worked in that school’s finance department for the past 21 years.
Thusitha “T” Cotter, M.D., has joined the staff of Rutland Regional Medical Center in Rutland Women’s Healthcare. She completed her doctor of medicine degree from Memorial University of Newfoundland, with residencies in obstetrics and gynecology at Queens University, Kingston, Ontario, Canada, and Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center, Lebanon, N.H.
The Rutland Region Chamber of Commerce announced Aug. 9 the promotion of Mary Cohen to new executive director after four months serving as interim director, and Janelle Howard is its new director of business development.
Kirsten Hathaway has been named interim town clerk and treasurer, Rutland Town Select Board Chairman Joshua Terenzini announced Aug. 8. She holds a degree in business management and leaves a position as wedding and social sales representative at Killington Resort to take up her new post Aug. 29.
It’s a wrap
RUTLAND—Rutland Regional Medical Center recently hired Awesome Graphics of Rutland to put up new signage that is also innovative. Co-owner Mike Napolitano said the new exterior signage is a breathable vinyl that seals in place, molding itself around every brick, but can be heated and removed. It can be applied to surfaces as rough as cinder block or stucco. He says large-format printing is one of the few growing segments of the print industry at a time when many traditional printing functions have been assumed by desktop technology. Large is hardly the word for this technology, which can even wrap entire buildings.
Permit process weighs down inflatable sports arena
RUTLAND TOWN—In 2013 Middlebury College donated an air-supported dome sports arena to Castleton University. Its 40,000 square feet of track, turf, and hard-floor recreation surfaces were expected to be in use by summer 2014. So far, compressors have not yet puffed up the arena in its intended destination, beside Spartan Arena at Diamond Run Mall, Rutland Town.
Its inflation would offer Castleton’s athletic teams year-round practice space and provide sports medicine students with a “laboratory of learning,” as well as see use by the general public. However, it lacks a wastewater permit and a drinking water permit from the Agency of Natural Resources. ANR Engineer David Swift received a permitting application in July 2015 but postponed acting on it until a different state program could complete a wetlands permit.
Adding the dome requires an Act 250 permit amendment, according to District 1 Environmental Commission Coordinator William Burke.
Volunteers spruce up South Wallingford cemetery
WALLINGFORD—On Aug. 7, Vermont Old Cemetery Association President Tom Giffin led a crew of Comcast volunteers and Wallingford volunteer Rodney Ward a quarter mile into the woods, bearing tools, to bring order and dignity back to those deceased Vermonters whose remains are buried here. During a morning spent at the Doty Cemetery in South Wallingford, the stones were straightened and the broken ones repaired, blown-down tree limbs cut up and removed, brush cleared, posts straightened and the grounds raked.
Appreciation is due to the nine-man group from Comcast: William Mills, P.J. Mallon, Chad Hicks, Jason Bates, and Simon Turgeon, coordinator Russ Shoengarth, Ward and Giffin.
The Vermont Old Cemetery Association lists 255 old cemeteries in Rutland County. Danby has the most, with 17; Clarendon, Poultney, and Rutland each have 16. In Wallingford, there are 15.
The website VOCA58.org offers a variety of resources for people who want to learn more about old cemeteries, their locations, the meaning of the symbolism on the stones, who is buried where, and other helpful material.