Bridgeport Council to meet in person for first time in 2 years
BRIDGEPORT — Aside from some plexiglass dividers installed between members’ seats, Monday’s City Council meeting, that legislative body’s first official in-person gathering in two years, should be like old, pre-coronavirus pandemic times.
Even Cecil Young, a resident and former municipal employee who for years showed up to harangue council members during the public speaking portion of their meetings, is again scheduled to make an appearance.
Since the global health crisis reached Connecticut around this time in 2020, the 20-person council and Mayor Joe Ganim, who typically presides over its meetings, have gathered online, as have the council’s subcommittees, to prevent the illness’ spread. The public could either listen by phone or watch on a computer.
President Aidee Nieves had initially hoped to reconvene in the spacious council chambers in City Hall on Lyon Terrace in January, but a winter spike in COVID cases scuttled that plan.
But when the council’s Monday agenda was published Thursday, it stated in red letters the group would be back in City Hall. The move follows Ganim’s recent lifting of Bridgeport’s pandemicrelated mask mandate, as well as an overall effort statewide and nationwide to get back to some sort of normal because of vaccinations and a decline in cases.
“I said, ‘We’re doing it,’” Nieves explained Friday.
Members of the public used to tuning in from the comfort of home will be disappointed. Despite Nieves’ claims last year that the meetings will still be livestreamed, she admitted that
President Aidee Nieves had initially hoped to reconvene in the spacious council chambers in City Hall on Lyon Terrace in January, but a winter spike in COVID cases scuttled that plan.
will not be the case.
Bridgeport’s City Council chamber is notorious for poor acoustics. And Nieves said it will cost a lot of money to invest in the equipment necessary to overcome those sound issues and also to properly televise the large curved area where members sit.
“I thought it was just like, we put a couple of cameras up,” she said. “But the sound is gonna be horrible . ... What we thought would be an easy fix requires a bigger overall.”
Nieves, however, said the plan is for the council’s committees, where most of nutsand-bolts discussion and debate occurs, to continue to do that work online.
That decision drew an emailed rebuke from Councilwoman Maria Pereira, who wrote she supports all meetings being live-streamed, but the committees too should gather in-person for residents “to interact with elected officials prior to and after ... and to witness committee interactions in person.”
But Nieves insisted the overall committee attendance, not just by committee members but by members of the public, has been better since the council went online.
John Marshall Lee, like Cecil Young, was always a regular presence at council meetings and often spoke. He plans on attending Monday as well. Lee has tuned in to council gatherings the last few years over the phone but said it is not the same as witnessing the elected officials in action in City Hall.
“I want to see who’s paying attention, who’s listening,” Lee said.