Longtime Derby city employee dies a week after her sister

DERBY — Around City Hall, Patty Finn was known as the go-to person.

You needed to check on the status of a grant, she was the person to ask. You needed a building file, she’d pull it out of a stack of documents. You needed a laugh, she’d have the joke for you “How do you replace someone like that?” said Mayor Richard Dziekan Tuesday. “I could never put together an accurate job description if I wanted to get someone to do everything she could. I’m not even sure such a person exists.”

The 60-year-old Finn died in her home suddenly Dec. 27 — exactly a month before her next birthday and a week after the death of her sister, Kathy.

A private funeral and burial service is being handled by the Spinelli-Ricciuti/Bednar-Osiecki Funeral Home, 62 Beaver St. in Ansonia. The family intends to schedule a memorial celebration once it’s safe to do so.

Ansonia Mayor David Cassetti remembers Finn from their school days.

“She was a childhood friend of mine,” Cassetti said. “We were classmates from kindergarten to eighth grade at Lincoln School.

She grew up on Judson Place.”

But what Cassetti said he remembers most is how easy going she was.

“She was such a friendly and wonderful person,” he said. “She was so easy to talk to. I know she is going to be missed in Derby.”

Finn earned an Associates Degree in Management from Johnson & Wales University in Providence, R.I. She began her employment career at the former Park Plaza Hotel in New Haven and later the Marriott Hotel in Shelton.

She then moved onto municipal work and found a job as the assistant to the director of the Ansonia Redevelopment Agency under Leo Russo and then Florence Villano.

“I hired Patty in 1995 to be my administrative assistant at Derby’s Office of Planning and Development,” said Rick Dunne, now the executive director of the Naugatuck Valley Council of Governments.

Her current position was deputy director for Derby’s Office of Economic and Community Development but she also oversaw the operation of the city’s municipal garage downtown.

“She a wealth of information and most of it was self-taught,” said Andrew Baklik, Dziekan’s chief of staff. “Before we had computers, we relied on Patty. Ask her a question and she’d have the answer along with the historical background. How do you replace someone like that?”

Dunne, who worked in Derby until 2005, said the city will soon understand “just how much she actually did for the city, the work and effort that have long gone unacknowledged, and how difficult it will be to replace her. Every day Patty turned wheels that the city didn’t even know they had. She was an indispensable staffer and friend.”

Town/City Clerk Marc Garofalo said Finn loved Broadway musicals.

“Lately you’d hear her enjoying the soundtrack to Hamilton while working in her office at City Hall,” said Garofalo, a former fourterm Derby mayor. “We are all in shock and terribly saddened by Patty's sudden passing. She will be sorely missed.”

He said Finn was “fiercely loyal to her family and friends. She cherished them dearly.”

For the past several months, she had been caring for her sister, Kathy, who was fighting cancer until her death on Dec. 20, 2020.

Dunne said he last talked to Finn the night before her sister died.

“She called me to let me know Kathy’s condition and prognosis,” he said. “Patty has suffered so much tragedy, has lost so many people who were close to her, but she always had a bright view of life and tried to cheer up friends who were going through their own struggles.”

“I will miss her as much as anyone I have loved in this world,” Dunne said.

Finn is survived by a sister, Maureen Wilkinson and her husband, Allan; a niece, Bridget Wilkinson Lane and her husband, Josh, and her lifetime friend Lynne Hines Iverson.

Patty Finn