Mayor discusses schools, business in ‘fireside chat’
STAMFORD — Mayor Caroline Simmons spoke about promoting schools, the city’s business environment and more during a wide-ranging “fireside chat” Wednesday as she enters her third week as Stamford’s top elected official.
Stamford Partnership’s TechHub held the discussion at Third Place by Half Full Brewery, which is where Simmons and her campaign team celebrated the night she was elected mayor.
Here are a few highlights from Simmons’ hourlong conversation with George Boyce, the owner of a State Farm Insurance agency in Stamford.
Schools’ ‘perception challenge’
Audience member Doug Burke, a local businessman and husband of Stamford Board of Education member Jennienne Burke, asked Simmons about the reputation of the city’s schools and how public perception of them could be changed.
Simmons — who, as mayor, is a nonvoting member of the Board of Education — acknowledged that Stamford’s school system has a “perception challenge” and said the city needs to “do a much better job of marketing our schools.
“We have incredible teachers, incredible programs at our schools,” Simmons said. “We have graduates of our high schools who went on to Ivy League schools. We have incredible successes that we should be proud of.”
The city should also highlight its international population, she added: Going to school with classmates who speak different languages is “a strength that's going to prepare our students to be successful in a global economy.”
Simmons then turned to the schools’ aging buildings, saying Stamford officials met with state officials in recent days as the city seeks funding for a new Westhill High School.
She said that improving the rankings of Stamford’s schools should also be a priority.
“Parents are looking at that when they’re choosing where to settle down,” Simmons said.
‘One-stop-shop’ for businesses
Simmons said she wants to create a new one-stop shop similar to an existing state website for people wading through the permitting process and taking other steps to establish a business in the city.
The city already has a website billed as a “one-stop shop,” but Simmons said what she is picturing would take “the Amazon customer service approach, where you can go to Amazon and you can get everything you need with one login, one ID.”
For instance, business owners could log in and see the status of their permit applications — similar to how people track their orders from Amazon, she said.
She said her administration is also taking a look at the city’s permitting process, which for some businesses can take up to a year and a half to complete.
“To get your permit to start up, it has to get signed by five or six different offices,” Simmons said. “The flow doesn’t necessarily make sense.”
During their campaigns, Simmons’ general election opponent, Bobby Valentine,
floated the idea of creating a “concierge service” to help entrepreneurs start up a business and stay open.
A ‘silver lining’ of the pandemic
Speaking about Stamford’s population boom and its growing corporate community, Simmons said “one of the silver linings of this pandemic is that smaller cities like Stamford are now really competing” with the likes of New York City and Boston for attracting companies.
Still, with Stamford’s commercial vacancy rate around 30 percent, Simmons said her administration is “looking at how we can market our commercial spaces and proactively recruit businesses.”
Tech ‘vulnerabilities’
Another question that came from the audience was: “What's already keeping you up at night?”
Other than the times when her two young sons have woken her up, Simmons said she had trouble sleeping when a snowstorm was expected to hit Stamford — “then, luckily, it was barely a flurry.”
She also said the “vulnerabilities of our IT infrastructure” have been on her mind. Before his term as mayor ended, David Martin appointed Stamford’s first chief information officer, Izzy Sobkowski, who is overseeing an overhaul of the city’s financial system.
“If anything gets disrupted in that, it could mean a disruption in city services, so we're getting constant reports and monitoring the progress of upgrading our software and our IT,” Simmons said.