LOOKING BACK, LOOKING FORWARD
David Martin: ‘I’m gonna be working hard until it comes time for the next mayor’
STAMFORD — Mayor David Martin said there were perhaps a dozen factors that contributed to state Rep. Caroline Simmons’ victory over him in the recent Democratic primary.
She raised much more money than him, Martin noted, though he managed to win the Democratic primary in 2013 despite being outraised by then-state Rep. William Tong.
Another factor, Martin suggested, was the COVID-19 pandemic and the amount of time he spent focused on the vaccine rollout.
“But I think the biggest single factor, which I don’t believe anybody will admit to: We’ve been through four years of (President Donald) Trump. Jan. 6. ‘The Big Lie.’ A pandemic. We’re moving into now a delta variant. There’s problems in Afghanistan. There are wildfires in the West, floods in the East. I mean, it’s like the end of days almost. It’s one plague after another,” Martin said.
“It is perfectly understandable that people are tired of what’s been going on in the last couple of years, and so they just want a change,” he said.
And change is what Simmons and her general election opponent, former Major League Baseball manager and unaffiliated candidate Bobby Valentine, have promised. Martin said he believes both are strong candidates. He has thrown his support behind Simmons.
The Stamford mayoral election will take place Nov. 2. Whoever wins will be sworn in the following month.
“I’m gonna be working hard until it comes time for the next mayor,” Martin said. “And I am gonna be very pleased during the month of November to brief the new mayor on dozens of issues and projects that are
underway that are designed to save Stamford money and improve its quality of life or improve its resiliency, which will become projects that they can carry forward and change direction or take the advice that we have and move forward as we’ve planned.”
One item he hopes to check off his to-do list: bringing on someone to be Stamford’s first chief information officer. The new position was included in Martin’s budget this year. He said he aims to have someone in place by Oct. 1.
But he said he will leave the filling of another new position — a diversity, equity and inclusion officer — to his successor.
“With CIO … that is an urgent position and not really a political position,” Martin said. “I don’t want to call the DEI position political, but you can understand it has a different level of sensitivity.”
He said he will also leave it up to the new mayor to fill a number of vacancies in city government and make decisions about spots on volunteer boards and commissions.
Before his time as mayor is up, one of Martin’s goals is to get the ball rolling on some stormwater projects in the city.
“We’ve already allocated half of our ARP money,” Martin said, referring to the American Rescue Plan Act, a federal COVID relief package. “I want to get that money in place so projects can get started. … It will be up to the next mayor to make certain those projects get completed.”
He said he also wants to hold a meeting with the residents who live around Farms Road to discuss plans for fixing the roadway that was damaged by flood water earlier this month. Residents were already frustrated that Aquarion Water Company’s pipeline replacement project along the road was dragging on for months longer than expected, and then Ida hit.
“The Farms Road washout is complicated, with multiple parties involved,” Martin said. “It is the perfect situation where it takes forever to get anything done. I want to see if we can’t get that in motion and have a meeting with the residents to talk about what we’re planning to do.”
With winter on its way, “I’m not certain that we can get that road totally restored,” he added. “But I don’t want it to be something that just languishes forever.”
As for schools, Martin said he intends to weigh in on the long-term facilities plan that is still in the works.
Now that his campaign is over, Martin said he is planning to revive his livestreamed presentations of Stamford’s latest COVID case numbers and vaccination rates. Martin had given the updates on a weekly basis for months but stopped in June as new reported cases were bottoming out. A couple months later, cases were back on the rise amid the spread of the more contagious delta variant, and Martin responded by issuing a local mask mandate.
With the delta variant still a concern and children now back in schools, Martin said he wants to bring back his presentations — but instead of giving an update once a week, he is thinking of spreading out his broadcasts to once every other week.