ON THE MAYOR’S MAP
Increasing enrollment and downtown renewal top Boughton’s agenda
DANBURY — The reelection fight Republican Mark Boughton won with Tuesday’s 1,300vote victory leaves Danbury’s longestserving mayor to battle a classroom shortage crisis and an underperforming downtown in the new decade.
Boughton’s election to an unprecedented 10th term means he will lead one of Connecticut’s fastestgrowing cities into 2020 at a time of swelling school enrollment, increasing west side congestion and a downtown Main Street corridor that is segregated from the rest of Danbury’s economy.
“It’s a real doubleedged sword when you are managing the city’s finances because Mark could go out and bond tens of million of dollars to pay for these projects but that would dump the city’s credit rating, and we would be caught spending 20 or 30 years paying these projects off,” said Jack Knapp, the city’s GOP chairman. “One of the falsehoods of the campaign was
to blame the influx of students on (west side developments) — but the students are coming from the downtown, because Danbury is an attractive city for Hispanics.”
Boughton’s plan to deal with the classroom shortage continued the day after the election with a Wednesday task force meeting to study the city’s school expansion options.
The first step, Boughton said, is to understand why a demographer badly missed projections earlier this year, when 350 new students showed up for class unexpected.
The surprise 5.6 percent jump in enrollment at a time in Connecticut when most schools are losing students caused the city to scramble to find $1.3 million to pay for extra teachers, desks and buses.
“There is a swath of housing in the central corridor of the city that is generating a lot of young people, so we know where they are coming from,” Boughton said Wednesday. “The question is what do we do if it happens again next year?”
Ideas that Boughton floated during the campaign including leasing a nearby school in Brookfield to ease the overcrowding are options that could be considered by the task force. Boughton affirmed his belief that Danbury will have to put a spending proposition to build new classrooms up to voters as soon as the spring and no later than fall.
“First, we have to know what our needs are going to be, and before we can know that we have to figure out how we got here,” Boughton said. “So we want to run everything through the task force.” Postelection picture Boughton had no plans to take time off after winning
54 percent of the vote in Tuesday’s election against Democratic challenger Chris Setaro, an attorney and former City Council president who came within
150 votes of beating Boughton in 2001.
In addition to Boughton, who beat Setaro 8,965 to
7,580, Republicans were returned to office at the top of the ticket with the reelection of Treasurer Daniel Jowdy and Clerk Janice Geigler.
The GOP also held onto its majority on the 21member City Council — but only barely — losing three seats to Democrats and ending the night with an 11to10 majority.
The city’s Democratic Party chairwoman called the effort to wrestle the mayor’s office away from one of Connecticut’s most popular Republicans “Homeric” — noting that Setaro’s campaign began in January and raised an unprecedented $175,000.
“But we had really big wins, including 10 seats on the City Council,” said Andrea Gartner, who lost the race for clerk to the GOP’s Giegler. “The messages we campaigned on about the overcrowding schools and the congested roads and the quality of life downtown is reflected in those big wins.”
Boughton, who Republicans endorsed for governor in 2018, said much of the congestion on the west side will be alleviated when the state widens Interstate 84 and Mill Plain Road.
The mayor said downtown revival will take time and more private investment to build apartments, such as the 150unit project underway at the former NewsTimes building on Main Street.
“It is not going to happen overnight that all of a sudden there will be 50 restaurants on Main Street,” Boughton said. “We have to put the bones of the infrastructure in place, which we are doing.”
Boughton said Danbury has begun work on its share of a $4 million project that includes graniteinlaid sidewalks, street amenities and ornamental trees.