Politics & Government
Belden says if Dunn runs again, he will too
Selectman wants to concurrently develop price tags for proposed larger police facilities and future use of Center Elementary School
By Scott Benjamin
BROOKFIELD – The tall, Ivy League graduate acquired his business acumen over 42 years at IBM.
However, Bob Belden also is fluent in municipal election cycles.
Find out what's happening in Brookfieldfor free with the latest updates from Patch.
He was initially elected in 2003 to the Brookfield Board of Finance.
The Route 7 bypass was still in the planning stage.
Find out what's happening in Brookfieldfor free with the latest updates from Patch.
The 2.1-mile highway has become a fixture in Brookfield. So has Belden.
He has been chairman of the Board of Finance and then the Board of Education. In 2023 he was elected as one of the two Other Selectmen on the three-member board.
“It really is a fast cycle,” Belden says. “By the time you settle into a role you are running again.”
There is a whiteboard at Brookfield Democratic Headquarters with categories of positions to be filled on the 2025 municipal ticket. The pitchers and catchers are about to report for Spring Training and the Democratic Town Committee is already recruiting candidates for November.
Should all the municipal offices have a four-year term? For example, Stamford, Ridgefield and Roxbury have adopted that formula over the last generation.
“I have mixed feelings,” commented Belden.
Yes, the cycle moves faster than the Kentucky Derby, but he added that, “If the voters have second thoughts [about the results] it doesn’t have to wait a long time” when there is an election every two years.
Will Belden run for another two-year term as a selectman this November?
“I’ve told Mr. Dunn that if he runs, I will run with him,” Belden commented in an interview with Patch.com.
He added, ”I really enjoy working with Mr. Dunn. He’s a good manager. We bounce ideas off of each other all the time.”
Democratic First Selectman Steve Dunn served for six years, lost an election and then got elected again in 2023.
Dunn was unavailable for comment on his future political plans.
Said Belden, “I think he’s going to run again. But that’s up to him.”
Dunn recruited Belden two years ago. The local Democrats even posted a video on social media underscoring their management experience. Dunn had been an executive at J.P. Morgan Chase and Belden held a similar position at IBM.
Belden, who had been a lifelong Republican, left the GOP and registered as an unaffiliated voter in late 2020 following the initial denial by the GOP nationally in the presidential election results when Joe Biden prevailed over Donald Trump.
“The Republicans were espousing that the election was stolen,” said Belden. “That is not something I believe in.”
Wall Street Journal columnist Peggy Noonan recently wrote that over the last 20 years there has been an “ideological maximalism” in the federal government.
She stated, “You must get everything you want and grant your foe nothing.”
Belden agreed, saying, “It definitely has become very [split] between the Republicans and the Democrats. It has become more, ‘My way or the highway.’ I think that is why you see such a growth in unaffiliated voters nationally.”
However, he added, Brookfield municipal government mostly operates in harmony.
“The Democrats have been fabulous to work with,” Belden commented. “The unaffiliated voters I’ve met have been fabulous to work with. I actually enjoy working with most of the Republicans in Brookfield.”
Regarding the Brookfield Democratic Town Committee, Belden said he is impressed with how “they embrace unaffiliated voters.”
However, although an unaffiliated voter can run on the Brookfield ticket, neither of the major political parties in Connecticut have embraced open primaries in which the unaffiliated voters could participate.
Wall Street Journal columnist Joseph Sternberg has stated that the Millennials are telling the pollsters that they are registering unaffiliated at a greater rate than their parents. It appears the unaffiliated block will only grow.
Brookfield Democratic Town Committee Chairman Shannon Riley said, “I think it is unfortunate that if you are an unaffiliated voter or are not part of the two major parties that you don’t have a voice in who represents you prior to the General Election.”
Former Brookfield Democratic Town Committee Chairman Aaron Zimmer agreed, saying, “More participation is a good thing.”
Zimmer also endorsed ranked choice voting in which voters would rank their top candidates from one through three for each office. Gov. Ned Lamont (D-Greenwich) appointed a study group last year on that procedure, which is utilized in other states.
CT Voters First, an organization promoting ranked choice voting, has stated that it “gives voters more voice and more choice and helps bridge partisan divides.”
Belden said in addition to the possibility of running for re-election for another term with Dunn, part of what would “motivate me” to continue would be the two capital projects that are under study – expanded police facilities and what to do with the former Center Elementary School, (CES) which closed in 2023 and has been ceded to the municipal government.
The Board of Selectmen recently received a progress report from Bob Zinser, who chairs the ad-hoc committee that is studying CES. That panel is about to embark on design and environmental studies of the building.
Belden said an earlier ad-hoc committee had recommended that the former school be used to house a library. There has been discussion since at least 1999 that the current library on Whisconier Road is too small. Belden added that the earlier panel also recommended that community meeting rooms and Parks & Recreation activities could be housed at CES.
Belden called those three areas a “logical combination.”
He said that the police department has been preparing preliminary cost estimates for expanded facilities since 2017, which have been shared with the selectmen.
The two options have been to expand the current headquarters on Silvermine Road, which opened in the 1980s, or build a new facility at a different site.
Dunn told Patch.com during the 2023 campaign that the current headquarters doesn’t conform with federal regulations that it should be the first of the two capital projects to be considered.
Belden said he believes the selectmen will work in “parallel” fashion on the two projects.
He remarked, “We want to know what each one would cost before we take either one to the voters.”
He said Brookfield faced that dilemma less than a decade ago.
There was vigorous outreach effort by library officials on a proposed a $14.7 million plan to build a new library on the municipal campus along Pocono Road.
However, there also were plans by the Board of Education to build the $78.1 million Candlewood Lake Elementary School, which would be going before voters in the near future.
The library package was defeated by a nearly two-to-one margin in early 2018. The new school was approved in 2019 and opened in 2023.
Remarked Belden, “Knowing that we were going to bring a new school proposal up, there were a lot of people who said ‘I don’t want to commit money to this building when there would be a proposal for a more important building.’ ”
He said that a referendum on the police headquarters is “at least a year away.”
The selectmen have recently appointed six members to an ad-hoc committee that will study the police facilities. A seventh member may be added soon. Former Police Chief Jay Purcell, former Board of Education Chairman Matt Grimes and Zimmer, who was the Democratic candidate last year in the 107th state House District, are among those that have been appointed.
What are the differences from serving on the Board of Finance, the Board of Education and the Board of Selectmen?
“This is more legislative,” Belden said of being on the Board of Selectmen.
What is similar?
Belden commented, “Budgets are the most common denominator across all three of them.”
About 10 years ago Brookfield voters approved adopting the bifurcated budget system in which the proposed town government and education budgets appear separately on the referendum ballot in the spring along with advisory questions on whether a voter thinks the proposed figure is too low or too high.
Previously voters had only considered one, overall municipal budget.
Belden said adopting a bifurcated budget was a wise move.
“You get a lot more information,” he commented on the data that is available to the Board of Finance. “That system works very well.”
Resources:
Interview with Bob Belden, Patch.com, on Sunday, February 9, 2025.
Phone interview with Aaron Zimmer, Patch.com, on Friday, February 14, 2025.
Phone interview with Shannon Riley, Patch.com, on Saturday, February 15, 2025.
Joseph C. Sternberg, The Theft of a Decade, Public Affairs, 2019.
