Dunn pleased residents have helped their neighbors during crisis

By Scott Benjamin

BROOKFIELD -- First Selectman Steve Dunn says residents have demonstrated "awesome" support for their neighbors through donations for the municipal food pantry and by continuing to patronize local restaurants with take-out orders during the pandemic.

Dunn said that as of April 24 there had been 121 reported cases of Coronavirus in the town.

He said that there has "not been enough testing done" across Connecticut and that getting more tests conducted will probably be one of the steps toward returning to normalcy.

He commended Gov. Ned Lamont (D-Greenwich) for "determining statewide what the issues are and addressing them, and taking steps to mitigate" the pandemic.

Dunn said government officials should rely on the best information they can get from the health experts and reopen activities accordingly.

He said, for example, that California Gov. Gavin Newsom recently said that his stated had recently discovered that there were more cases in January, before the pandemic escalated, than had been previously reported.

Locally, Dunn said the requests for items from the municipal food pantry at the town hall on Pocono Road has "increased by 500 percent," but that residents have contributed items generously and over the last five weeks the Brookfield Recovers fund had, as of April 24, amassed $26,500 in donations for emergency relief.

The first selectman said that some restaurants in Brookfield have maintained "a very, very good business on take-out orders."

"The response has been awesome," said Dunn in a phone interview. "People are helping their neighbors."

He said that he drives through parts of Brookfield each morning and there is "90 percent" compliance with the masks that Lamont mandated in public areas as of April 21 if people could not "maintain a safe social distance" of six feet.

At the town hall, Dunn said many municipal employees are working with lap top computers from their homes and there is usually about one person per department in the town hall each weekday from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m.

He said that the Board of Finance, which he serves on as an ex-officio member, is continuing to prepare a proposed budget by the extended June 4 deadline in the executive order that Lamont signed.

Dunn said that the town has expended about $131,000 to fight the pandemic but that he is "not a proponent" of using the town's fund balance, which recently had been hovering just below 11 percent, and that he believes money can be utilized from the existing general funds.

Dunn said that he also believes, partly as a result of the funding for the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) that was approved March 27 as part of the $2.2 trillion stimulus that Republican President Donald Trump signed, most Brookfield businesses will survive through the pandemic.

However, he said he was dismayed over reports that too much of the initial PPP money went to large retail chair stores.

ABC News has reported that another $310 billion in PPP funds were approved on April 23.

Dunn said that he spoke recently with two local banks that were administering funds through PPP and was pleased that funding was being disbursed promptly.

The first selectman, who retired in 2013 as a vice president with J.P. Morgan Chase, also expects that the stock market will again be robust.

Dunn said the current Wall Street reaction is similar to what happened after 9/11 attacks in 2001.

"Two weeks ago some of the Wall Street firms wouldn't even give quotes on bonds," he said. "But that is changing. The stock market is usually very rational."

Vox has reported that U.S. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) appears "increasingly reluctant" to providing additional stimulus since he said on Hugh Hewitt's radio show that there hasn't been sufficient discussion to the recent $2.7 trillion in added debt.

The deficit surged starting in 2009 after former Democratic President Barack Obama signed a $787 billion package shortly after the onset of the Great Recession. Deficits went over $1 trillion a year, but receded to $585 billion during Obama's last year in office. The deficit was already destined, according to the Congressional Budget Office, to exceed $1 trillion during the current fiscal year, which ends in September.

In 2009, Washington Post economics columnist Robert Samuelson wrote that Japan's economy, greatly admired in the 1980s, was, following a bursting bubble, still struggling after 13 stimulus packages dating to the early 1990s.

He stated that "serial stimulus plans become self-defeating. The required debt is unsustainable. At some point, the economy must generate strong growth on its own. Japan's hasn't."

Dunn said the current stimulus is "providing the sticks and leaves to keep the fire burning."

He said that he is confident that after the pandemic ceases consumers will return to their usual purchasing habits even though CT Hearst reported on April 24 that joblessness in Connecticut has reached the national level of the Great Depression of the 1930s.

Dunn exclaimed, "I definitely think that the economy will come back on its own inertia."