Esposito becomes a fixture at City Hall

By Scott Benjamin

DANBURY –Dean Esposito said that growing up in a family of eight children if you “had to go to college you had to provide for yourself.”

In the 1970s, his father, Don Esposito, was the state representative in the 110th District, which takes in much of the city’s downtown. His grandfather ran for mayor in the 1950s.

Esposito said his chief concern after high school was to “get a good job.” He said he wishes there had been a Career Academy in the Danbury schools back then

After graduating from Danbury High School (DHS) in 1979 he took some continuing education classes, but it appears the most valuable lessons in his adult life came in Danbury City Hall.

Esposito has spent a large chunk of his adult life there, first as a Democrat and now as a Republican.

It is not surprising that his admiration list features three former mayors – the one who was elected to the office shortly after Esposito graduated from DHS; the one whom he served under on the City Council; and the one whom he lost to in the 2005 mayoral election, then began working for shortly thereafter and eventually served as his chief of staff.

Sitting in his campaign headquarters on West Street, Esposito names Jim Dyer, who served from 1979-1987, and Gene Eriquez, who was in office from 1989- 2001, both Democrats, and Mark Boughton, a Republican, who was in office from 2001 to 2020.

“They each stepped up to do what was best for the city,” he explained.

Boughton said during a 2013 talk at Western Connecticut State University in Danbury that he learned during the 1998 freshmen orientation when he was first elected to the state House of Representatives that you have to keep your word with constituents and colleagues.

Boughton said while in the Hall of the House, the orientation leaders pointed to a desk and told the freshmen legislators, “Don’t talk to that representative, he’s a liar.”

Boughton added that many times as mayor he felt conflicted when a constituent, for example, wanted their street repaved and he wasn’t sure there was money in the budget to accomplish that.

Said Esposito, “Anything you say is better than saying nothing. If you say “No’ or ‘Yes” to give them some answer- that is what they need. Sometimes it is better to say ‘No’ than ‘Let me look into it,’ when you know it can’t get done.”

Esposito, then a Democrat, was earning a living as a house painter when he lost to Boughton in the 2005 election. He went to work for Boughton’s administration in 2006 and 10 years later became his chief of staff and continued in that role for Republican Mayor Joe Cavo, who succeeded Boughton for about a year.

State Sen. Stephen Harding (R-30) of Brookfield told Patch.com during the 2021 municipal election campaign that Esposito, who also has served as town clerk, probably had the best resume of anyone who had run for mayor of Danbury.

In the 2021 election he defeated former Democratic City Council member Roberto Alves by 290 votes out of the 14,096 that were cast. They will face each other again in the November 7 balloting.

Esposito oversees a city of more than 86,000 people and which ranks with Stamford as the only cities in Connecticut that have had considerable population growth over the last decade.

“We’re the most diverse city in the state,” Esposito said in an interview with Patch.com. Mark Pazniokas of CT Mirror reported in 2021 that 53 percent of the residents are people of color. When Boughton was initially elected in 2001 Danbury’s population was 75 percent white.

Harding, whose former state House district included a slice of Danbury, has told Patch.com that there are houses valued at more than $1 million on the city’s west side.

Yet, when Assistant Superintendent of Schools Bill Glass retired in 2018, he told Zach Murdock of The News-Times of Danbury that there was more poverty in Danbury than when he had initially arrived in the school district 20 years earlier.

On the fiscal side, Rich Kirby of Patch.com has reported that Danbury’s 2023-24 municipal budget would lower the tax rate by 4.89 mills, which would represent a 17 percent reduction in taxes.

Esposito stated that the tax mill rate in Danbury is now lower than in any city in Connecticut.

However, Alves, state Rep. Farley Santos (D-109) and state Rep. Bob Godfrey (D-110) have complained that the recent revaluation of property taxes should have been phased in since some residents have faced steep increases in taxes.

Santos said in an interview with Patch.com that some of his constituents were hard-pressed to pay this year’s property tax bills.

Esposito said he acted on a recommendation from the city tax assessor and believes that phasing in the taxes would be “kicking the can down the road. We don’t want to extend the pain.”

However, Santos said there was a phase-in while both Eriquez and Boughton were in office. He said that former U.S. Rep. Jim Maloney (D-5) of Danbury has said that it could be accomplished by increasing the commercial taxes slightly to offset the residential taxes over the long term.

Esposito said the city is in excellent fiscal condition.

He commented that Danbury has an AAA bond rating with Fitch – the highest rating possible- and an AA-plus with Standard & Poor’s. The aggregate pensions plans’ “net position as percentage of total pension liability is approximately 80 percent,” which is considered the beginning of the gold standard for municipal pensions, according to municipal elected officials

Livibility just rated the Hat City as one of the best 100 places to live in America.

At a time when online shopping has hurt bricks and mortar outlets, Esposito said that the Danbury Fair Mall “continues to thrive” by utilizing new and innovative venues. He said a bowling alley/arcade center is slated to open by early next year and additionally Target will become a tenant in 2024.

“They’re staying ahead of the curve,” he said of the mall, which is one of the largest in the northeast.

The mall transformed the city’s economy when it opened in 1986.

Danbury ranks first in Connecticut in sales tax revenue and first per capita in restaurants.

Esposito said that the increase in work from home since the pandemic “does impact us economically downtown. They’re not coming down to have lunch. They’ve not coming to have meetings downtown. They’re having meetings on Zoom.”

In a phone interview with Patch.com, Godfrey said he believes the election will largely focus on the schools and the condition of the roads.

There has been friction between Esposito and the Democratic state legislators from Danbury, particularly over school funding.

“I need their support,” Esposito said. “However, as you get closer to the municipal election, they seem to be more motivated by political favor.”

Santos, a close friend and supporter of Alves, said that Esposito’s “fiscal management” will be a prime issue in the mayoral campaign.

“There could be more of a collaboration [between the mayor and state legislators],” he said. “Bob Godfrey will tell you that he hasn’t been the mayor’s office since the Eriquez Administration,” which left office in 2001.

Santos said that he and other legislators from the city were able to recently acquire “buckets of funding” that “Danbury [municipal government] never applied for.”

He said that, for example, the local state legislative delegation recently secured funding for youth baseball.

“Danbury has not taken advantage of that, and that is on the municipal level,” Santos said. “Other municipalities are getting a boat load” of funds. “We’ve wasted a lot time. Money that went to other communities could have been here.”

In an e-mail statement to Patch.com, Esposito wrote that he is “proud” about his record of securing grants – noting that, among other things, he formed a task force on Grant Opportunities in March. The roster includes Maloney, former state Sen. David Cappiello (R-24) and former Torrington Republican Mayor Ryan Bingham.

He added that he has worked with U.S. Rep. Jahana Hayes (D-5) of Wolcott to secure $2 million to conduct an environmental impact statement on the Danbury rail line and has partnered with U.S. Sens. Richard Blumenthal (D-Greenwich) and Chris Murphy (D-Hartford) to secure funds for flood mitigation.

Esposito stated, “My door is always open to have a meeting with members of our legislative delegation from Hartford. Representatives [Rachel] Chaleski (R-138), {Patrick] Callahan (R-108) and [Raghib] Allie-Brennan (D-2) have all met with me this year about our mutual priorities representing the citizens of Danbury.”

He added, “As a Councilman, Mr. Santos met in my office to discuss the needs of his citizens in the Fourth Ward on March 7, 2022, but since he has been elected to the state house, he has not prioritized any type of meeting with my administration. I think it is a disservice to the constituents he seeks to serve that he lacks the integrity and honesty of being truthful about our record when it comes to grants and funding."

Godfrey has said that the local state legislative delegation netted an additional $10 million for the Danbury schools in the state budget that took effect July 1. He insisted that the local funding is insufficient, which placed Danbury last among Connecticut’s 169 municipalities in per capita school spending.

Esposito said the state legislators from Danbury need to get more funding for the schools. He said that New Britain “gets twice as much funding for education that we do.” Danbury is Connecticut’s seventh largest city. New Britain ranks eighth.

In February, Godfrey told Patch.com that he objects to taking $12 million in state funding away from the public schools for a proposed charter school for sixth through 12th graders that will not be controlled by the Danbury Board of Education.

“I don’t like it when something is not accountable to elected officials,” Godfrey declared.

Esposito said that the local school district and the state Board of Education will work directly with the students.

“The oversight will always be there,” Esposito remarked.

“The community is in favor of a charter school,” he exclaimed.

He said the Democrats in the Danbury state legislative delegation “lobbied against it.” He added that funding for the charter school was included in Gov. Ned Lamont’s (D-Greenwich) budget and three other municipalities did receive funding for charter schools in the final version of the budget that was approved in June

In May Santos told CT Mirror that “I knocked on over 3,500 doors, and my team knocked on nearly 5,500 doors all together,” Santos, who’s in his first term, told the CT Mirror about his time campaigning before his election. “Not one person brought up the charter school in the sense of saying, ‘Hey, we need our legislators to support this.’ If anything, they told you anytime it would come up, ‘We need to focus on our traditional public schools.’”

Santos said in an interview with Patch.com in July that he would again oppose funding for the charter school during the 2024 General Assembly session, even though Esposito has pledged to continue to lobby for it.

Esposito said one of his major accomplishments was the approval of $164 million at referendum in June of last year to renovate the former facilities for Cartus into the 1,400 -student Career Academy, which is being billed as a state-of-the-art facility for high school and middle school students. Cartus now primarily has an employee roster that works from home.

“It is a logical solution to some of our problems in Danbury,” said Esposito regarding the overcrowded schools.

Alves told Patch.com in June that the Career Academy is a “start,” but that with enrollments that always exceed projections, the school district also “desperately” needs another middle school and elementary school.

Esposito disagrees, saying, “We’re prepared for the worst.”

He said that school and municipal officials have gone to Nashville to observe a similar program that is oriented toward career education.

Esposito said that 90 local businesses will be affiliated with the school.

Initially, the municipal government was seeking to purchase space at The Summit, the former site of Union Carbide.

In an e-mail interview with Patch.com, Danbury Republican Town Committee Chairman Mike Safranek praised Esposito for his management of the negotiations.

“Danbury needed to build a new school, the classrooms were getting crowded,” he stated. “This was something that Mayor Esposito had to do.”

“But when the negotiations were not going in the city's favor, Mayor Esposito walked away from the deal,” Safranek added., “He would rather risk his Mayoralty then sign a bad deal for the city. His reputation was on the line, yet he did the right thing for Danbury, not enter into a bad agreement.”

He wrote that a week later the Cartus site became available and Esposito eventually secured it for the Career Academy,

Esposito said that he has honored his 2021 campaign pledge to start budget deliberations with the Board of Education earlier to try to craft a better spending plan.

“We moved forward with the Board of Education very well,” he said, indicating that the Board of Education’s request of $150 million was fully funded in the $295 million municipal budget that took effect on July 1.

On another topic, since at least Chris Setaro’s mayoral campaign in 2019, the Democrats have been critical of the condition of the city’s roads.

Esposito said even under Boughton, who left office in late 2020, the city has been ambitious about road repaving. He said that 12 to 15 miles will be done in 2023.

Once upon a time, when Danbury had a race-arena for stock cars and Main Street was the primary business district, Esposito played linebacker and defensive end in football for DHS.

He once sacked Steve Young, the Greenwich High School quarterback who would become a Hall-of-Famer. He became friends with DHS teammate George Radachowsky, who graduated in 1980, a year behind Esposito, and would play at Boston College and then for five seasons in the National Football League. In fact they are teammates again, as Radachowsky, now a mortgage banker, has been nominated by the Danbury Republicans for a City Council seat in the Sixth Ward.

For Esposito, the Hatters’ coach, the late Gus Edwards – who guided the team to the Fairfield County Interscholastic title in 1976, when Esposito was a sophomore, and also helped capture the conference crown in 1973 - was a mentor who became a friend.

Edwards, who compiled a record of 90-60-3, was the subject of a 2009 book that was written by former longtime WLAD radio air personality and sportscaster Paul Baker.

Edwards’s daughter, Robin, is an assistant corporation counsel for the city.

“He gave me a lot of guidance,” Esposito said of Edwards. “He made sure that a lot of people followed the right path.”

Resources:

Interview with Dean Esposito, Patch.com, Wednesday, July 19, 2023.

Interview with Farley Santos, Patch.com, Thursday, July 20, 2023.

E-mail statement from Dean Esposito, Patch.com, Friday, July 28, 2023.

Phone interview with Bob Godfrey, Patch.com, Tuesday, June 6, 2023.

Phone interview with Stephen Harding, Patch.com, Sunday, May 21, 2023.

E-mail interview with Mike Safranek, Patch.com, Friday, July 28, 2023

https://www.newstimes.com/news/article/danbury-area-retail-vacancies-ct-18200744.php

https://ctmirror.org/2023/04/21/danbury-ct-charter-school-budget-amendment/

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https://www.newstimes.com/local/article/Bill-Glass-retires-from-most-important-job-in-13038810.php#photo-15802678

https://ctmirror.org/2021/10/3...

https://patch.com/connecticut/brookfield/esposito-underscores-education-top-topic-among-voters

https://patch.com/connecticut/brookfield/godfrey-predicts-democrats-will-try-do-add-education

https://patch.com/connecticut/danbury/danbury-mayors-budget-would-lower-taxes-17-fully-fund-schools

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