Former Naugatuck Mayors Win Burgess Seats, Republicans Gain Majority in 2011 Election

Republicans took a majority of seats on the Board of Mayor and Burgesses, which had a 6-3 Democratic majority going into Monday’s election. The GOP now controls five of the burgess seats, while Dems have the other four along with the mayor’s seat, currently held by Mayor Robert A. Mezzo, who was unopposed Monday.

Mezzo was automatically elected again after running unopposed in the 2011 campaign. He received 2,390 votes, according to official tallies released by the Republican and Democratic registrars of voters late Monday.

Still, for local Republicans, perhaps the biggest victory of the night belonged to Michelle Dowling, who defeated Democratic challenger Ed Carter by a more than 2-to-1 margin.

Dowling, the current assistant town clerk who is already certified to serve in the top spot, will replace her current boss, Sophie Morton, a Democrat who has held the position for 28 years.

When news broke at the end of last year that Morton was planning to retire, several names were discussed in political circles as possible candidates, but Dowling’s was not one of them.

“It wasn’t discussed because I’m not a politician,” Dowling said. “I’m a very hard worker. …I love my job, being the assistant town clerk.”

But one day Morton asked Dowling if she’d be interesting in the head clerk’s position, and after contemplating it for a few days, Dowling, who doesn’t like the spotlight and doesn’t much care for party politics (she supported Mezzo two years ago), reluctantly decided to kick start her own campaign.

“I said to my husband, ‘It’s going to be harder to win than it is to lose because I’ve got huge shoes to fill’,” she said. “All I can do is be nice, be respectful and if I don’t have an answer, I’m going to find it, which is what we do now so it’s going to be good. And I know we have a great staff of clerks and Sophie is only a phone call away.”

Perhaps the most shocking news of the night came from the Board of Education race, where Republican and political newcomer Dorothy Neth-Kunin collected the most votes among any school board candidate with an official tally of 1,712, which is 91 more than second-place finisher David Heller, an incumbent Republican.

Neth-Kunin, the sister of longtime burgess and former Board of Finance Chairman Robert Neth, admits that her goal going into Tuesday was to simply get on the board.

“I was just aiming for that last eighth spot” (out of nine candidates), she said. “…But I guess I had a lot of people out there championing for me, and it paid off.”

She said it will take a little time to figure out what the issues are and “understand what adjustments (the board) can and cannot make.”

Interestingly, her brother has had very public battles with the school board over budget issues for several years. Robert Neth, a Republican who finished third in burgess voting Tuesday, said he’s hopeful he and the rest of the burgesses will have a stronger bond with the new Board of Education.

Robert Neth said the biggest issue facing Naugatuck is taxes, “just like it is every year.”

“We need to bring more businesses to Naugatuck to grow our tax base,” he said. “That is our only way to help shift the burden a little off of residential taxpayers.”

Neth returns to a board that now has a mix of familiar and new faces. Mezzo said he looks forward to working with the new board, as “each board is unique.”

“They all ran very clean, good issue-oriented campaigns,” Mezzo said. “I’m looking forward to working with he new board, and I certainly want to thank those for their service over the past few years."

Catherine Ernsky, a GOP newcomer to the Board of Mayor and Burgesses who finished sixth in burgess voting, agreed taxes are what have people worried.

“We need to make sure we’re using our dollars the wisest way we can,” she said.

Ernsky, who has never run for elected office, said she “wasn’t exactly pleased with the way things were going (in local government), so I figured I could complain or I could do something about it.”

The other newcomer to politics, Laurie Taf Jackson, said she is “excited” an “thrilled” to begin her job on the borough board.

“And I am ready to get started tomorrow, following in my mother’s footsteps,” said Jackson,  the daughter of former Democratic Mayor Joan Taf who served between 1999 and 2003. “

Voted off the board this round were incumbents Democrats Henry Kuczienski and Anthony Campbell. Campbell had to contest his own part in March after the Democratic Town Committee did not re-nominate him to run again and he chose to petition a primary.

“We lost some good people,” said incumbent Democratic Burgess Patrick Scully Sr. of both Campbell and Kuczienski.

Scully, however, said he was happy to see the newcomers on the board and that Jackson and Ernsky would “bring fresh ideas.”

Another incumbent Democrat, Robert Burns, succeded in capturing his 38^th year on the Board of Mayor and Burgesses Monday evening. A long-serving Democrat whose roots on the board go back to the earlier days of Mayor William Rado, Burns credited his continual elective success to his ability to “talk and listen” to people in the community.

“Those are probably my best attributes. I do what I can for Naugatuck and all its citizens,” Burns said.

Former Republican mayors Ronald S. San Angelo and his predecessor, Mike Bronko, said, like Ernsky, they too wanted to step up. Though they decided against running again for the top spot, they still wanted to be involved.

“To me, this is fun,” said San Angelo, who served as state representative of the 131^st District for 10 years before serving as mayor from 2003-07. “I like being able to get involved and help the community in any way I can.”

Bronko, who had no political experience before being elected mayor following San Angelo’s departure in ‘07, said he would have liked to have run for mayor again but couldn’t afford to support his family on a two-year position that wasn’t guaranteed.

“But running for burgess was the next best thing to me to help the town,” he said. “And I believe now that we have a majority (of burgesses) as a Republican Party, it’s going to be good because we’ve worked as a team throughout the campaign, and we’re going to work as a team through the two years that we’re going to have in office.”

Bronko, who defeated San Angelo in a bitter Republican primary for the mayor’s seat in 2009, lost in the general election in a landslide victory for Mezzo. Still, Bronko says he’s mended fences with San Angelo following the primary, and believes the former mayors can work well together to help Mezzo and other burgesses.

“…We have the experience of knowing what’s going on at Town Hall, so I think that’s going to help a lot,” Bronko said.

Mezzo said he thinks having the two former mayors on the board will provide a “wealth of experience.”

“I’ve worked with Mayor Bronko, I’ve worked with Mayor San Angelo. I know they have the best interest of Naugatuck at heart,” the incumbent mayor said.

The board will once again have a Republican in the number two position as Tamath K. Rossi was elected to her fifth consecutive term as the town’s deputy mayor, a title bestowed upon the person who receives the highest vote of any burgess candidate.

Just before polls closed Tuesday, Rossi told a reporter she thought the race for deputy mayor was a toss up.

“This was a race that was so focused on the burgesses because there was no mayor’s race,” she said.

Officials have said the lack of a mayoral race in 2011 may have attributed to the overall low voter turnout. Only 17.8 percent of eligible voters — or just over 3,100 — cast ballots on Monday.

“With all of the new faces coming on board, there was a lot of hard work going on,” Rossi said. “Everybody was pretty ramped up this time around. It was probably one of the most active burgess races I’ve been involved with.”

And, she said, although the past few months have been focused on divisive party politics, Rossi said now is the time to merge the two parties to move the borough in the right direction.

“When everybody comes and sits around that table, it’s not about Republican, it’s not about Democrat, it’s about Naugatuck. And I have faith that this board will be the same way. You have to have the town’s best interest at heart,” she said.

In a separate interview, Mezzo’s statements agreed with Rossi’s.

“Once you get into the issues, once you get into the details of the work, everybody has different opinions,” Mezzo said. “But I’ve seen that on the local level political parties mean the least. If you want to get anything done, you need people to come together.”

That board, Rossi said, is going to have its hands too full to worry about partisanship. She said the economic pain being felt nationwide is hurting residents, and that the town will be deeply affected by budget deficits at the state and federal levels. Therefore, she said, the borough board must focus on keeping its budget at a reasonable level.

“It’s a very fine line we walk because we have to make sure that we don’t damage the infrastructure of the town,” she said. “So it’s a very careful and difficult balance to try to be as frugal as we can and at the same time still provide the best quality services possible to the people of the town.”

Editor's Note: All election totals in this article are official results obtained from the Democratic and Republican registrars of voters Monday evening.