Segarra wants to see progress reach full blossom
HBJ PHOTO | Brad Kane
Hartford Mayor Pedro Segarra is running for his second full term in office.
Incumbent Hartford Mayor Pedro Segarra, 56, is seeking his second full term in office and third term overall. Unlike his first two runs for office, however, this election is going to be much more contentious.
When Segarra was serving as Hartford City Council president in 2010, he took over as mayor after Eddie Perez resigned following a corruption conviction. Less than 17 months later, Segarra won re-election, facing no major competition and winning 82 percent of the votes.
This year, Segarra faces no less than six challengers, four of which will compete in the Democratic primary Sept. 15.
A native of Puerto Rico who grew up in the Bronx, Segarra moved to Hartford at age 15.
A lawyer who was heavily involved in the community, Segarra was first appointed to serve on the Hartford City Council in 2006 and then won his first election as a city councilman in 2008. He was serving that first full elected term when he took over as mayor from Perez.
His main motivation in seeking re-election this year is continuing the programs he started to improve Hartford's vibrancy but aren't quite complete, Segarra said. These include better graduation rates, lower crime, increased economic development and an overall change of the internal and external perception of Hartford.
Segarra lives with his husband, Charlie Ortiz, in the West End neighborhood.
How would you assess Hartford's current economy?
It needs improvement, but it is stronger than it has been in a long, long time.
What are your top two economic development initiatives to improve the city?
We are going to continue improving education and decreasing crime. We need to accelerate the pace of development in all areas of our city because it is a great job creator and it is what is needed.
We need to continue what we are doing in Downtown North in all areas of the city. We need to take advantage of our new Promise Zone in the north end to use that as a catalyst for change. We need to use Westport Village and Bose Park and the close to $200 million in schools and infrastructure improvements in the north end to facilitate job creation and also improve that community.
Streetscapes are vitally important as corridors to our businesses, so we need to continue to work on streetscapes. We are going to continue to implement the TIGER [Transportation Investments Generating Economic Recovery] grants we secured from the federal government [for road improvements around Bushnell Park]. We are going to ask for another TIGER grant to do Main Street to connect the south end to the north end.
We just got the national park designation for Coltsville, and we are redeveloping Dillon Stadium in the hopes of recruiting a national soccer team.
The question is how can we make all the improvements we need to make in our city and not increase taxes. For five years, I've been able to keep the mill rate stable, which has not happened in a long time. However, it comes at a cost because you have to cut expenditures.
What can be done to reduce the 74.29 mill commercial property tax rate?
We have to continue to advocate for more PILOT [Payment in Lieu of Taxes] funding. We also need to continue to grow the grand list, and the projects we have been doing have done that. We also need to work on the government side to make things more efficient.
It is a combination of increased growth and more state assistance. Because we are the Capital City, 52 percent of our property is tax-exempt, which is something created by state and federal law. The state needs to take more responsibility for its tax-exempt properties.
With multiple transportation projects in various stages of completion, what is your long-term plan for how people will move to, from, and around Hartford?
Obviously, that is limited by our financial resources. If resources weren't a problem, we would like to have electric light-rail trolleys that can move people efficiently. In the meantime, because we are a very walkable city and a very small city, we are trying to have multiple transportation options. That is a combination of cycling, walking, cars and buses but in a more coherent way.
At the same time, we have connections to the outside world. Our interstates need to be totally redone. I-84 and I-91 have really broken up our city and created a bad situation for us. One of the things I have done as mayor is partner with the U.S. Conference of Mayors and lobby Congress for a long-term transportation bill that invests in our cities. These transportation systems are vital to our economy.
How would you continue to work with the Capital Region Development Authority (CRDA) to improve the city?
We have been working with the CRDA. I sit on that board; our economic development director sits on that board, and we have another city appointee on that board. We have been a strong partner in facilitating the permitting of projects and coming up with tax-fixing agreements and other incentives to make those projects work.
We also work with CRDA to make sure other issues are addressed, such as policing, other essential city services and improving education to make it more desirable for people to live here.
We also are working to expand that work to other areas of the city because right now the boundaries of CRDA's work is limited by statute to downtown. I'd like to expand it to the south and to the north. I have no problem with the district expanding outside of Hartford as well.
How will you grow the momentum in downtown brought by the new housing developments and projects like Front Street?
We will continue to advocate for arts and culture. Arts is important to the city. I've also been a supporter of sports and sports venues. I've worked hard to bring USA Gymnastics into the city; in the five years I've been here, they've come to the city twice. We also will work hard to bring other sporting events, such college basketball and UConn hockey. I want to see it expanded. I want to see volleyball. I want to see soccer. We have the right population to attract those sports to this market.
Job growth is also important. All these things are connected. You can't have the job growth without the housing.
What's your opinion of the Downtown North development, including the new baseball stadium?
When I became mayor, I was always pissed off you had all these surface parking lots over there and then you had this building — the Butt Ugly Building — that basically said 'Do not enter.'
The area became more disconnected from the urban core when the neighborhoods used to have some fluidity to them. Urban planners always have been very insistent that we reconnect that area to downtown.
More than a year ago, we were approached by the New Britain Rock Cats saying they had researched the market and that this was a good market for them. They were having some pre-existing issues with New Britain, and they wanted out. If it wasn't Hartford, it was going to be somewhere else in the state or somewhere out of the state.
We started doing research, and I visited other cities that had downtown stadiums. I found the closer these stadiums were to downtown, the more economic development came around them.
We were able to get $350 million in private investment to transform this into a new neighborhood. Now we must make sure the benefits that are intended for the community are monitored, enforced and realized.
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