15-Point Mayoral Employment Contract & Scorecard

1. Recruit Retail: The feedback has been clear that our citizens want more retail options inside our
City limits. I pledge to lead recruitment efforts, focused on bringing the right retail stores, with
the right architectural fit, within the right business corridors, to the City. As Middlesex County’s
largest City, our 46,000 citizens, deserve more shopping options, without having to leave
Middletown to reach the everyday things they need.
2. You’ve heard of the A-Team, now meet the M-Team: I pledge to establish a bi-partisan
Middletown economic development team full of local retailers, businesses, non-profits, and
community leaders to think through and go-on-the-road with our City’s economic recruitment
pitch.
3. Market for Main Street: I pledge to complement our downtown housing growth with a
concentrated effort to attract a grocery market within a walkable distance of Main Street.
4. Your Voice Matters: I pledge to trade the closed old-time political backroom for the open
community room. I pledge that all local laws and municipal projects, no matter how big or small,
will only go forward after the public gets more opportunities to be heard. We may not agree on
every decision, but I promise that your voice will be heard and valued.
5. Kids 1st: I pledge to support a Students First culture within our public schools recognizing that a
great school system is critical to rising the tides of real estate and commerce within our City. I also
pledge to fund efforts to eliminate childhood hunger in our kids and to collaborate with the school
district to provide a mental health safety net for students of all ages and backgrounds.
6. Sustainability and Sensibility I: I pledge to support and fund climate and energy saving initiatives
like establishing local grants for local property owners and businesses that implement
environmentally conscious ideas. I also pledge that every future City building project will have an
energy saving or sustainability aspect included into it.
7. Sustainability and Sensibility II: I pledge to make fiscally responsible and balanced budget
proposals to the City Council, for its collective action, with the goal of saving City taxpayers a
manageable $250,000 each year in City-side expenses totaling $1 million dollars in efficiency gains
over four years. I also pledge a temporary two-year debt diet halting road bonding until all
existing and already publicly approved road bonds are completed.
8. Wear Wesleyan Dancing Shoes: I pledge to respectfully yet assertively push Wesleyan to offset
some taxpayer funded services provided to the university much like Yale provides to New Haven.
I pledge to seek reimbursement for any tax revenues lost when Wesleyan takes over additional
taxable properties like the historic Post Office building on Main Street.
9. Push the State to Add M-Stops: I pledge to push the State to add Middletown’s travel corridor to
its CTFastrak bus line and to its commuter rail service connecting us from the heart of Connecticut
to Hartford and New Haven and to New York and Boston.
10. Planning and Collaboration as Our New Hallmarks: I pledge to hold strategic planning meetings
with the school district, to methodically approach and sequence, future school repairs or new
physical plant needs, so taxpayers aren’t caught off guard. I pledge to work with the BOE to
consider the future construction of a new and modern Macdonough Elementary School in the
City’s North End and the retooling of Keigwin Annex and the current middle school for returned
public use. I also pledge to create a public facilities and parks standing committee to strategically
plan for City-side maintenance and to end re-work on municipal projects.
11. Trading Rough Roads for Smooth Ones: I pledge the road repair selection process and the
creation of the municipal project list will no longer be a political laundry list but will be a fact-
based, open, and fair one that will include all neighborhoods for consideration. No one knows the
roads that need repair and the projects that need to get done like our citizens do.
12. Bump the Bump-Outs and Hip-Check the State: I pledge to review the State bump-out project on
Main Street in the first 18 months of entering office and to always protect our City and our
downtown against future State projects that may harm our City, our waterfront, or dump State
traffic onto our local roads in either the short or long run.
13. Putting the Public and the Service back in Public Service: I pledge to create two new citizen panels
to cultivate a more professional City Hall culture moving away from a slow, unaccountable, inward
focus to a quick, outward and serving focus. I pledge to establish a Citizen Advisory Panel (CAP)
to provide candid feedback from across the City and to create a Hiring Review Committee (HRC)
empowered to help me recruit, review and hire qualified and diverse candidates for City positions.
14. Acknowledge our Mistakes and Move Forward: I pledge to acknowledge City Hall’s current
mistakes and historic biases toward those in our workforce. I pledge to quickly find the right and
just endpoint for the multiple legal claims against the City, closing this chapter and opening a new
one where equality and equity in pay and opportunity are our shared and valued ideals.
15. We Deserve the Best: I pledge to study and implement national and regional professional “best
practices,” like holding quarterly business reviews, establishing realistic and measured
operational goals, implementing modern digital and mobile tools to make public feedback easier
to give and solutions easier to provide.

We are an urban $200 million-dollar enterprise spanning every phase of life and our citizens
deserve a CEO that thinks, acts, communicates, leads and even gets scored like it

Paid for by Geen2019; Welles Guilmartin Treasurer; Approved by Geen Thazhampallath, Candidate