Marcia Chambers Photo
Unk DaRos and Andy Campbell.
After weeks on the fence, First Selectman Anthony “Unk” DaRos plans to run for a sixth term in office.
DaRos declared his intentions in an interview with the Eagle. He also disclosed that he plans to have Andy Campbell, a local attorney who won the endorsement of the Democratic Town Committee (DTC) nominating committee, as his candidate for second selectman.
DaRos praised the other contenders but said his choice was Campbell, who is tough-minded and likes the give and take of local politics. Campbell, 45, served as a member of the Representative Town Meeting (RTM) from 1997 to 2003 during DaRos’s first six years in office and headed the DTC from 2001 to 2003. Campbell returned to the RTM this year.
DaRos and Campbell are expected to be formally nominated at the DTC convention on July 26. Floor nominations are also permitted.
DaRos’s decision to announce his candidacy comes a day before the seven DTC committee districts hold caucuses to select their candidates for the RTM, the town’s 30-member legislative body. Candidates serve a two-year term. Elections will also be held for town clerk, tax collector, treasurer, the Board of Education, the Board of Assessors, the Board of Assessment Appeals and constables. Voters go to the polls on Nov. 8.
DaRos, 68, has scheduled a meeting Monday morning with the town’s department heads to tell them he plans to run for the town’s top office again. He has served nearly a decade as first selectman, first from 1997 to 2003 and again from 2007 until now.
He has been pondering whether to seek reelection for some time, he said. He said he had considered not running again. “The town is in good shape.” It has a triple A bond rating, he added. “There are a lotta good things happening in our town. Even with the economic times we are in, the town is doing very, very well. And you know we cleaned up some messes. I don’t know if people realize where we were four years ago. We did what we said we were going to do and initially I thought it was a good time to give somebody else a chance.”
He decided to run, he said, because he was disheartened by the transformation of the town’s Republican Party, a phenomenon, he observed, that is playing out on the national level as well. “It is all negative stuff,” he said. He pointed to a group of residents who harp on the negative without putting forth “a suggestion to fix it. All you hear are the negative side of things. And often those negative things are not based on the facts.”
At the last DTC meeting on June 23, DaRos pointedly addressed the Republicans. “I would just love to see my Republican opponents come up with an alternative to an idea. To any idea, “he said to laughter from the audience. “That would be kinda fun to do that,” he said.
Registered Republicans hold the fewest number of voters in town, with a total of 2,726. But the current leadership is well-organized and vocal. There are 5,953 registered Democrats. Unaffiliated voters, 8,844 in all, may well determine the outcome of the race.
The Republicans have selected Joy McConnell, 44, a newly minted Republican recruit to run for the first selectman’s position. The Republican Town Committee (RTC) is expected to make its choice for second selectman tonight. The RTC meeting is closed to the media. Read an interview with McConnell here.
Ray Ingraham, the chair of the RTC, told the Eagle recently that the four frontrunners for the second selectman nomination are: Third Selectman John Opie; Beth Bryan-Almeida and Jamie Cosgrove, both members of the Representative Town Meeting; and Jacey Wyatt, who describes herself as a 40-year-old supermodel.
Opie, the town’s top-ranking Republican official, said he has not made a decision about running for second selectman or a higher office. “I don’t know what the future holds,” he told the Eagle in a recent phone interview.
In weighing whether to run or not, DaRos recalled when he left office in 2003, the town was also in good shape. “And there were opportunities to do good things. And what happened? First there were two years “of paralysis,” his term for describing the two-year tenure of then Republican First Selectman Opie. Then there were two years of “absolute terror,” his view of the Democratic administration under former First Selectwoman Cheryl Morris and her town counsel Ed Marcus. “I asked myself are you going to take the chance and risk that we will end up like we did back then?”
“Back then I had no intention of coming back to Town Hall but I did,” he said referring to his decision to run again for office in 2007. “Now as I look at it, I wouldn’t want to take the chance that this would happen again.”
Then he turned to Joy McConnell. He took issue with a statement that McConnell made in a recent interview with the Branford Eagle. An avid opponent of raising property taxes, McConnell said she prefers growing the tax base by bringing new businesses to town.
“Right now we have about ¼ of our commercial properties which are empty,” she estimated.
DaRos called her statement “ill-informed and exaggerated. I called up various officials and got a listing of all the commercial vacancies in Branford. And in fact, available space is 12.5 percent of the total, but what is actually vacant is more like 6.5 percent.
“Even at 12. 5 percent most towns in a good economy would think that was good. We are in a bad economy and Branford is at 12.5 percent. These are businesses that are available. They are not vacant. What is actually vacant is 6.5 percent.
“To make statements like that would make anybody want to run. Just to keep the record straight. This time when they make these misstatements they will be called on it,” he said.
One of McConnell’s other issues is to return civility to town government meetings. McConnell said she was upset by the goings on at public meetings, both at the Board of Selectmen and the RTM, meetings that are televised and replayed on BCTV, the town’s public access television station.
“Well, civility is a two-way street no matter how you cut it,” DaRos said.
McConnell said enforcing some type of protocol, for example, Robert’s Rules of order, at meetings “would be helpful so everyone knows the rules of engagement.” This is a common practice followed by most towns, counties and states in the United States. DaRos said he would see the next term as a time to start afresh and impose new rules at selectman meetings. He said “we have rules, the rules that Fran [Walsh, the current second selectman] set up.” He said these rules, which were either not adopted or if they were “we didn’t stick to, are probably the best yet.”
DaRos said he has several major projects he still wants to get done, including creating a new senior center. He said he had learned a lot since a proposed swap of public buildings failed. He came under criticism for his handling of that proposal; for instance, it didn’t go to the Board of Finance, where it was supposed to begin, until late in the process.
“I learned a lesson, that I would not depend upon the RTM to do work that probably they are not qualified to do. We asked them to debate something: Is it possible to swap property? What was most disturbing and what was most disappointing was to try to hold a public meeting with interested people and to have certain individuals stand up and shout them down and insult senior citizens. It was beyond my comprehension that anybody would do that.”
“I have not given up on getting the seniors a senior center. Now it may or may not be on that site. But I am not giving up on it.”
He also envisions commercial expansion at both Exit 53, where the Amtrak Bridge is now under construction, and near Exit 56.
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