Torrington Mayoral Candidates Interviews
Molly Spino
What inspired you to run for this office?
I guess it's because I've been involved for the past 10 years. I currently serve on the City Council. Previously, I've served on the Board of Education, the Board of Public Safety, Economic Development Commission, American Rescue Plan Act Commission.
So when Eleanor [Carbone] decided she wasn't going to run, and this was going to be an open seat, it was one of those discussions I had with my husband and my kids. And it took a couple weeks of really talking about it. It's life changing, it's career changing, too. After talking, we decided, yeah, this is the time. Let's do it.
What's your understanding of the responsibilities of this office? How do you see yourself fulfilling them?
So the mayor is the CEO of the city. She oversees every single department. So she has some sort of say in everything that goes on within the city. Of course, we have our department heads, which we have to rely strongly on. That's why they're there. That's what they went to school for, what they're trained for.
But the mayor, of course, is the head honcho, the one that oversees everything. And she or he will point the direction that the city goes. I think it's important as mayor that we're also seen throughout the city. So I don't plan on just sitting behind my desk all day. I plan on being out there, I want to talk to the businesses, I want to talk to the residents. I want the input, I want to know what other people think, I want to know what their interests are, what their ideas are.
In addition to that, I think it's important that the mayor is visible in Hartford. We try so hard to get grant funding, to bring services to Torrington for our economic development, for our police department, for our fire department, not to just leave it on our legislators to do everything.
What professional, civic, or personal experiences have best prepared you for this position?
I am a real estate paralegal. I've been a paralegal for over 15 years. I have a bachelor's degree in legal studies. I also went to UConn and pursued a degree in urban and community studies.
I've also, as I mentioned earlier, served on numerous boards. And on all of those boards, I served on the budget subcommittee. So I've worked on every single budget in the city of Torrington. I know what each department needs, I know what they ask for every year, I know what they get cut every year. I know the insides and outs of it.
What have you learned from observing and participating in various meetings, attending committee meetings, community discussions?
It's important to me that we work together. There's been so many broken relationships in the city, that I've witnessed since I got involved, especially between the Board of Education, City Council, and Board of Finance. And we need to fix those relationships because we're not going to progress if we continue to fight and we're not getting anywhere.
I want to be able to sit down with the Superintendent of Schools and work with him and see, what is it that the schools need, but you have to also understand that the city of Torrington only has X amount of dollars to spend, and we can't continue to raise the taxes on our residents, especially after this year, and we saw what the assessment did to property values.
What are your top priorities and what are some of the top challenges?
No. 1, economic development. Right now, with how the assessment worked this past year, the values really shifted heavily on residential and less on commercial. So we have to work on building that commercial base. That is what's going to start offsetting that tax burden on the homeowners.
Building on that, we've done a great job remediating brownfield properties. We have all these properties now that are getting cleaned up. And now, next steps, we’ve got to start building. Are we looking at housing? Are we looking at manufacturing? Are we looking at retail? I want a master plan. I want timelines, because we know nothing happens overnight. But people want to know, why has this property been cleaned out, but it's sitting vacant for the past six months? I want to be able to have that answer for people.
Is there anything else that you'd like to share with voters?
So these solar companies are coming in, they're taking up all of our vacant land. That's a problem. You know, this is good farmland. I'm not against solar at all. I have solar panels on my house, but they have to be in the right place. Put it on top of buildings. Look at our old dump. That land is not usable. So that's the property that we want the solar panels on, not this perfectly good farmland that we could build and develop.
Stephen Ivain
What inspired you to run for this office?
Well, I think it starts with community involvement. I've been working in a corporate world for 30 years. And some of my businesses I've been employed by encouraged us to get out into the community to understand the community and help them. And it was a great education, getting involved that way. And I think that led me to join nonprofits and get active. And I think that was my segue into politics.
What's your understanding of the responsibilities of this office? How do you see yourself fulfilling them?
Well, I see it as an opportunity to set the tone and atmosphere for all the things that City Hall does and our city as a whole. So I'd hope to reset what we have and change the direction in several ways. We find ourselves facing some significant issues right now. We have funding being pulled back from Washington, DC, which is stressing some of our groups that were dependent on that type of funding.
But we also have a business community that needed support from City Hall. I'd like to be that pro-business community that brings in jobs, brings in businesses.
What professional, civic, or personal experiences have best prepared you for this position?
I'm retired. I've had three decades in the corporate world working for different insurance companies in different roles. Some as project manager, some as an investment analyst. Some as a product manager, most recently. I think that type of skill set will be helpful in our city to run and lead projects and basically determine how Torrington can best benefit by what developments we take on.
I'm thankful for my financial experiences. It helps to undertake something quite complicated as our city finances and budgeting processes. So we have over 40 departments to help manage, we have to make sure our community is safe. And we're sending kids to school where we need to plow the snow.
What have you learned from observing and participating in various meetings, attending committee meetings, community discussions?
I think I first got started in politics when Torrington had sewer treatment plant discussions or presentations at our city hall regarding Woodridge Lake Goshen sewer lines coming to Torrington and how best to manage that. So that was eye opening.
I was on the Conservation Commission of the city, which looks into the parks and open spaces.
I've been elected to City Council and that has been a really good experience. It's not what you see in the rhetoric when you turn on TV, it's really a lot of people coming to the table, committing their personal time to voice how we go about doing things in Torrington.
I was on a THS steering committee. I've been on Torrington Historical Society, the local Torrington Heritage Land Trust. So a lot of different groups over probably the last 15 or 20 years.
What are your top priorities and what are some of the top challenges?
Well, the tough one is affordability of our community. So we have to look at how best to manage around the costs. The top one is our taxation. Our property tax just jumped 33%. That's a high jump. And I would tell you that's flat budgeting of our city. Just maintaining a flat budget will be a challenge.
We need to focus on economic development. We have a lot of vacant retail spaces right now. That's a negative for property values.
I would say we need to be service-oriented. We need to be the community that cares for existing businesses and onboard new businesses in such a way that we hit their timelines. They want to come, break ground within a certain period of time. They want a commitment that will review their plans and make edits all at one time without dragging out the project. I know other communities are there doing this.
We need to get our fair share of those businesses looking for a good location. We have all the good structure to do that. In an industrial city, we have power, gas, water, sewer. We have Route 8 going down the center of our city.
We can't sit back and just expect they're going to come to us naturally. We need to go out there with our best sales pitches and attract them here.
Is there anything else that you'd like to share with voters?
We have an economic development team from City Hall. Currently, they've been doing very well in the past year plus to write grants for different developments. [That] includes brownfield cleanups of older industrial sites.
[There’s] a commitment to education locally. That's a quality of life issue for those new businesses moving to town. We have bragging rights now. We have brand new facilities. We'll be not focusing on buildings anymore. We're going to be focusing on outcomes.
We want those kids to, if they go on to college, great. We want everything to enable that successful student to do that. But also if they're not going to college, we expect them to land a good job. We need to prepare them for what's after graduation.
And I hope to, again, City Hall can help set that conversation, participate in that with our Board of Education.
