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Transcript: Mayor Pedro Segarra Says He Has Best Interests of City Residents in Mind

Chion Wolf
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WNPR
Hartford Mayor Pedro Segarra.
Pedro Segarra said support for his opponent, Luke Bronin, is not rooted in Hartford.

The mayoral campaign season is reaching an important milestone next month: primary day. In Hartford, incumbent Mayor Pedro Segarra, who lost the endorsement of city Democrats, will face challenger Luke Bronin. Segarra gathered the necessary signatures to petition onto the primary ballot.

The campaign is partly about race and ethnicity, and partly about qualifications and experience. Segarra appeared on WNPR's Where We Live to talk about why he thinks he's the better candidate.

Below is a partial transcript of Segarra's conversation with host John Dankosky.

HOST JOHN DANKOSKY: You keep talking about Luke Bronin not having the experience to be mayor, not having lived in the city long enough. But at the same time, I think one of the things that Hartford has been trying to do -- and you’ve been trying to do as mayor -- is bring in people from the outside. I mean, we’ve heard for years about the need to have young, professional, interesting people living downtown -- vibrancy, feet on the street, people who want to invest in the community. And it seems like a lot of what you’re saying about your challenger is: he hasn’t been here long enough; he’s an outsider, he doesn’t really have our interests in mind. So how do you reconcile those two things?

SEGARRA: There’s a difference between having people come into a city and invite people to come into the city. But there’s another difference – it’s very different to give someone that’s a recent arrival to the city the number one spot of leadership for that city.

DANKOSKY: But shouldn’t they get involved in politics? I mean, don’t you want people --

SEGARRA: Absolutely. Absolutely.

DANKOSKY: You don’t want people to just come in here and not be involved. I mean, maybe they should want to do something; change something.

SEGARRA: Absolutely. But one needs to look also at motivation, and what is the motivation. And when you look at my opponent’s support, and where it’s coming from, you start to see that that is not -- the support is not really rooted in the city. Take for example the very embarrassing situation he has now, where he was stripped of the Hartford Federation of Teachers endorsement. Why? Because you cannot play both ends. You cannot take top dollars from the charter schools’ executives, and seek to portray their interests, and then at the same time, go to the union and say that you’re going to protect their interests, who are so pro – anti-charter. You can’t have it both ways. And what I purport to you is that the motivations behind this candidate in wanting this job is not because he represents the best interests of the residents of this city, whether they be here a month or 50 years, is because he has his own personal agenda. His own personal agenda -- and his own interests, that are not really tied in to the best interests of the people of this city.

DANKOSKY: Is it beyond your purview a bit to assign motivations to others, to say you know what their motivations are for wanting to run for office?

SEGARRA: Absolutely.

DANKOSKY: No, I’m asking you, is it outside your ability to comment on that? I don’t know that you would want anyone to say what your motivations for your job – for wanting to be mayor is. I guess I’m wondering why you feel you know what Luke Bronin’s motivations are.

Credit Jeff Cohen / WNPR
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WNPR
Candidate for Hartford mayor Luke Bronin, center, with his wife Sara Bronin, at right.

SEGARRA: Because when he – first of all, the issue of experience, and the issue of motivation, and the issue of why he wants to be mayor, as articulated and as expressed. When he was at the governor’s office, okay, I don’t think that there was anything really tangible that he did using that position and that power that was in the favor of our city, whether it’s budget cuts, whether it’s the re-entry population that’s coming out from prisons without us having adequate supports to deal with those challenges, whether it’s Latino children from Central and South America looking for a place in our city, which he basically didn’t intervene to any extent. So he basically didn’t do much while he was in that job to really, really help our city, number one. Outside of that job, very little contributions to the city in terms of active participation. Most of his effort that he expended in our community, and most of the effort, actually, that he expended while he was at the governor’s office, was expended on lining himself up for a mayoral run. Not in terms of actually contributing anything significant to our community that would really make him appreciated in terms of what he had donated to our city, or produced for our city. So that’s what I’m talking about. And even the residency and the tenure – it’s very, very spotty. I mean, he says he comes in 2006, falls in love with the city, wants to raise a family here, but several years later, he goes to Washington, D.C. and buys a million and a half dollar home in Washington, D.C. that he basically didn’t sell until it was time to head back to Hartford. So…

DANKOSKY: His wife, Sara Bronin, heads up the Planning and Zoning Commission.

SEGARRA: Yes.

DANKOSKY: Again, another accomplished person who’s lived in Hartford about as long as he has. How did she get on Planning and Zoning?

SEGARRA: Very simple. I contacted the University of Connecticut asking for folks from the University of Connecticut that might be interested in joining the Parking Authority. A response got back to me that she preferred to be on the zoning board. I explored it. It was not disclosed to me that her husband was already, I think, by that time planning a mayoral run, so that did not enter into the equation. I thought that she was a competent person to sit on the board. It was later that she expressed wanting to chair it as opposed to being a member. And again, it was not disclosed to me that her husband had intentions of running for mayor.

DANKOSKY: I guess to that point, here’s someone who has come from the outside, who has the same tenure of living in the city as her husband does, who wants to invest in the city, and you’ve appointed her to this position.

SEGARRA: Right. By the way, I’ve done this with many other people.

DANKOSKY: Oh, of course.

SEGARRA: I don’t necessarily need to agree with someone to appoint them to a board.

DANKOSKY: But I guess my question is: if she is qualified, and her tenure and her desire to help the city of Hartford qualifies her to sit on this very important commission – I mean, look, at the end of the day, planning and zoning in a city like Hartford, where planning is such an important part of what you all have to do – if she’s got enough experience, why doesn’t he have enough experience?

Credit Jeff Cohen / WNPR
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WNPR
Supporters of Hartford Mayor Pedro Segarra outside the city's Democratic convention this summer.

SEGARRA: I have more experience. I have more of a connection. I have 40 years working in this community. I have a record to show, whether it’s increased graduation rates; whether it’s increased investments and developments in our city; whether it’s increased housing activity in the downtown area and other areas of the city; whether it’s working with the Hartford Housing Authority to redevelop Bowles Park, Nelson Court, and Westbrook Village; whether it’s five progressive years of significant reductions in crime; even when you include the current upswing, overall, crime is down during my whole entire tenure. Whether it’s good relationships with the community and having an ability to express myself, and communicate, whether it’s in Spanish, in English, Portuguese, I do my best to connect and work with the community. I have a very strong connection with this community. Okay? So, so, you know, everyone over 18 who files the necessary paperwork is eligible to be mayor. I’m talking about an issue of experience. My experience versus his experience: there is no comparison.

DANKOSKY: I want to get to something you said during a candidates’ forum earlier this year. It’s about some of the challenges that the communities of color that make up most of the city of Hartford – some of the challenges they face. Let’s listen.

SEGARRA on tape: Our challenge is how we, as communities of color, maintain the political power we have, and that we don’t yield it over to suburbanites.

DANKOSKY: You say there – and the tape is a little bad, because it’s in a big room – but it says that we don’t yield it over to suburbanites. What were you saying there? What did you mean?

Credit Jeff Cohen / WNPR
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WNPR
Hartford mayoral candidates at a debate in June.

SEGARRA: Politics powers is about representation, okay? I think that I’m a much better representative, collectively, of this city than is my opponent. I understand Puerto Rican culture and Latin American cultures. I understand the African American cultures. I lived in a community that’s been diverse. As a candidate, I’m much more experienced and much more able to deal with the different communities that are encompassed in this city. So therefore, I believe that someone like myself who has that connection, who has been in this city for this period of time dealing with groups – all different groups – is much better able. To have someone that was basically raised in Greenwich, who went to an elementary school, wherever that he went that [Jeb] Bush went to, and then over to some other boarding school. I mean, even at his own office, as the lieutenant – as the governor’s counsel, I don’t believe that there was either an African American or a Latino that worked in that office. Even in his current law practice, there’s not a Latino in that law practice, over 100 lawyers. So how are you gonna be able to interpret, analyze, intervene, work with, support communities of color when you simply do not have that experience?

Credit University of Virginia/Google
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University of Virginia/Google
A map created by Dustin Cable at University of Virginia's Weldon Cooper Center for Public Service shows dots to represent racial distribution. This portion focuses on Hartford, Connecticut.

DANKOSKY: I don’t know if you saw this – this came out recently – the magazine WIRED [shared] a really interesting interactive map of the racial makeup of America, essentially. It had dots representing each individual all across the country, and so you could see some very clear patterns -- you know, where communities are more African American, more Latino, more white. And if you look, and you zoom in on the city of Hartford, you actually see a city in which north of the I-84 corridor, most of the residents are African American, and south of the I-84 corridor, most of the residents are Latino, and to the west part of the city, most of the residents, or a large percentage of the residents, are white. So, a couple things about that. One is: that’s no – that’s nothing new to any of us. You’ve been here for a long time; I’ve been here for a long time; we know that. But, I guess I wonder, do we make too much of race in the city of Hartford when we talk about politics? Or might it be better to think about this in terms of whoever the mayor is, trying to unify these places that have been so divided for such a long time into one city that maybe works better together?

SEGARRA: Absolutely. This should be one city that works better together. So it is a very dangerous thing when you have someone that’s fairly new to our community that says that this is about race when this is not about race. This is about qualifications and experience.

DANKOSKY: Did he say it was about race?

SEGARRA: Well, I think the insinuations from the campaign is that I’m making race the issue. And this is about experience. This is about experience.

DANKOSKY: But you have been – I mean, you have been talking about, you know, your experience within the Latino community, having a voice of the people of the city of Hartford. A lot of what you’ve said, Mayor, honestly, sounds an awful lot like you have been talking about people of color wanting to retain the political power that they’ve gained over many, many years – which, I understand why you’re saying it, but it does sound like what you’re saying during your campaign.

SEGARRA: It’s personal to me. I am the candidate. And I’m making an argument that I have the cultural competencies, the connections – all the things that are required in order to have a better fit, and a connection as a representative of the people. You know, there’s been other races in which -- gubernatorial races, in which you have Italians, right, which are described as Europeans, voting for [former New Haven Mayor John] DeStefano. You had  Irish voting for [Governor Dannel] Malloy. There’s always gonna be that degree of allegiance, right? Nationalistic allegiance. But in my case, I put it more with the context of a candidate’s and a mayor’s ability to be able to relate, to be able to connect, to be able to understand. I have a master’s in social work, with a specialty in community organization and Puerto Rican studies. Okay? So the fact that I have that experience and that credential makes me much better able to relate, whether I was white or black, it makes me much better prepared, much better able. My years of experience -- as a psychotherapist, as a social worker, as an attorney, as corporation counsel, as a council member, as a council president, all those experiences collectively make me a much better person. The fact that I happen to be Puerto Rican may give me an additional advantage in terms of understanding and relating to the Puerto Rican community. It doesn’t exclusively qualify me, but overall, in terms of total experience, I think I’m a much better candidate.

The Hartford mayoral primary is on September 16.

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