On the eve of his installation as Stamford mayor, Michael Pavia accepted an invitation to march beneath the massive balloons in the UBS Parade Spectacular.
Stamford”™s business community now awaits Pavia”™s trial balloons in the realm of economic development.
In the race to succeed Stamford Mayor Dan Malloy, Pavia outpolled Democrat David Martin by more than 2,000 votes, with residents apparently fed up with their rising tax burden.
Pavia displaces Norwalk Mayor Richard Moccia as the leading Republican mayor in the state as ranked by city population. In neighboring Westchester County, N.Y., the GOP also wrested the county executive seat from three-term incumbent Democrat Andrew Spano, with the victor Rob Astorino, a Sirius-XM Satellite Radio program director for a Catholic channel.
The Stamford mayor-elect holds a master”™s degree in urban planning from New York University and owns Pavia Development L.L.C., a small residential construction company, which he said has completed more than 200 projects.
Even as Pavia dug into the task of filling top positions in city government, the state GOP was still basking in the victory.
“I chipped in making get-out-the-vote calls, along with many other Republicans,” stated Linda McMahon, the former CEO of Stamford-based World Wrestling Entertainment Inc. who is running for the seat of U.S. Sen. Chris Dodd, in a blog after the election. “It was all hands on deck. And it paid off.”
Martin had run his campaign on multiple planks, including job creation, education, government efficiency and transparency, protecting neighborhoods from excessive development, and promoting cultural institutions in the city.
Pavia staked his campaign to several issues: spending, education, roads, and a review of Stamford”™s master plan to emphasize controlled growth that ensures a quality of life.
On the development front, Pavia acknowledged the importance of increasing tax base, but stressed the need to pay more attention to the impact development is having on the city.
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He promised to control expenditures with the ultimate goal of lowering taxes, by reviewing how each city department delivers services with an eye on streamlining operations and re-bidding city contracts.
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He said he would look to secure additional school funding from the state, and create what he called a new code of accountability and achievement in the classroom. He also promised to repave roads and expand sidewalks.
Under outgoing Mayor Dan Malloy and his economic development chief Michael Freimuth, Stamford mustered a steady drumbeat of upbeat news, including Royal Bank of Scotland bringing more than 2,000 jobs to the city; the construction of Harbor Point in the South End and related improvements; and the construction of significant amounts of multi-unit housing, including the Trump Parc luxury residential high rise that now dominates the city skyline.
On the downbeat side for Malloy”™s mayoral run, residents were outraged at their residential tax burden following the city”™s most recent property revaluation, supposing their tax burden would be lightened in light of the city”™s impressive commercial developments. And even as RBS and other large companies moved into Stamford, others left, including International Paper and Meadwestvaco to other states, and Xerox Corp. and GE Commercial Finance up the road to Norwalk.
Jack Condlin, the president of the Stamford Chamber of Commerce, sees both tax revenue and transportation as key challenges for the incoming mayor. With debilitating traffic jams on Interstate 95 and the Merritt Parkway a fixture of the daily commute at the height of the last economic cycle, Condlin fears a similar scene as the economy rebounds.
If widening I-95 is not in the cards, Condlin wants to see the city pursue a light rail system that would run from the Stamford train station as far north as the Merritt Parkway, which he argues would both take some commuters off the roads while spurring growth north of downtown.
