STAMFORD — Five mayoral hopefuls, including three write-in candidates whose campaigns have struggled for visibility, are hoping to catch momentum from their Monday pitch to a largely Black audience on the city’s West Side heading into Election Day.
The two-hour forum, co-sponsored by the Stamford NAACP and 100 Black Men of Stamford, gave the three write-ins – David Cherniack, Fritz Chery, and Michael Loughran – a rare chance to share their message on the same stage and on an equal footing with Democratic Mayor Caroline Simmons and Republican nominee Nicola Tarzia.
For many in attendance, the gathering at the city’s Bethel A.M.E. Church wasn’t just a chance to hear what the candidates had to say. It also represented a chance to air their own longstanding frustrations over affordability, schools, police accountability, and how city resources are shared across neighborhoods.
It’s unclear how many of the roughly 350 people who were there have already voted and how many others will head into Election Day with changed minds about who should lead the city for the next four years. But the “Black Votes Matter” signs lining the walkway outside the church underscored how turnout among the city’s Black voters, who make up an estimated 12% of Stamford’s population, could affect the outcome.
One man, reflecting on his journey to U.S. citizenship while serving in Afghanistan, lauded the candidates for agreeing to the forum and declared it “a great day to be an American.” His comment earned an impromptu round of applause from the crowd.
Others who spoke with CT Examiner afterward expressed similar sentiments. “I thought it was a great debate. Very fair and balanced questions,” said Thomas Patterson, vice commander of American Legion Post 3 and a former trustee of the church where the event took place.
Undercurrents of Anger
But beneath the niceties was also an undercurrent of lingering anger over the death of 23-year-old Steven Barrier in police custody six years ago. Some of that anger was rekindled by the arrest of a 14-year-old girl falsely accused of assaulting a Westhill High School administrator last year.
Chery, a local businessman who served on the Board of Education from 2020 to 2023, appeared to channel that frustration as he opened with a fiery challenge to city leaders and residents alike. He questioned why outrage over national politics seems to eclipse anger over perceived injustices closer to home.
“Where is the outcry when innocent 14-year-old girls are arrested in our schools?” Chery asked. “Where is the march when a pastor is killed by a speeding car in the city? And where are the politicians in our political parties when our voices go unheard about children graduating from our city schools who cannot read?”
Chery faulted city leaders for paying lip service to Black community concerns and not always following through. “You want to talk about DEI? How many times have you sent in your resume only to never hear back for a city job or a position in our schools?” he asked. “And yet we continue to elect these same individuals who say that nothing can be done.”
Simmons, a former state representative, pointed to accomplishments during her term as mayor including efforts to make city government more responsive and user-friendly. “We’ve made significant progress toward building a more inclusive, equitable, affordable, and vibrant city where everyone can thrive,” she said. “We’ve made historic investments in our schools, infrastructure and affordable housing and opened the city’s first walk-in permitting center and our Veterans Resource Center, but we still have work to do.”
Tarzia – a longtime building trades professional, philanthropist, former school board member, and co-founder of the Stamford Public Education Foundation – said his goal is to bring accountability and practical experience to city government.
Loughran, a retired Stamford police sergeant and former Marine, took aim at voter apathy with a call for renewed civic engagement. “Too many people are registered to vote but don’t actually do so,” he said. “Most of the folks in this room are not part of that problem, but it’s a problem for Stamford… I love this city, I’ve lived and worked in every neighborhood, and I really want to serve it.”
Cherniack, a longtime marketing executive, invoked a tradition of civic investment paralleling his own family’s history in Stamford dating back to the Great Depression. “My grandparents came here in the 1930s and started different financial institutions to help Stamford residents get loans to start small businesses and buy homes at a time when few other institutions were lending,” he said. “What they started is in my blood.”
Stamford’s Budget Surplus: Too Much of a Good Thing?
Simmons touted the city’s AAA bond rating and what she said was a nearly $30 million budget surplus last year and a projected $10 million surplus in the current fiscal year, making Stamford the envy of many other cities across the state. “We’ve used our surplus funds for everything from investing in our schools to enhancing quality of life across Stamford,” she said. “We’ve also maxed out our Rainy Day Fund and are in the best financial shape of any city in the state.”
Whether this apparent fiscal win on paper is translating into relief for residents burdened by the high cost of housing, property taxes and utilities remains an open question, however.
Simmons, for her part, criticized the Board of Representatives’ decision last year to block a proposal to direct millions of dollars from the surplus to the city’s Affordable Housing Trust Fund. “That was unacceptable. We’re facing an affordable housing crisis in our city and have surplus dollars that can’t go to people who need housing now,” she said.
Cherniack has said he would apply surplus funds to road repairs, affordable housing, and pension liabilities.
Chery would like to see surplus money used to reopen the adult night school at J.M. Wright Technical School for entrepreneurship and job skills training. He’s also proposed using some of the surplus to build affordable housing for teachers “so that our students can see educators who look a little more like them.”
Tarzia echoed Chery’s support for reopening the Wright Tech night school. But he questioned the accuracy of the surplus figures quoted by Simmons, arguing that the city’s repeatedly late audits over the past three years have made verification all but impossible.
To the extent those surpluses can be verified, Tarzia wants to use them to freeze taxes for seniors and make a citywide tax assessment map available online. “We deserve the transparency of knowing what each building downtown is paying in property taxes,” he said.
Tarzia and Loughran would also surplus money to fund infrastructure maintenance and improve traffic and pedestrian safety. “We used to have more police officers at a lower population, and now we have less police officers at a bigger population,” Tarzia said.
Police Accountability
Simmons has highlighted efforts to diversify the police force, noting that 44% of police promotions over the past four years have gone to Black and Hispanic officers. She also has cited other reforms including body cameras and the embedding of social workers in the department to better respond to mental health issues.
“Stamford is rated the safest city in Connecticut, the safest in New England, and one of the safest in the country,” she added.
Still, questions of trust and transparency in the Stamford Police Department remain top of mind for those like Jere Eaton, a former Stamford NAACP president. She has a pending lawsuit claiming an officer assaulted her and threw her to the ground during a 2020 Black Lives Matter protest.
Eaton recalled how she was ill at the time but showed up anyway, not as a protester but as a peacemaker, at the request of a local police captain. She said the captain asked for her help knowing she was respected by both protesters and officers. “I was four days out from chemotherapy for breast cancer, and then this other officer decided to knock me down and hit me on top of my head where I’m still suffering,” she said.
Eaton said her experience underscores the need for a Civilian Complaint Review Board, which Chery agreed is essential when an officer is accused of misconduct.
“I have a particular love for many police officers here in this city, who are some of the most amazing individuals,” Chery said. “But not everything is rosy in every department. We need a mayor who’s going to demand accountability.”
Tarzia recalled past scandals involving police overtime manipulation and agreed stronger oversight is needed.
Loughran, drawing on his police background, said “when a police officer dishonors the badge, nobody gets more upset than the officers doing the job the right way.” He agreed that accountability has broken down and called for reinstating annual performance evaluations and removing politics from promotions. “Let’s take the politics out and promote people on merit,” he said.
Cherniack agreed with these recommendations and went a step further, calling for increased community engagement and training for officers on how to navigate cultural differences.
Chery supports this, too: “We need officers to get out of their cars, walk the neighborhoods, and build relationships.”
Public Schools
Concerns about lack of trust and transparency extend to the city school system, where public backlash continues to mount against a newly imposed block scheduling format that took effect at the start of this academic year.
The lack of trust is personal for Monia Dees, the mother of the 14-year-old Westhill High School student who was arrested last year after being falsely accused of assaulting an assistant principal. Video evidence later exonerated her daughter, but the way the situation was handled still stings. “Why wasn’t anything done to properly reprimand the assistant principal, and why is she still allowed to hold her position?” Dees asked. “Is there ever going to be any accountability?”
Chery, harking back to his service on the Board of Education, suggested Simmons bears at least some of the blame for not demanding greater accountability from city school leaders. If the current mayor and Board of Education won’t do it, it’s up to residents to elect different people to city government and the school board, he said.
“Students are still graduating who can’t read, and students’ math grades continue to decline,” he said. “The mayor may not have a voting voice on the Board of Education, but I can assure you if I was the mayor, I would be at a majority of those board meetings because there’s nothing more important than our children’s education.”
Chery suggested using some of the city’s surplus money to fund Saturday instruction for children who need it: “We’ve got the money to do it. If we can’t do it in the schools, let’s open up the Government Center.”
Loughran criticized school leaders for focusing too much on image and public relations and trotting out misleading statistics about graduation rates. He said the school system is failing students by not having midterm and final exams. “We are doing a disservice to our students when we focus only on graduation rates,” he said. “If they can’t pass a midterm or a final, they shouldn’t move on to the next grade.”
Loughran also called for an accelerated search to replace the current superintendent, whose contract expires next year. “The Board of Education is a mess right now. Another year of damage and chasing statistics is much too long,” he said.
Simmons countered that her administration has increased investment in early childhood education, which she said has been proved by research as the most effective way to close achievement gaps. She also touted her Mayor’s Literacy Initiative, expanded mental health support for city schoolchildren, and securing of additional state funding that will reimburse up to 80% of Westhill High School construction costs and 60% of Roxbury Elementary School costs – far above the 20% Stamford had originally expected.
Tarzia said he would appeal to state leaders to increase Stamford’s aid for general education expenses as well. He said Stamford currently receives about $17 million per year of educational cost sharing aid from the state as compared with $150 million to $200 million that Bridgeport, Hartford, New Haven, and Waterbury each receive. “That’s a dramatic imbalance of funding,” he said.
Chery, however, said talk of more funding and new buildings misses the mark if students are being wrongly arrested or failing to meet grade-level reading and math standards. “Before we even think about rebuilding, we need more accountability,” he said.
Cherniack said accountability should also include addressing chronic absenteeism and ensuring a safe learning environment for students.
Housing Affordability and Gentrification
All five candidates agree that Stamford has an affordability crisis but differ on what to do about it.
Loughran took aim at what he considers the city’s misguided development policies that he believes are gentrifying the city at the expense of current residents. The city will never be able to build enough luxury high-rises and apartment buildings to house all the people pouring into Stamford from New York City and beyond, he said.
“As the mayor of Stamford, my obligation is to you and the folks in this room,” Loughran said. “Some politicians here seem to have forgotten that and are trying to serve the housing needs of Manhattan and Brooklyn instead. That is not our job.”
Simmons said one of the first things she did as mayor was sign an executive order on affordable housing calling for the construction of 1,000 new or upgraded units, of which 700 have either been completed or are in the pipeline. She cited the additional completion of the first phase of the Oak Park project, creating 168 family-sized affordable units on the city’s East Side.
Simmons wants to create more affordable pathways to homeownership as well. She argued the city could have done more if the Board of Representatives had been more supportive of her initiatives: “Last year we put forth a proposal to dedicate additional millions of dollars to our Affordable Housing Trust Fund, but unfortunately it was voted down. That is unacceptable,” she said.
Despite the differences, Simmons said the city has increased below-market-rate requirements on new construction from 10% to 14%.
Cherniack said the BMR requirement should be even higher. In practice, however, developers can circumvent it by making “fee-in-lieu” payments based on the estimated cost of building affordable housing elsewhere.
Tarzia believes the fee-in-lieu provision is open to manipulation and lacks a rigorous valuation and enforcement mechanism.
Loughran called for eliminating the fee-in-lieu option altogether. “Even in a best-case scenario, that money doesn’t turn into apartments for three to five years,” he said. “We need affordable housing now.”
Last words
Eaton, still bitter over what she considers the callous treatment she received from city officials after her 2020 injuries, declined to say who she’s supporting this mayoral election cycle. But she intimated it won’t be Simmons.
“I was once her biggest cheerleader and donated over $3,000 to her campaign,” Eaton said. “But once she became mayor, I can’t even meet with her.”
Eaton believes Simmons is out of touch with working-class people. She points to city programs, such as classes on permitting requirements for starting a small business, that mostly take place during the day when a majority of residents are at their jobs.
She also faults Simmons for failing to diversify the city’s contracting and procurement policies. “Most of the opportunities continue to go to the same companies that have always gotten the contracts. It’s like nothing has changed at all. I’m just really disappointed in her,” Eaton said.
Rev. Winton Hill, pastor of Greater Faith Tabernacle Baptist Church and a Democratic candidate for the Board of Representatives from District 7, sees it differently.
“The whole city needs a civic education because I don’t think people understand how the Board of Representatives, the Board of Finance, the Zoning Board, and all those other boards impact and affect final outcomes,” Hill said. “When you ask the mayor how much more affordable housing we can create, it’s kind of shouting into the wind if the appropriate boards won’t support it.”
Hill acknowledges there’s more work to do but believes Simmons has done more than enough to earn his vote for a second term. “I’m with the mayor,” he said.