Strong Connecticut mayors go on to ... ?

In the 1990s, I wrote editorials urging Hartford to join other big cities and adopt a strong mayor form of government because a strong mayor could more readily be held accountable for his policies — and his sins.

Subsequent events indicate that this is so. Strong mayors cannot only be more easily held accountable but they can also be held behind bars when the occasion demands.    

Back when both WFSB-TV and The Hartford Courant were urging Hartford to abandon a council/manager form of government that hadn’t been working for years, strong mayors looked like the answer, except, perhaps, in Waterbury.

In 1988, that city’s Mayor Ed Bergin was indicted and acquitted of taking bribes from a towing contractor.  Four years later, Joseph Santopietro, the city’s 26-year-old boy mayor, was indicted and convicted for taking kickbacks and bribes disguised as loans and went to prison.

Finally, in 2001, another Waterbury statesman, Mayor Philip Giordano, got himself into even bigger trouble with what started, for Waterbury, as a routine corruption case. But while the FBI was seeking evidence the mayor was taking bribes, it tapped Giordano’s telephone and discovered he was soliciting sex from little girls. That got him 37 years and there hasn’t been a Waterbury mayor indicted since.  

The largest city was heard from in 2003 when Bridgeport Mayor Joe Ganim was convicted on a 16-count corruption indictment and sent to prison.  Ganim had been a candidate for lieutenant governor on the ticket with Bill Curry and was considered a hot prospect for higher office.  

And now, we may have Eddie Perez, who became Hartford’s first strong mayor in 2003, after Hartford voters abandoned the ineffective council/manager government it had had since the post-World War II era. In June, he succumbed to the apparently contagious Connecticut strong mayor disease.

 After getting favors from a city contractor and sweetheart deals for supporters, Perez will, pending appeals, go from the mayor’s office to a state prison, just like too many Connecticut city mayors before him. 

It has, in fact, become something of a Connecticut tradition for the mayors of Connecticut’s largest cities to go to jail or run for governor.  

This election year, the former mayor of Stamford, Dan Malloy, is the Democratic Party’s candidate for governor but he’s being challenged in an August primary.  Four years ago, Malloy was also the party’s convention choice, but he lost out in the primary to another  mayor, John DeStefano of New Haven, who, in turn, was defeated by M. Jodi Rell.    

If you’re keeping score, the number of mayors who have gone to jail leads those who have run for governor 4-2.  

Accountability prevails.  

Dick Ahles is a retired broadcast journalist from Simsbury. He may be reached by e-mail at dahles@hotmail.com.