Arunan Arulampalam has a lot of plans for Hartford. Some have been on the incoming mayor's mind for a while. Others are being developed by his eleven transition policy committees, which include some of Hartford’s best and brightest.
“It’s just really encouraging to bring together a lot of the stakeholders and community members and nonprofit heads and private sector folks who are doing a lot of the same work,” says Arulampalam, “to get them brainstorming together about ways we can do things better in the city of Hartford.”
The committees—from arts & culture to youth & education—met for the first time last Friday at Trinity College, and will continue to meet throughout December, leading up to the new mayor’s January inauguration.
Some of the other key committees focus on the vital issues of public safety and education, areas which are very much in focus for Arulampalam:
On public safety: “I have… a lot of proposals to try to improve community policing, to get more cops to walk a beat in the streets, a lot of proposals to create safe spaces for kids to go after school and I want to create an office of violence prevention to coordinate our services around violence prevention efforts in the city.”
On education: “We’ve got to get kids to school, we’ve got an incredibly high chronic absenteeism rate in the city. We’ve got to work to make sure we’re focused on the kids who are falling between the cracks… We need to support our teachers, we’re losing teachers at an incredibly high rate.”
Committee leaders in these areas include Jacquelyn Santiago Nazario, CEO of COMPASS Youth Collaborative and Mike Lawlor, criminal justice professor at the University of New Haven (quality of life & public safety), along with state Rep. Joshua Hall (D-Hartford) and Hartford Promise President Richard Sugarman (youth & education).
Citizens’ input, which Arulampalam says he embraced throughout his campaign, will be accepted again at the transition team’s public meetings, to be scheduled in December.
He says the goal is “to get as broad an array of ideas and input from the community as we can, because I think everybody has thoughts about the city… but the more people we can get to the table, the more people we can get input from, the better the product’s going to be.”