nothin Millennial Mayor Opens Up | New Haven Independent

Millennial Mayor Opens Up

Paul Bass Photo

Ben Florsheim at WNHH FM.

Middletown Mayor Ben Florsheim loves living in Connecticut.

The Midwestern millennial isn’t looking to leave the state anytime soon, and he’s trying to use his positive outlook and newly elected top municipal office to promote a similar optimism, and higher quality of life, for his constituents.

On this week’s episode of WNHH’s The Municipal Voice” program, hosted by the Connecticut Conference of Municipalities, Florsheim discussed the role towns and cities will play in the coming years. Florsheim is one of just two millennials currently holding a municipality’s top elected office anywhere in the state.

He said his attraction to municipal work came from his time working for U.S. Sen. Chris Murphy’s office as a community organizer.

You have to go in with an organizer’s mindset, rather than a policy mindset,” he said about how he would like to lead Middletown.

We have to think big. It’s why municipal government was interesting to me. This is where things are happening.”

But that doesn’t mean that there aren’t challenges.

Like so many other places in Connecticut, Middletown has a cost-of-living problem that he’d like to rein in. When it comes to property tax, energy costs, utility costs, it’s an expensive state to live” in, he said.

Florsheim said some of that stems from the federal and state levels. During the budgeting process, Middletown has to grapple with state Payments in Lieu of Taxes (PILOT) being chronically and historically underfunded,” he said.

He decided to create a Middletown Complete Count Committee to support the upcoming census in part to ensure that the city does not miss crucial funding opportunities from the federal government.

When talking about local politics, Florsheim invoked the Green New Deal, participatory budgeting, shared services and regionalization, and the development he wants to see in his city.

He said he sees municipalities leading the way for improving residents’ day-to-day quality of life. It’s local jobs, it’s local projects, local businesses. The work is already being done. The cities and towns have to be the entities that lead the way on this.”

Speaking to a recent op-ed that he wrote for the Hartford Courant, Florsheim said that pessimism about the state is a self-fulfilling prophecy.

You’re in this line of work to get things done, to help people,” he said, even if it’s fixing a pothole, that’s meaningful to people’s lives.”

He said he sees Connecticut as a place where people do want to move and want to stay. He named himself, a transplant from the Midwest, as someone who has decided to call Middletown home.

He notes that people are being priced out of places like Boston and New York, so smaller cities have to stay laser-focused” on cost. And that making a city like Middletown a better place to live as well as do business can be a self-fulfilling prophecy, a virtuous rather than vicious cycle.

That change starts at home, he said.

I want to put it into people’s minds that there are people who like living here. There are young people moving in.”

When you see the other side of the fence, maybe it’s not always greener,” he continued, We have challenges, but they become less existential, less immutable.”

Click on the video to watch the full interview with Mayor Ben Florsheim.

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