First Selectman Llodra’s First Days In Office Full Of Appointments, Orientations

By John Voket

(This is the first of a two-part interview with Pat Llodra, who took office as Newtown’s First Selectman this week.)

Halfway through her second day in office as Newtown’s first selectman, Pat Llodra sits at her desk enveloped in the subtle perfume of congratulatory flower arrangements and a spectacular spray of long-stem roses positioned by the window.

Mrs Llodra is already well along in the process of filling her first official journal with notes, thoughts and appointments, but glancing around her well-lit nook at the new Municipal Center, there does appear to be one thing conspicuously missing.

“I don’t have a computer yet, and I’m in withdrawal without one,” she said, her dusty blue eyes twinkling and a quick smile stretching across her face. “But I’m told it will be in later today.”

The newly elected but long-tenured public servant has spent more than 30 years in and around government operations prior to her election to Newtown’s top post. She sat down with The Newtown Bee to discuss her thoughts, ideas, and priorities as she comes to grips with the myriad responsibilities of her latest public role.

In the scant few weeks between her election and her December 1 start date, Mrs Llodra has taken time, as opportunities have presented themselves, to chat informally with several department heads. But now that these meetings have become official, Mrs Llodra said she has found herself listening intently and taking notes furiously as each support staffer has come and gone leaving with her something of a common thread of concern.

“There are concerns about the availability of resources in what they all understand will be a very tough budget year. And I’ve been telling all the department heads that I expect to see a widening gap between revenues and expenditures, and talking with them about possible ways to [address] that gap,” she said. “I’m at somewhat of a disadvantage because I am coming in after a lot of the budget development process is already in place.”

Council Background Helpful

Despite being the latecomer in her capacity as first selectman, Mrs Llodra is as up to speed as she can be, given the fact that she has sat on or chaired several of the Legislative Council’s most active committees, including Education, Communication, and an ad-hoc panel studying ways to potentially merge certain town and school facility management and purchasing functions.

Among other specific topics that have come up during her first few days of department head meetings is the ongoing controversy involving the Housatonic Railroad and its plans to establish expanded trash transfer operations in Hawleyville.

“In my role as a council person I had a different perspective,” she said. “But as first selectman, I want to know where we stand, and do we have a global strategy moving forward.”

Recognizing the Housatonic Railroad as a commercial asset that provides some economic benefit to the community as a whole, Mrs Llodra said she wants to be sure all parties involved appropriately separate and focus on the transfer station issue.

“We are not the enemies of the Housatonic Railroad,” she said. “We want them to thrive and be successful.”

She has also spoken at length with health district officials regarding interim recommendations by a committee set up to explore ties between the town’s deer population and tick-borne diseases. Mrs Llodra said she understands that deer culling is not the only option to reducing Lyme disease and related illnesses.

“We need to understand there can be a broader response to the issue,” she said.

Putting IT To Work

In conferring with the town’s IT team, Mrs Llodra said she hopes to foster a big picture vision about what technology is available, and how to make it a more comprehensive and user-friendly tool for residents and visitors to the municipal website, newtown-ct.gov.

“I know a lot of the information is out there. But I’m hearing from the community that information is sometimes not as easy to find or manipulate as it can be,” she said. Mrs Llodra said that while information technology is one way to communicate and engage citizens, she also sees the continuation of open and agenda-free selectmen meetings with her board as another avenue to engage public discussions.

“We need to hear more from the community about how they want to access government information,” the first selectman said.

Mrs Llodra noted there is one area of town government where she has few concerns: the quality of Newtown’s municipal employees.

“We have very good and capable staff in all our offices,” she said. “Citizens don’t often get to see the value of everyone’s contributions.”

Returning to her concern about the potential shortfalls in state and federal funds to municipalities like Newtown in the coming year, the first selectman illustrated how reduced funding of education cost sharing (ECS) and excess cost grants can add up fast.

“If the state is not prepared to flat fund ECS, it’s going to come out of the towns’ and taxpayers’ pockets,” she said, adding that the one-year reduction in excess cost grants that are applied to special education programs may be reduced from 90 percent this year to between 50 and 70 percent next year.

“That alone could account for more than a couple hundred thousand [shortfall],” Mrs Llodra said.

That means that the first selectman will likely be calling at least one, if not a few multiboard summit meetings that could include the Boards of Education, Finance, and Selectmen and the Legislative Council, or any combination of the four in the coming months.

“As soon as we have all the data, it makes sense to get together to assess the impact, and what we’re going to have to do to address it,” she said. “The best thing that could happen at this point would be for my assumptions [about funding shortfalls] to be wrong.”

(In the second part of her transition interview, Mrs Llodra candidly discusses her ideas about long-range planning, the future of Fairfield Hills and Edmond Town Hall.)