Llodra Promises To Facilitate ‘Patience, Diligence, Focus’ As First Selectman

By John Voket

Twenty-four hours before Pat Llodra sat down for her first extended interview as Newtown’s first selectman-elect, she was busy making a final Election Day push to get the vote out on behalf of herself, her running mate and Legislative Council colleague Will Rodgers, and the entire Republican team.

The following day, she spent little time basking in the sweet glow of victory. “I feel very humbled...very valued, this is such an expression of trust,” Mrs Llodra told The Bee Wednesday afternoon. “I want to thank the voters and assure [the people of Newtown] I will work hard to make sure their trust was placed likely.”

Mrs Llodra said she is already anticipating rolling up her sleeves and wading into a number of concerns, challenges, and opportunities she sees the community is facing. She candidly discussed how she was at this early stage of the game going to begin addressing them.

She and the entire slate of officials who were elected to office November 3 will be sworn in on or before December 1, and Mrs Llodra envisions a quick start to her administration.

She plans to capitalize on “off-line meetings” she wants to schedule with certain town staffers, her running mate, and Independent Selectman-elect Bill Furrier, along with existing relationships she has been building from her days as Newtown High School’s acting principal, to the most recent connections she has made as chair of the council’s Education Committee and a subcommittee exploring the consolidation of town and school facilities management.

“I learned an awful lot on that facilities subcommittee,” Mrs Llodra said. “I see that the town has an opportunity to allocate resources to achieve [savings] we need, while realizing efficiencies we haven’t seen in the past.”

As she begins to decompress from what was an intense political campaign, closely following the tragic untimely death of her daughter, Sharon, Newtown’s incoming first selectman is looking to also book some “quiet, contemplative time” for herself. But come December 1, she vows to take the helm of the $100 million enterprise that is Newtown with “patience, diligence, and focus — and most importantly a willingness to move forward.”

And she plans to do lead by example.

“Leadership matters, and I have to be the first one to model it,” she said.

Gang’s All Here

Mrs Llodra also sees great advantages in the proximity she will be afforded by having most of the influential decisionmakers involved with town government just a few doors away from her office in the new municipal center at Fairfield Hills.

“The opportunity for informal and formal collaborative meetings will be enhanced because most of us will be in the same building,” she said. “And together we’ll determine how to move forward with one vision, as one town. Clearly that will be my expectation.”

Mrs Llodra understands that Newtown’s municipal functions, like its residents and taxpayers, come to the table with “lots of needs... a lot of expectations and competing interests.” And instead of firing off a laundry list of “to-dos” the new first selectman said she will “need to be embedded for some time before determining what, if anything, needs to be modified from a staffing or process perspective.”

As she moved about town meeting and greeting “thousands of residents” during her campaigning, Mrs Llodra admitted to being surprised and somewhat validated because the more she heard from people, the more their concerns resonated with a set of core ideas she put down on paper last July, in the final stage of her decisionmaking process to seek the town’s top elected office.

“The people I was meeting were saying the same thing I was feeling,” she said. “The number one concern is determining how to best manage our financial resources.”

And that will involve something that resonated as a catch phrase among most of the hopefuls campaigning for office this Election Day — planning.

“We need to look at the Plan of Conservation and Development [POCD]. This represents planning work that is already in place — quality plans ready to integrate and implement.”

She will also work with her board and other elected and appointed bodies to review the Fairfield Hills Master Plan, to be sure its four-point initiatives of providing open space, recreation, town offices/facilities, and a commercial core are still viable in today’s economy.

But this is where she veers decidedly from most of her political opponents, dismissing the notion that public support and consensus can be rooted in some type of binding or nonbinding vote about prospective future uses of the sprawling former state hospital complex.

“A vote is doomed to fail,” Mrs Llodra said firmly. “It’s simply not the venue to determine consensus because we will never be able to script the questions specifically enough to get the answers we need.”

Instead, Mrs Llodra plans to launch into a full-scale campaign of citizen engagement, taking the issues related to Fairfield Hills to the people with possible surveys workshops, meetings, charettes — “lots of outreach will help get people involved in rethinking.”

Fairfield Hills’ Future

The incoming first selectman said information about the campus’s future needs to be shared with everybody so the community can “engage a rich discussion surrounding the history of the facility...determine if those four core uses are still valid and wanted. And if so, how will we move forward as a community. We will sort it all out in a way people will feel engaged at every level, every step.”

With that in mind, Mrs Llodra responded to a question about how she will plan to ally herself with Mr Furrier, who campaigned on a broad agenda for change. More specifically, his interpretation of the current town charter, which the IPN candidate has maintained requires the Public Building and Site Commission (PBSC) to become involved with every public project irrelevant of its size or scope.

“We’ve had several discussions about this at the council level, and the council’s response has been the Public Building and Site Commission’s involvement is permissive, not required,” she said, adding that “since we don’t know the intention of the people who wrote [the original PBSC language], the council may want to consider seating another charter revision commission to specifically clarify that language and intent, based on what the people want today.

“There’s clearly a benefit with their involvement, but cherry-picking their ideas permissively will just leave us with a less reliable source of information.”

As far as identifying how she will respond in the event her IPN colleague comes into office intent on forwarding a particular agenda, Mrs Llodra remained candidly diplomatic.

“I don’t know Bill well enough to get a handle on what aspects of his agenda that may be in conflict with my leadership philosophy. But all his ideas will be valued and assessed based on a common need,” Mrs Llodra said. “I have great confidence Will, Bill, and I will work together as a team, and pledge not to come to the table with a political agenda.”

Mrs Llodra said throughout her long and diverse range of professional experiences, she’s “never afraid to say ‘no’ if ideas are not consistent with others, or the direction in which we are going. But before we get [to that point] I will spend a lot of time listening and working to try and fit any and all aspects of their ideas into the general scheme.”

She just asks and expects others to have some patience with the process.

“I will celebrate every good idea from Will and Bill,” she concluded. “I will also ask and expect everybody involved to drop any political agendas, because getting Newtown through the next two years is not about politics, it’s about leadership.”