Danbury Mayor on City Budget + Uptick in COVID Cases
Mayor Joe Cavo unveils his first city budget tonight (Tuesday) and talks about the proposed bond referendum for the new Danbury Career Academy.
Every Tuesday morning you can find out what's happening in Danbury as Mayor Joe Cavo is on with us to discuss the issues people are talking about in and around the city.
Big night in Danbury, you're rolling out the first budget of your administration.
"That's right, it's the first budget I've presented and we'll be unveiling it tonight (Tuesday) before the City Council. We also have a few other large items on the agenda, one of them being a proposed bond for the Career Academy which is the school we are hoping to build over at the Summit. It's a great program and under Mayor Boughton's leadership, he managed to get the state to commit to an eighty percent reimbursement of the bonds for that project, which is really on heard of. Normally, the state refunds bonds at about 62 percent, but under the special legislation that the Mayor was able to get through last year, the state has agreed to fund 80 percent of this project and that helps the local taxpayers."
You know I won't tell anyone, but do you have an inside track on this new budget? Will there be a tax increase? Hopefully not.
"For the last couple of weeks anytime we spoke and when the conversation turned to the budget you said, Joe "read my lips, no new taxes", so that's all I can say right now. Residents will just have to wait till the budget is officially presented tonight."
Unfortunately we did have another increase in the COVID-19 numbers in Danbury.
"Yup, it's been happening for the last couple of weeks, we were doing so well for awhile and then all of a sudden the numbers started popping up. The experts and the science tends to lean towards the fact that it's most likely variants that are now affecting this trend and causing the problems here. We're vaccinating folks like crazy at the mall, at Danbury Hospital, here at the city clinics. We've been partnering with the CIFC and local pharmacies to get that vaccine out there to the public as well and so the goal is to get as many people as we can vaccinated so we can get to the herd immunity. Hopefully we can put some of these variants away and then we should start to see some better numbers as we go into the future."