At some point early in each student’s stay here at Wesleyan, the following thought crosses his or her mind: the University and Middletown are an odd couple.
Though the goings on at City Hall and at the city’s schools can be interesting, they are also often seemingly peripheral to life in the “Wesleyan bubble.” In many ways, however, the school and the town are closely linked. City events, such as the recent election of Mayor Sebastian Giuliano, can have a marked effect on the University and the lives of its students.
Giuliano, a Republican and Middletown native, defeated Democratic incumbent Dominique Thornton by 807 votes. Though Thornton had served a record four consecutive terms, she faced “the fight of her life” in running against Giuliano, the Middletown Press reported. In the 2003 mayoral election, Thornton narrowly defeated Giulano by 232 votes.
“I took the election of 2003 as a signal that there was tremendous dissatisfaction with the administration of Middletown,” said Giuliano. “I didn’t see the administration do much to change that between [2003] and [2005]. Not only did they not try to change it, they exacerbated the problem. They handed us enough issues.”
In the latest election, voters were divided along many lines, including budget efficiency, education spending, and, perhaps most importantly, the beleaguered construction of a new high school. According to Giuliano, the massive construction project is currently years behind schedule and nearly $21 million over the budget voters approved.
“The high school project dominates everything right now,” Giuliano said.
Though he is aggressively pushing to fire the contractors, Tomasso Brothers, Inc., Giuliano has faced opposition from those who complain the move would cost the city $7.9 million in penalties. The rising price of the construction, coupled with other increasing costs, may result in payroll cuts or tax increases, two things that Giuliano wants to avoid.
In fact, most of the key issues in the mayoral campaign had a lot to do with education, if not Wesleyan directly. Giuliano ran on a platform that stressed his commitment to governmental efficiency and creating incentives that encourage responsible spending. He would like to separate city finances from the Board of Education’s budget, presenting citizens with a separate bill for educational taxes.
During the campaign, Thornton accused her opponent of being “anti-Wesleyan.” Giuliano denies this claim, merely stressing his opinion that the planning board and Mayor Thornton often bowed too easily to the University’s demands.
“I think my predecessor just——it’s hard to know what she was thinking—–—but she tended to [take the position that] whatever the University wanted to do, she let them do it,” Giuliano said.
The new mayor sees more space for compromise. He characterizes Middletown-Wesleyan relations as “good” and envisions a cooperative partnership.
“The city in many ways takes its character from the fact that the University is here,” Giuliano said. “And I think that it has worked the other way; that Middletown has influenced Wesleyan.”
Giuliano also pointed out that the University exerts a significant amount of power over the town and that the future relationship between the two has the potential to be either mutually advantageous or destructive.
“In terms of the institutional Wesleyan, the administrative Wesleyan, the bricks, the mortar, the lands, it has its needs,” he said. “Wesleyan could do things if it wanted to. It has an inventory of land that, if it dumped on the city, it would devastate the city’s real estate market. Of course, the University knows better than to do that. The city could obviously do things that could be very harmful to the University. In terms of stuff like that, you keep the lines of communication open so you make sure things like that don’t happen. It’s not the interest of either entity that the other be harmed.”
Some of the tension in the Middletown-Wesleyan relationship was evident recently in the University’s acquisition of Long Lane, the boarded up property on Cross St., past Freeman. Giuliano had proposed that the land could be used to build a new public school.
New schools can mean higher taxes. Former mayor and Democratic Majority Leader of the Common Council Thomas Serra noted that Giuliano promised to lower taxes during his campaign. Serra tabbed budget as the biggest problem facing the mayor’s young administration.
“He’s going to have an interesting time dealing with the budget,” Serra said. “There are huge overages. Government institutions have to pay for inflation. Individuals propose that it’s going to be a really rough year.”
Serra added that property, which generates the majority of tax revenue, has not expanded much.
Giuliano, a relative newcomer to politics, having never been involved as a candidate until 2000, will have to learn how to make hard decisions on the fly. Yet politics is something that Giuliano, who up until the election worked as a lawyer, claims he has had an affinity for since his childhood.
“As a little kid, [when I was] eight years old, the Democratic headquarters was on Main St.—I was a Democrat back then—and it was the Kennedy-Nixon election of 1960,” Giuliano said. “I could walk to Headquarters after school, and I walked there every day after school, [so] I’ve always been interested in politics, but I never ran for anything until recently.”
Giuliano, who began his education at West Point but transferred to Boston College for medical reasons, has a starkly different background than most Wesleyan students. Yet, as mayor, Giuliano hopes to, if not pierce the Wesleyan bubble, make it a bit more translucent.
“I want to foster [a relationship] where [the city and the University] are part of each other,” Giuliano said. “I want Wesleyan students [to] think very highly of the city when they are done, and maybe a few of them [will] stick around.”
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