There's always a lot of things happening in the city of Danbury, and every week the Mayor fills us in on what's going on.

As we start off the New Year, the City of Danbury has a new Mayor, and this week, Joe talks about how the job is going, and his top priorities he's set for the city in 2021.

You've been Mayor now for about two weeks, so how's it going?

"As you can imagine, it's been quite busy, we've had a lot going on since I raised my hand and took the oath a couple of weeks ago in that snowstorm, you know, 14 inches of snow. So needless to say it wasn't a great sleeping night. The public works department did a phenomenal job, then we had the wind storm the following week which didn't help matters any, but we did well, Eversource did a good job, we got peoples power back on in a reasonable amount of time, and I'm pleased about that. So as you can see, it's been a one two punch since I took office."

We've got a lot of COVID-19 cases in the city, what's the latest?

"Unfortunately we're still seeing numbers that are not what we'd like to see on the charts. It does look like we did do better in December than we did last month, but November was a very bad month here in Danbury. We're all sitting here with one eye open waiting to see the results of Christmas and New Years get togethers. We just hope people continue to social distance, wear their masks, and stay away from those type of gatherings, you know, follow the guidelines. It's not just me, it's not just city hall, not just our health department, it takes everyone to come together and do this."

I know this job was kind of thrown at you very quickly when Mark took the state job, but I want to ask you, what is your top priority since becoming the new Mayor? 

"I have several, I don't know if I can separate just one of them, but some of what we've been talking about is how we see the economic recovery out of this pandemic. Going forward, we're concerned about small businesses, we want to make sure that people can get back to work. Tied in hand to hand with that is the ability to get our kids back in school. I would say that those would be a shared priority right now. We would love to see the kids back in the classroom, but we have to get these COVID-19 numbers back down. It's an issue that's going to be decided by our Board of Ed. We have a template set out for certain grades to return to school sometime later in January with a phase in for the remainder of the grades to be back to in-person learning in full by February 1."

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