Kohut: Ganim’s Barnumesque Vision

2011 mayoral candidate Jeff Kohut is lending his policy wonk ideas to Joe Ganim’s campaign. Kohut shares why he thinks Ganim should be elected.

Bridgeport is, unarguably, a special place. Of course, it is known to the world as the home-base of P. T. Barnum – perhaps the best salesman and most imaginative businessman of all time, who virtually created Bridgeport from the blueprints of his imagination and his salesmanship.
While it’s obvious that Barnum’s Bridgeport of prosperity and greatness has fallen from grace and is widely perceived as a place where dreams and people die, we mustn’t forget Barnum himself built his fame, fortune, and the City of Bridgeport from a series of alternating disasters and triumphs. He created the modern circus from the ashes of disaster of his New York museum, and built a succession of ever-grander homes in Bridgeport in response to alternating periods of success and failure (coupled with personal tragedy), with the latter firing the nuclear furnace of his imagination, propelling him to create and fulfill ever-grander dreams for his circus and his city, causing him to build and sculpt both into vital aspects of the modern world.

That Bridgeport has fallen from grace would only be reason for Barnum to create an even grander idea for the place and to work evermore tirelessly to give birth to a phoenix that would completely eclipse its progenitor.

To this lifelong Bridgeporter, watching my city fall from grace has been at once heartbreaking and maddening.

Our downtown, a formerly vibrant, regional retail and entertainment destination–and major piece of the city’s tax base/jobs–now lies largely fallow and barren; the victim of deliberate, planned, tax base theft by the Bridgeport suburbs, in particular, Trumbull.

Similarly, a significant part of our pre-existing, city-based manufacturing sector–along with potential operations that might have been inclined to gravitate to Bridgeport’s advantageous location–were hijacked by Trumbull and Shelton as a result of the politically engineered availability of Bridgeport infrastructure and the Route 25-8 access created for them by that Bridgeport-resisted, state-mandated highway.

But the most outrageous aspect of Bridgeport’s decline is the deliberate impoverishment of our city through the use of official state and federal red-lining policy, engineered by the Fairfield County Gold Coast (Stamford/Norwalk/Greenwich, et al.), such that high-value redevelopment and living-wage jobs are directed away from would-be location to Bridgeport and instead directed to Stamford/Fairfield County Gold Coast-suburban towns.

The only city leader to address the root causes of our decline during these past 60 years was a young Joe Ganim, who, during the 1990s, fought to correct the exploitation of Bridgeport by its suburban neighbors in his attempt to force Trumbull to cease its exploitation of Bridgeport infrastructure in the theft of our jobs and tax base, and in his bid to bring jobs and tax base back to Bridgeport in the face of fierce opposition from Stamford and other towns that benefit from Bridgeport’s distress.

Joe Ganim might have brought Bridgeport back had he not taken a wrong turn on the political highway and fallen from grace.

But Joe Ganim is back now–older, much wiser, and powerfully motivated in pursuit of redemption.

Like Barnum, Joe Ganim is determined to come back better than ever, taking Bridgeport to new heights, beyond the best days that it saw under P.T.

Joe has shared his vision for Bridgeport with me. Joe knows his number-one priority has to be the creation of a vehicle for massive relief from the crushing property taxes driving the sky-high mortgage foreclosure, personal bankruptcy, and business failure rates in our city. Joe has a detailed plan for Bridgeport homeowner and business tax relief. (A big tax rollback could be possible for us soon, under a Ganim administration!)

Of course, the vehicle for major, long term tax relief for Bridgeport is married to the core socioeconomic need of the creation of tens of thousands of living wage jobs for Bridgeporters. The creation of these jobs entails the building of an additional $15 billion dollars of tax base/grand list value such that we will rebuild the equivalent of what we have lost since 1960. *(Current Bridgeport grand list/tax base–$7 billion; Stamford–$24 billion.) We talked about a new plan and model for development. A comprehensive plan that would see us back to prosperity. We talked about Bridgeport becoming the technology/manufacturing center of the future, leading the way in the New Industrial Revolution. We spoke of using our remaining manufacturing base as a nucleus for a massive, new manufacturing base creating new, essential products for the world. We talked about enlisting cutting-edge science and new technology, via local universities and corporations (such as UB and GE) in the creation of the new Bridgeport manufacturing powerhouse by way of the reclamation/reuse of our abandoned industrial core.

The general plan we discussed involved creating energy self-sufficiency in Bridgeport through innovative, Bridgeport-manufactured products; it involved the development and use of cutting-edge modes of transportation by way of a new Bridgeport manufacturing sector enlisting Bridgeport operations of companies such as GE and Sikorsky. Also targeted will be the development, manufacture, and use of futuristic, cutting-edge security/anti-crime technology and products in concert with the Computer Engineering Department of UB (a national leader in computer engineering, IT, and anti-crime/security technology). (Bridgeport will become the safest city anywhere, through Bridgeport-developed and manufactured technology, in conjunction with innovative community policing methods, such as through the use of “virtual” neighborhood patrols by the police and neighborhood block watch groups. In this regard, public-safety leadership will serve as a business driver.)

We also talked about developing and implementing new technology/products in conjunction with the development of university/corporate-created land reuse expertise, to remediate and safely reuse our vast, contaminated brownfields. In this regard, another Bridgeport manufacturing/service sector could be created and exported to regional markets and the rest of the world.

Joe Ganim sees the great potential of our huge regional markets (that is, the Northeast Corridor mega-market) for the export of myriad manufactured products and services, as well as our land, sea, and air potential for shipping our products to the rest of the world. He sees, and fully understands, Bridgeport is better situated than most places anywhere–for efficient redevelopment as a leading developer, manufacturer and exporter of the essential, peacetime products of the future.

And, unlike his fellow mayoral candidates, Joe Ganim has a comprehensive, detailed plan to fulfill this vision for Bridgeport. The Ganim Plan will bring Bridgeport back to a place that would make P.T. proud–and envious.

Joe Ganim is back. And now he wants to take Bridgeport back–to the future!

Vote for Ganim–and your future–on Wednesday, September 16.