A Conversation with the Mayor of Middletown

By Betsy Froiland ‘22

We’ve all felt it -- the “Wesleyan Bubble” is the feeling that Wesleyan’s campus is its own little world in the middle of Connecticut, somewhat detached from reality. It’s easy to get wrapped up in our busy lives as college students, especially given the plethora of things happening on-campus. With that, it’s also easy to lose sight of our collective role as citizens of Middletown. I sat down with Daniel Drew, the Mayor of Middletown, to get a better sense of the community we live in and what it’s like to run it. 

Q: How did you come to be the mayor of Middletown?

A: My Bachelor’s degree is in Political Science from UConn. I spent the first couple years after college in the DC area at a newspaper that just had a ton of action because it was so close to DC. So I covered a lot of national political stories and those were all really formative experiences. We moved back here, I worked as a reporter for a couple more years, and then I did some grants work and ran for mayor in 2009 against a pretty powerful and popular incumbent and I came very close to beating him -- I was only 29 years old. Two years later, I ran against him again and beat him that time. 

Q: What are the greatest challenges that come with being the mayor of Middletown?

A: In a community as diverse as Middletown -- it’s got people who are wealthy, it’s got people who are very poor, it’s got everyone in between, it’s got an elite liberal arts university, a community college, a hospital, a state mental institution, a military base, railway infrastructure, highways, waterways, bridges, I mean all kinds of stuff -- the hard part is bringing so many disparate interests to the table and finding the ways in which they have commonalities or the ways in which their interests might align in ways that aren’t obvious and building coalitions. It’s really difficult but it’s also very rewarding when it works. 

Another really hard part is in this environment right now, resource allocation is just a really difficult thing. In a lot of ways, I think that’s what governing is all about -- figuring out how to best allocate resources. Figuring out how to best meet everybody’s needs can be really difficult, but that’s what makes it interesting and fulfilling work -- when, even if everybody’s not perfectly happy, you can see either qualitatively or quantitatively through real objective measures that the work you’re doing is having an effect.

Q: What are the most rewarding parts about being the mayor of Middletown?

A: When you get to put your hands on a problem and work with people, particularly when it’s a hard one to solve, and it works out, and you either get to see the effect on people’s lives or you get to see the beginning stages and you know it’s going to affect people’s lives for the better, there are few things that I’ve ever experienced that are more rewarding or more fulfilling than the sense that you played a critical role in success that’s going to improve people’s lives. And you know, sometimes, because of the nature of what you have to do to make a situation successful, you can’t necessarily always claim credit, so you have to be ready, willing, and able to have the success itself be fulfilling enough for you. But it really is a tremendously satisfying experience to make a decision and see someone’s life get better or know that it’s going to get better and to know that it’s because of you. 

Q: Are there any examples of this kind of success that come to mind?

A: There are a lot of them. There have been major infrastructure projects, there are going to be parks that are enhanced all over town that are going to last for generations, and the riverfront is all in the process of getting developed because we got the sewage treatment plant away from there. A big one is that we struck a deal with FedEx Ground and they built a quarter of a billion dollar distribution center. They had to remove the whole hillside, so there was a massive amount of construction labor, and there’s going to be more than 1,000 jobs there by the time it’s done. I asked them to use local construction workers through our trades unions and they agreed. So, there are all these people that are working there, either building it or working there permanently, because of the work that we did on it -- me and my team. I remember, I was at an event with one of the construction workers who was part of the local carpenters’ union. He was at this event with his wife and daughter, and the daughter was running around playing, and he came up to me and he told me that because of this project, he has a job for the next couple years and was making a really good wage and had health insurance. If there’s not enough work, those guys through the union they get unemployment, but they’re not working and it’s not that much money and their lives suffer and now he was working at it was a huge deal. So that’s the kind of thing that stands out.

Q: If you had a magic wand and could erase one problem in Middletown, what would it be? 

A: One of the biggest problems that we face, not just in Middletown but I think in most municipalities, is that some of the structures of state law that set boundaries for us make governing way more difficult than it should be and create avenues for people who are ill-intentioned to escape accountability. I would fix those with a magic wand. The problem is that some of those very structures were created to help people who were in vulnerable positions and they can be taken advantage of by ill-intentioned people. 

Q: What, if any, was the effect of the recent government shutdown on Middletown?

A: There really wasn’t much for us. It hit New London harder than it did for us, because they have the Coast Guard Academy and they have so many people from the naval base there, so they have a lot of contractors and civilian government employees there. It hit those types of communities harder. We have federal employees here too, but the way that it was becoming a problem for us was that there were going to be property tax deadlines. If it had gone on much longer, we would have had to help people on a humanitarian level. The concern was that if someone wasn’t getting paid and they couldn’t pay their property taxes, then they were going to start to accrue penalties at a huge interest rate -- I think it’s 15% -- and that would have been a huge problem. 

Q: Can you talk a bit about the accountability initiatives and reforms in the Middletown Police Department during your time in office?

A: There have been several accountability initiatives at our police department. When I took over with the new chief that we have, the department had some real accountability problems and it’s night and day today from where it was. First and foremost, we’ve held a number of officers accountable directly for bad behavior. Since I’ve been mayor, including the former deputy chief, I have let go of I think nine sworn officers, and I’ve never had one reinstated. Beyond that, we’ve done de-escalation training for our officers, we’ve promoted really good people, and we have a very exhaustive and thorough hiring process. When someone reaches the end of their probationary period when they’re coming on, if they’re not the right person or if they’re not passing muster appropriately, we have let go of probationary officers before. We’ve worked very carefully with the police union, so we’ve actually cut down on the number of grievances we’ve had and we’ve solved most of our problems before they become big problems. We’re very mindful of how our officers work and interact with the public, because they face some very difficult circumstances. There have been circumstances where in other cases or in the past, it could have escalated to the use of deadly force, but instead they chose to use less than lethal force. Deadly force, while it would have been warranted from a legal standpoint, wasn’t necessary, and they chose a more judicious path and saved a life instead of taking it.