By Matt Kiernan
The CCSU Town and Gown Committee’s public meeting saw a strong turnout Monday night, with professors, city administrators and local residents all contributing to the ongoing discussion about what the city and university can do to strengthen the relationship between students and the outside community.
“We’d like to not only get a sense of where the problems lie, but also what the solutions may be,” said Timothy Corbitt, director of counseling and wellness and co-chair of the Town and Gown Committee, at the start of the meeting in Bellin Gallery in the Student Center.
The meeting had an outcome of positive suggestions for how to improve campus and local community relations, but also an outpour of complaints from residents who said they have had to deal with loud parties, cars crowding streets and houses with poor upkeep.
“It’s very difficult for police to take action off the campuses of the CSU system,” said New Britain Mayor Timothy Stewart, who has recently made it an initiative to increase the influence of Connecticut State Universities in the punishment process for students getting in trouble off-campus.
Captain Anthony Paventi of the New Britain Police Department said that the New Britain and CCSU campus police have made 90 student arrests, mostly consisting of alcohol-related incidents, but some involving narcotics, since the beginning of the fall semester.
The police have worked harder to keep in touch with what students are doing on nights that typically have an increase of students drinking alcohol. One of the ways police have done this is by viewing Facebook event listings for upcoming parties.
Of the suggestions, the one that seemed to have the most positive response was the idea of a shuttle bus that would drive around the local neighborhoods where students live to transport them from their homes to the university. The suggestion, made by former SGA President Andrew Froning, was responded to by Stewart who said he would look into speaking with local bus shuttle companies that would be willing to create something similar to Froning’s idea. The shuttle system may decrease the number of cars parked in nearby neighborhoods.
“I do think that we need to communicate much more with the landlords,” said Laura Tordenti, vice president of student affairs, who received feedback from locals saying town officials should knock on doors to see how many students live in one apartment.
Stewart responded to the suggestion by saying the problem arises from there not being enough people that are willing to knock on doors to monitor the number of students living in one room. In addition, Stewart says students will be unwilling to answer questions about who lives in their apartment because they’re not legally obligated to say.
“It seems to me that our neighborhood communications have fallen apart,” said John Nedosko, former co-chair of the Town and Gown Committee and resident of Stratford Road in New Britain, a hotspot for student parties in the Belvedere neighborhood. Nedasko was speaking on the loss of town and gown meetings at St. Francis Church in New Britain that had representatives from nearby towns and residents that met more often than the committee does now.
Stewart replied that he thinks the meetings fell apart when Nedosko stopped coordinating them, leaving no one to organize times for locals to gather to discuss concerns.
What police can do, according to Stewart, is give citations to people with unsightly yards that disrupt their neighborhoods. People are given a 14-day warning to clean up whatever bothers their neighbors, or else they will be given a citation.
The committee decided they would look toward gathering a mailing list of people who would be interested in attending town and gown meetings, who would then be sent e-mails and updates on when meetings will be held in the future.
Those interested in learning more about the Town and Gown Task Force can visit www.ccsu.edu, and click their link under the A-Z index.