After nearly a dozen years with a firm grip on Waterbury politics, Mayor Neil O’Leary confirmed at his annual State of the City address Thursday that he will not seek reelection this fall.
“I’ve loved every minute of it but I’m going to be 65 this year,” O’Leary told the Hartford Business Journal outside the event. “When you turn 65, you realize you are not invincible.”
O’Leary’s announcement had been telegraphed weeks earlier as Board of Aldermen President Paul Pernerewski — a longtime political ally and fellow Democrat – began a tentative mayoral bid.
Thursday’s annual mayoral luncheon, organized by the Waterbury Regional Chamber, packed hundreds into La Bella Vista restaurant in Waterbury. Many, if not most, anticipated the announcement and wanted to pay tribute to O’Leary, who will leave office as the city’s longest-serving mayor.
Attendees included the most prominent business and political leaders from Waterbury and surrounding towns, including several mayors from nearby communities.
O’Leary said he has been approached in recent weeks by various corporate leaders who have asked about his post-mayoral plans. O’Leary said he has no definitive plans yet but intends to continue working. Whether it will be for a business or in some government capacity has not yet been decided, O’Leary said. He is not ruling anything out, including a run at some other political office.
“I will not be retiring,” O’Leary said. “I will not be moving away from the area. Depending on who is the next mayor, I will be very happy to stay involved on some level. I don’t just want to walk away from the city. I feel I would be lost.”
O’Leary said he intends to remain involved with Waterbury’s progress, whether that’s in a professional or volunteer capacity. The main thing, he said, is to dial back the non-stop demands of political life, freeing more time for family. O’Leary’s daughter, Maggie, and her fifth-grade class led the Pledge of Allegiance at his first inauguration in 2011. Now she’s 21 and wrapping up her senior year of college.
O’Leary’s 37-year-old son, Patrick, lives outside Charlotte.
O’Leary’s charisma and political acumen helped him win reelections by strong margins and allowed him to pass virtually all of his initiatives through local government bodies with minimal to nonexistent opposition. Many of these were aimed at turning around large and mostly vacant downtown properties that had long resisted redevelopment. O’Leary courted New York developers who converted two floors of the downtown Brown Building into privately run housing for college students. Green Hub
Development also transformed the long-languishing former Howland Hughes downtown department store into office space leased to Post University.
The Post transformation was fueled by more than $7 million in state grant assistance to the developers.
O’Leary was a close ally to former Gov. Dannel P. Malloy and has built ties with Gov. Ned Lamont. O’Leary has courted federal and state lawmakers, as well as the heads of state and federal economic development and environmental agencies.
Those alliances helped pave the way for “hundreds of millions” of dollars in state and federal economic development initiatives during O’Leary’s tenure. That includes $120 million in upgrades to the Waterbury branch railroad line and rail cars used by the Metro-North Railroad, as well as widening Interstate 84 to the city center.
“If you look where the city was when I came into office and where it is today, it is night and day,” O’Leary said. “If you talk to any business leader in this city, I think they will tell you that their real estate values have gone up dramatically.”
Under O’Leary, the city committed nearly $50 million to redevelop the former Chase Copper and Brass metalworks along Thomaston Avenue. Some portions were renovated, while others were demolished. This prompted superconductive wire-maker Luvata and manufacturer Atlantic Steel to remain at the rechristened “Waterbury Industrial Commons.”
That project also freed up acreage that was sold to Norwalk-based chemicals company King Industries in 2013. The company has been slowly building up a manufacturing campus ever since.
Some of O’Leary’s economic development efforts have struggled to maintain momentum. The revival of downtown has been a pillar of his economic strategy, but remains a challenge.
Several hundred workers that Post University had brought downtown as part of the Howland Hughes renovation dispersed to remote work with the onset of COVID-19 and have largely not returned. Several of the retail businesses that cheered Post’s arrival downtown have since gone under.
It will take additional time to determine the yield of some of the seeds that O’Leary planted.
Those include millions in infrastructure upgrades and brownfield cleanups pursued along Freight Street, a sleepy industrial area next to downtown. Also pending is whether Amazon will carry through with its efforts to build a regional distribution center on roughly 150 city-owned acres straddling the Waterbury-Naugatuck town line.
William Palomba, marketing director with Waterbury-based Blasiums Chevrolet Cadillac, said O’Leary’s natural charm helped him recruit businesses and win political friends that have bolstered the city and its economy.
“As he said, it’s all about relationship building and Neil’s a master at that,” Palomba said.
