Mayor Erin Stewart (R) announced that she will not seek re-election in 2025, instead saying that she will decide in early 2025 whether to, again, run for governor.
Stewart’s announcement comes at a time when she has been embroiled in another scandal involving her father, former Mayor Timothy Stewart (R) who, again, made bigoted comments online, making his having official roles in the current mayor Stewart’s administration even more tenuous for her.
Timothy Stewart had been forced out from his powerful position chairing School Building Committee in 2019 after he called women members of Congress “bitches in heat,” as Erin Stewart sought to distance herself from the scandal. But, within two years, she had reappointed him to that same position, making it harder for her to distance herself from the recent scandal, in which the elder Stewart made a racist reference to Asians eating dogs, drawing sharp rebukes and calls for him to be, again, removed from the position.
Stewart said she had been planning, for some time, the announcement that she will leave at the end of her current term, and that the timing today was a report on tomorrow’s council agenda in which her administration has claimed of a large budge surplus, saying it proves her long claim of of her good management of the city budget.
But critics have often said the she has not balanced the city budget so much with skillful management, as with large tax increases and borrowing. During Erin Stewart’s administration, the city’s tax levy has gone up more than 43% to its present level of $147,961,910 in the fiscal year 2025 budget. And she has been criticized for repeatedly borrowing millions or tens of millions of dollars at a time, to be paid for by taxpayers in the future, by refinancing the city’s debt, to balance her own annual budgets.
Critics also point out, that while Stewart has increased city hall spending, increasing the city budget more than 13% to the current budget amount of $269,532,733, her budgets have only increased the school operating budget line item 3.48% in the entire eleven years of her administration, which has left city schools with less of this funding after inflation is taken into consideration. Her budgets have been heavily criticized for shortchanging city funding for New Britain’s schools, with low school test scores that have appeared to be directly related to this.
Stewart noted that her departure from city hall will mean the city will turn a page. What that will mean will be the question. Of course, chiefly among those questions will be who will be running for mayor next year. Who will emerge as the standard bearer of Stewart’s Republican party? And, of course, who among the Democrats’ bench of elected officials, or people who perhaps have not run before, may seek the Democratic nomination for mayor?
