As the debris and fallen tree branches are cleared off the local roads in Hamden, citizens will be preparing their costumes to celebrate Halloween on Tuesday evening.
Fortunately, for hopeful trick-or-treaters the rain is expected to be out of sight by Monday afternoon, and there is currently no chance of rain throughout Tuesday, according to local weather reports. However, for those planning on strolling the neighborhoods for candy, you may want to incorporate a jacket into your costume, as temperatures are expected to drop to 35 degrees during the evening hours.
Screenshot from Weather.com
For anyone laying off the sweets and looking for a Halloween scare, Creeperum Haunted House on Marne Street will be open for business and tickets are available on its website. The attraction is recommended for citizens over 13 years of age.
While local firefighters are working to extinguish a transformer fire on Whitney Avenue due to last night’s storm, they also recommend that citizens keep their Halloween decorations away from open flames and heaters, specifically cornstalk materials.
To keep trick-or-treaters safe, stores like Walgreens have helped put together a nutritional guide so parents know what candies to avoid if their children have specific allergies.
With sunset expected before 6p.m., a popular safety precaution for children has been glowing reflectors that can be worn to make trick-or-treaters more visible to local drivers. Many of these safety reflectors are Halloween-themed, and can be found at Party City in Hamden.
There’s a warm aura that surrounds Professor Kiku Jones. Her yellow top matched her warm personality on a grey Tuesday Morning. It is easy to see why she was one of the professors to receive a Center for Excellence Award.
“It’s absolutely amazing. I am so lucky to be able to do this and to get an award for it,” she said. “I can’t even process it. It’s just hard to say. I am absolutely blessed to do this.”
2017 has been a good year for Jones, she attended the award ceremony on October 19, she recently got tenure, and as a Kentucky basketball fan the recent changes to the Quinnipiac men’s basketball team have her excited.
“We were like ‘oh this is great, he’s (Baker Dunleavy) got basketball in his blood, it’s like a long line’ we were really excited,’ explained Jones. “We’re super excited and we’re definitely going to be at the basketball games.”
It’s been five years since Jones began teaching at Quinnipiac. She is originally from Kentucky but was teaching in Oklahoma before she made the move to the Northeast.
“We were there for nine years and everything in Oklahoma is kind of dead and flat. It was hot and nothing grew on the trees,” Jones said laughing. “My sons … we were driving and they said ‘Mom look, the trees are green’ and I thought that’s the saddest thing I’ve ever heard. We love it here. We absolutely love it here.”
Jones, a professor of computer information systems, made the move to New England because she was interested in the School of Business IT for Good program. The Kentucky native is also very passionate about giving back, she is always part of the big event and has gone to Guatemala twice to help different organizations build websites. She also wants to show her students that they can work outside of their expected career paths.
“For the senior capstone I try to have different projects that are based on non-profits so that the students can see that their skill sets can be used in that way, and I want the students to really see that the skills that they’re doing don’t only have to benefit themselves,” Jones said.
It’s clear to see that Jones doesn’t only love her job but her students too. She describes herself as a behind-the-curtains person who wants to help build her students.
“I succeed when they succeed and that’s what makes me happy.”
“Why are you intimidated by what makes me unique? Why are you intimidated if English isn’t the language I speak?”
There were some tough stories to hear this past Monday at the Your Voice, Our Quinnipiac event and there were also some tough questions to answer.
The questions were posed by freshman Jamien Jean-Baptiste in his spoken word piece. This wasn’t something that he got up and thought of on the spot, Jean-Baptiste spent the weekend immersing himself in learning about movements like Black Lives Matter in order to better prepare himself. He mentions that he would not have spoken for the right reasons at the event if he had not spoken to Tatyana Youssef, the student government association’s vice president for student experience.
“It enabled me to do a little research into the topic itself, step outside of my comfort zone and talk in front of an audience about something that people find uncomfortable,” Jean-Baptiste explained.
According to Jean-Baptiste he used rhyming to make it easier for people to follow what he was saying. Lines such as “power can provoke unity, power can uplift communities, power can dwindle the differences between you and me” accomplished Jean-Baptiste’s goal of portraying his subject matter in a unique and different angle than what most are used to.
“I feel that translating what we’re trying to do into different mediums like poetry or music, I feel like that can really hit people,” Jean-Baptiste said
Jean-Baptiste doesn’t just speak at SGA events, he is also a member of the organization as a representative for the class of 2021. The behavioral neuroscience major joined SGA because he wants to avoid being the student that complains but doesn’t do anything to change it.
“It’s a real privilege and it’s a real honor to just be able to make change,” Jean-Baptiste explained. “I really want to fight for the things that people want to change rather than just complaining about them.”
It has been less than two months since the new members took their position and the organization is already facing some difficulties, particularly after the same event Jean-Baptiste spoke at. After the general board meeting on October 25, some SGA members have pushed to begin the impeachment process of two members of the class of 2020 after questionable conduct at two different events. But this does not deter or waver Jean-Baptiste’s belief in the organization, in fact he “guarantees” that it will make history at Quinnipiac.
“I’m really happy I went to that voice series, and i’m really looking forward to attending more of those,” Jean-Baptiste said. “I really encourage that everyone try to make it to these events because it’s just so empowering and it made history because of what happened that night, and you could either be a part of that history or take an early nap. I really encourage everybody to come.”
David Ives is the executive director of the Albert Schweitzer Institute, also known as the white house on the corner of Mount Carmel Avenue and New Road.
Ives is also a Nobel Peace Prize nominee and has been teaching at Quinnipiac for 15 years as well as leading students to volunteer in different countries and attend Nobel Peace Summits since Jan. 2002.
David Ives in his office
“A friend of mine named Mohammad Elahee said he thinks that I brought the world to Quinnipiac and sent Quinnipiac students into it. So it’s something I’m proud about, ” Ives said.
This mission to bring Quinnipiac students to the world began 30 years ago when Ives was a Peace Corp volunteer in Costa Rica where he was measuring the height and weight of babies. During a visit to one family, he noticed that their daughter was having trouble breathing and decided that he would take her to the hospital. The only way to get to the hospital was through a boat that left at four am.
Excerpts of Letters from David
Ives said he would take the baby and pay if there were any charges. He remembers that the family was late getting to the boat and the captain threatened to leave without them, but Ives made it clear that he would throw the captain into the lake if he even tried to do it. The family got to the boat but they told him that the baby could not breathe. Ives tried to give her mouth to mouth resuscitation but he could not get any air into her lungs and half way across the bay, Ives says he felt her soul leave her body.
“I’ve never gotten over that since then,” Ives explained, “and that motivates me to do what I do, in terms of getting Quinnipiac students overseas.”
When he came back, he found that not too many people knew or seemed to care about people from other countries. Ives believes that we are all connected in one way or another regardless of where we live. Here at Quinnipiac, Ives tries to take students on a trip outside of their lived experience, he tries to ‘shock’ them by exposing them to different ways of life through living with host families.
Excerpts of Letters from David
According to Ives he has been criticized for not being academic enough but he has countered that by designing a program where the student goes to a particular area, ‘gets shocked,’ then comes back and takes a class that explains the nitty gritty of the situation in that particular country.
“There are academic aspects to the problem of the world but first you have to give a damn about them. I wanted to create a situation where people cared about other people around the world and then do the reasoning behind the poverty,” Ives explained.
Something else that has motivated Ives to continue his work is having had four different diseases. Polio, post polio syndrome, Guillain-Barre syndrome (a disorder in which the bodies immune system attacks the nervous system), and he is currently dealing with Parkinson’s. He has found that his own struggles help those in developing countries stop stigmatizing certain conditions. His selflessness and caring nature have led many students at Quinnipiac to love not only the work he does but who he is. One could say he has his own following, something he did not know.
“I deeply care about students and I try not to be pretentious and I try to act human in classes, and I’m a storyteller,” Ives said. “I don’t lecture, and I’ve had real world experiences from having polio and recovering from that and to helping people learn to walk in other parts of the world.”
Ives describes the students as his ‘lifeblood,’ so much so that even though this is his final year at Quinnipiac, he will be back to teach courses on nobel laureates and Albert Schweitzer. To fill the time between his classes, there are endless possibilities, he may write a book, a play may be written about his life or he may win the Nobel Peace Prize.
“I was pretty excited, I don’t talk about it much but I don’t deny it either. I hope to get it one day but I am not holding my breath for it.” Ives said of his Nobel Peace Prize nomination.
Alumni celebration at Quinnipiac kicks off this weekend
By Ryan Chichester
Quinnipiac University will be recognizing its past students and graduates this Friday and Saturday for Alumni Weekend across campus.
According to the Quinnipiac Alumni website, more than 1,000 former students and their families and friends attended last year’s festivities on campus. Festivities included alumni softball games, family block parties in the Alumni Gardens and a tailgate party at York Hill prior to the men’s ice hockey team’s game against Northeastern. The tailgate featured beer tasting, music and a photo booth to capture the memories.
This year, the tailgate will be held prior to the men’s hockey match against Colgate on Saturday night. The weekend is expected to attract both Braves and Bobcats, even those who just recently tossed their hats at graduation.
“I’m very excited for alumni weekend,” 2017 journalism graduate Gabbi Riggi said. ” Not only is it exciting as a recent graduate to come back and see the people that are still in school, but to see the growth that has already happened since I left.”
The university sent out postcards to members of the Alumni Association and advertised the event through multiple social media platforms.
Strong winds, heavy rain and flash flooding impacted many towns and cities across Connecticut Sunday night.
Trees and power lines came down as a result of the severe weather, which came on the five year anniversary of Hurricane Sandy. Eversource Energy is reporting that over 139,000 customers in Connecticut did not have power as of 10:41 a.m. Monday. An additional 4,900 United Illuminating customers are without power, 507 of them are Hamden residents.
A map showing the number of Eversource Energy customers in Connecticut without power as of 10:47 a.m. Monday.
A map showing the number of United Illuminating customers in Connecticut without power as of 10:38 a.m. Monday.
The storm debris created difficult driving conditions and many schools near Quinnipiac closed. Hamden, Cheshire and North Haven public schools closed Monday, according to WTNH.
Despite there being much debris on campus, Quinnipiac did not close or have a delay. Several residence halls have been leaking including Irma, Dana, Ledges, Perlroth and Larson on the Mount Carmel campus and Crescent on the York Hill Campus. The Athletic Center, School of Business and Arnold Bernhard Library are also leaking, according to the Department of Facilities.
A Facilities worker holds a bucket up to a leaking roof in the Dana Residence Hall.
The Hamden Fire Department responded to twenty-six storm related emergency calls overnight in Hamden.
Hamden Police also responded to several transformer fires overnight, one happening on Whitney Avenue near Walgreens.
For more updates on the impact of the storm, follow HQ on Twitter @hq_press
According to the Merriam-Webster dictionary, ‘diversity is the condition of having or being composed of differing elements, especially the inclusion of different types of people (such as people of different races or cultures) in a group or organization.’ For many people, this looks different. American diversity is thought of in a different way than the diversity in other countries. This is what some international students at Quinnipiac thought of diversity before they came to Quinnipiac and how that has changed in their time here.
Priceless
Wilkie,
Nigeria,
21
Diagnostic imaging
My idea of diversity was cultural as opposed to racial. It was based on what country you were from. It wasn’t really visual, it was either what country … if I was in Nigeria what ethnic group or class to an extent too. Like how many different people from financial backgrounds. It wasn’t racial until I came to America, to be honest. Now, (diversity) is everything: sex, gender, race, sexuality, disability. It’s everything. My spectrum of diversity is very open now.
Jiseok Hyun,
South Korea,
23,
Computer Science
Diversity was like a taboo, everybody knew about it. Everybody was aware that we should respect each other. Maybe it’s because I went to a majority white high school, they didn’t have a lot of diversity activities like we do in Quinnipiac because it was just a high school. I saw a lot of segregation, only Asian people hang out with Asian students. So, before I came here I was like there are still solid lines between races and I didn’t like that. Now, it’s a gift. What I realized is that we have a lot of common things, we share something in difference. I think that’s just amazing if you just think of it, we find each other similar or the same in difference like of cultural backgrounds, race. I see a lot of possibilities in diversity.
Zhouqi Helen Dong,
China,
18,
International business and computer information systems
I think it’s just people from different backgrounds, cultural backgrounds, different skin color that all work well together. I feel like my (high) school didn’t really have that, my high school was pretty white, I was the only Asian kid in my entire school.
Warren Webb,
Jamaica,
20,
Computer information systems
I don’t think I had an idea before coming here. I’ve always been surrounded by majority black people so I always thought that was a thing everywhere else. I thought there would have been an equal population and an equal distribution of population. At Quinnipiac, I would say my idea of diversity doesn’t really encompass race and stuff like that. It goes more towards different people who think differently. I feel like a lot of the students at QU have this one mindset, most of them not all, that if it doesn’t affect me then it doesn’t matter.
Jesulayomi Akinnifesi,
Nigeria,
20,
Business management
Diversity has been very instilled in me. I’ve lived in many countries where people of color would be the majority but the schools I would go to would be 50 percent white people and then 50 percent the minority … When I was in these different international schools, if it was anything cultural, no matter what country, culture or ethnic background you’re from you’d still want to go to it. Whereas in Quinnipiac, it’s like if you have anything with multicultural, it’s like, “Oh, it’s only for people of color not for white people.” I didn’t think it would be such a struggle to get people to understand why diversity is important … (My idea of diversity now is) people of all races, all ethnicities, countries, backgrounds, religions are eager to learn about each other, even if they disagree on things, they are still eager to learn about other cultures or factions in which they reside in. Diversity of thought, diversity of opinion.
Xinyu Olivia XU,
China,
21,
Computer information system
Before Quinnipiac I didn’t really have an idea of diversity because I was born and grew up in a small city for 18 years. People, especially my friends, have similar backgrounds, similar family (structure). Their family either work for a company or government, and were the only child in family. We don’t really have diversity things. All my friends are pretty similar.I had a lot of culture shock during the first two years. I think for now, diversity is you should accept yourself, then you accept the others. If you will not admit that you’re different from them, you will not accept what the difference is. You will not recognize what that is.
Nhung An,
Vietnam,
20,
Journalism and English
My high school was an international school, it was not just diversity in race but also nationality and ethnicity. It was also in dialects, in the way that people talk. So I saw diversity a lot in my high school and it was really nice because everyone was kind of on the same level that they are away from home and they bring different things to the table. No one judges anyone and it’s fascinating, everything is new. It’s just different race, different nationality and they speak differently and a lot of tolerance. In Quinnipiac, I learned more about genders and sexuality because I don’t think that was offered a lot in my high school. It’s not black and white, it’s not just the color of your skin but it’s also who you are, who do you identify yourself as and what do you like.
The 2017 Atlantic hurricaneseason has already proven to be extremely active and extremely dangerous. So far this year there have been 15 storms, 10 hurricanes and six major hurricanes (category 3 or stronger). These weather systems have resulted in more than 400 deaths, and more than $188 billion in damages. Connecticut has been spared the worst, but there is still a month to go in the season.
Connecticut’s coastline (photo via Google Earth)
On October 29, 2012, Hurricane Sandy tested the limits of Connecticut’s emergency preparedness programs. According to the National Weather Service, Sandy was a “worse-case scenario for storm surge for coastal regions.” By the time Sandy got to New Jersey, it was downgraded to a post-tropical cyclone, but the storm surge hit Connecticut right at high tide, causing massive amounts of flooding.
The Tropical Cyclone Report created by the National Hurricane Center reports that there was storm surge over nine feet in New Haven, resulting in floodwaters as high as six feet above ground level. Approximately 3,000 homes were damaged, and the state sustained more than $300 million in damages.
Five years later, is the state of Connecticut ready for another hurricane… or not?
Rick Fontana, Deputy Director of Emergency Operations – New Haven
“Our biggest fear in the city of New Haven is a hurricane,” says Rick Fontana, Deputy Director of Emergency Operations in New Haven. “It’s number one. It really is. We’re on the coast, and I think we’re pretty resilient, but when storm surge hits … that becomes a very significant issue.”
In the event of a hurricane, Fontana would work to develop strategies that will lessen the impact of a storm, plan and prepare for different types of storms, and help with the response to and recovery from a storm.
Fontana also serves as one of five regional coordinators in the state for emergency management. His job there is to communicate with the 30 towns in Connecticut’s Region 2 throughout an emergency, and relay information up to the state coordinators.
Quinnipiac’s Plan for Emergencies
Quinnipiac University, located in Hamden, Connecticut, falls under Region 2. Edgar Rodriguez is the chief of Public Safety and is also co-captain of the emergency management team at Quinnipiac. The team is made up of about a dozen members from various university departments, including public safety, facilities, health services, and academics. Rodriguez says the team has extensive plans when it comes to storms.
“We’ve come up with an emergency evacuation plan and we talk about if there’s a hurricane or a storm coming, what are we doing, how are we preparing for it,” Rodriguez says, adding that although the plans haven’t been approved by the state, they are still important to have.
When a storm comes, those plans get put into action.
The team begins a 24-hour-to-landfall. Members track the storm, gather information from the state and submit that information to Quinnipiac President John Lahey and Provost Mark Thompson, who ultimately decide whether students should stay at school or be sent home.
Once that decision is made, the emergency management team starts prepping all departments for landfall. Quinnipiac’s emergency management team only goes through the regional coordinators for assistance if it’s a minor, isolated emergency – such as power outages on one specific campus. In the case of an event as major as a hurricane, the protocol is to bypass the region and work directly with the state.
“The rule of thumb is every town or city should be able to sustain themselves for 72 hours,” Rodriguez says, explaining that Quinnipiac acts as its own sort of town for those 72 hours after landfall, with the emergency management team in charge. “Then after that, you start getting assistance from the state. But the entire time that’s happening, you’re communicating back and forth with the state.”
All the information goes up to the state emergency operations center in Hartford, is organized and then is sent out to the public.
“Every hour [the state is] sending us an update on the storm and we take that update and send it to everybody,” says Rodriguez. He feels that this system of organizing the information is a good way to keep consistency and keep everybody on the same page at a time when there could be a lot going on at once.
A building-Block Approach
Dan McElhinney, federal preparedness coordinator and national preparedness division director for the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), explains that everyone takes a building-block approach for providing and receiving assistance after 72 hours.
“At some point [the town] may have to bring in mutual aid from surrounding communities,” McElhinney says. “When the mutual aid has been exhausted, they’ll ask for county level assistance, then they go to the state … then the state will declare a state of emergency. The governor then gets special powers to extend additional dollars to direct other state agencies to assist the local community. When the state no longer has the capacity, the governor will ask the president for an emergency or major disaster declaration. That’s when FEMA gets involved.”
FEMA’s regions (photo via FEMA.gov)
FEMA is divided into 10 regions, and McElhinney is in charge of FEMA Region 1, which includes all New England states. He says although FEMA can respond in numbers that would outweigh the state help 100-to-1, they are there to support, not to supplant.
“Basically under the Stafford Act, we pretty much have tasking authority over all the agencies and departments to assist the state in response and recovery,” McElhinney says. “We provide a lot of technical assistance, but we are not there to take over.”
Mandatory training
Not only does FEMA provide assistance in the aftermath, but it also provides training services. According to the Quinnipiac website, those who are on the emergency management team have to complete FEMA’s National Incident Management System training. This training is similar to the statewide Emergency Preparedness and Planning Initiative training exercises.
Map of Hurricane Maria on the monitor in the New Haven EOC
“The state of Connecticut has gotten very aggressive on keeping everyone prepared,” Rodriguez says. “Every year in October or November we do a drill. It’s mandatory for every town and every city through the state of Connecticut and the last few years have been some type of a hurricane.”
During the two-day statewide drill, state officials provide updates as if there were a real hurricane approaching. The state sends out maps of the storm and asks participants to respond to ongoing situations.
“You just lost all power in your town, what are you doing? You’ve got multiple trees that are down, what are you doing? Are you opening up a shelter? How are you transporting people? How much help do you have? Is the fire department on standby? And you have to keep reporting back and forth,” Rodriguez says.
Emergency operations center – New Haven
The exercises are meant to be intense, but they’re also meant to replicate a real-life situation so that if and when a hurricane does hit, everyone is prepared. And apparently, you can never be too prepared.
“When a hurricane strikes, people kind of become complacent and never think it’s going to be as bad as it is. We’ve been fortunate, but … our departments on the preparedness level always scale one level higher than we normally would,” says Fontana. “We’re always prepared but we always prepare above and beyond because it’s easier for us to scale back than it is to scale up in the middle of a crisis.”
The training drills are mandatory for cities and towns that want to receive grant money in order to build resiliency in places along the shorelines or rebuild after a weather event occurs.
coastal resiliency and innovative thinking
Giovanni Zinn, city engineer – New Haven (photo via Yale.edu)
Giovanni Zinn, an engineer for the City of New Haven, explains why that grant money is so important.
“There’s a lot more land now and it’s low lying land,” he says. “In the large storms we face two major threats: coastal storm surge, where water is piling up in the harbor and coming up the rivers, and large rain events of six, seven, eight, nine, 10 inches in a short period of time. Where does the water go? When you get both at the same time, you have a particularly bad problem. And there’s no getting around the laws of physics. There are certain situations where you can’t drain the city.”
Zinn says that coastal protection methods — seawalls, living shorelines and storm surge barriers that are employed in some areas of the state — are “extremely expensive” and put financial pressure on local communities. He also said he thinks that those preventative measures are “not really a priority” and the long-term thinking tends to be put on the back burner.
But Guilford town planner George Kral says that hard infrastructure like a seawall is actually discouraged by the state of Connecticut.
“The view is that it doesn’t really solve the problem, it just pushes the problem from one place to another,” Kral says, adding that if anything, the goal is to implement green infrastructure instead.
Towns like Guilford have already completed major projects to raise the lowest-lying roads above flood level, as part of the town’s coastal resiliency plan. According to the plan, “coastal resilience is the ability to resist, absorb, recover from, or adapt to coastal hazards such as sea level rise, increased flooding, and more frequent and intense storm surges.” Kral says the plan has two goals: to educate the public on the the importance of coastal resilience, and to suggest actions local governments could take to make themselves more resilient.
And Guilford isn’t the only place thinking about preventative measures.
David Kooris, Director of the Rebuild by Design and National Disaster Resilience programs (photo via CT.gov)
David Kooris, the Director of the Rebuild By Design and National Disaster Resilience programs for the state Department of Housing, says that after Hurricane Sandy, the federal government reserved about a billion dollars in relief funding to be “competitively awarded to places that demonstrated a new way of recovery that better positioned them to be more resilient for future disasters.”
In 2012, the state of Connecticut had already received $160 million in federal disaster relief money, and was looking for more from the department of housing’s two competitions.
“Teams worked over the course of a few months and put together a proposal to the department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) and to a jury of architects and urban planners to compete for portions of the discretionary funds,” Kooris says about the international Rebuild by Design program. “Seven out of the 10 were awarded funding – the largest being lower Manhattan at $330 million, and the smallest being Bridgeport and the State of Connecticut with $10 million.”
Based on the success of that first program, Kooris says HUD took another chunk of the Sandy money and created a new competition — this time at the national level — which became the National Disaster Resilience program. There were 68 eligible government entities (states, cities and counties) that could enter the competition, and 13 were awarded funding at the end – Connecticut coming in 9th place with $54 million.
Kooris says the purpose of competitively divvying the money up was to “move beyond the standard recovery funding through HUD and FEMA, which more than anything else is just rebuilding.” The programs forced cities and towns to work on disaster prevention, rather than disaster recovery.
“Rarely you get the type of project that is new infrastructure – not repairing what was damaged – and do so in a way that explicitly addresses social and economic vulnerabilities in addition to environmental vulnerabilities,” Kooris says.
Connecticut’s plan involved combining “grey and green approaches” as Kooris puts it, by using “traditional, hard engineered solutions combined with natural solutions that mimic the functions of the environment.” He says that the state is planning to raise roads, build berms and add other green infrastructure to mitigate flooding in Bridgeport, in addition to pinpointing other coastal locations with the greatest number of critical facilities — power plants, roads, hospitals, wastewater treatment — and putting the majority of the investments into protecting those places.
where connecticut stands now
Since Sandy, officials have had five years to revise and strengthen emergency weather response plans.
“We have developed an emergency operation plan that’s worked on on a daily basis,” Fontana says. “Our primary goals … are preparing our residents, making sure that they’re prepared for any type of a disaster and making sure our infrastructure is protected.”
If another hurricane hit tomorrow, there are mixed feelings on whether Connecticut would be ready.
“If it were some kind of extreme storm like a category 5, that is a whole ‘nother ball game. The impact would be severe,” Kral says about the town of Guilford. “Hopefully we’ve done a little better job in terms of planning, but that remains to be seen I guess. If we had 50 inches of rain, we’d have a lot of problems.”
Kooris acknowledges there are still some things that need to be worked on, but for the most part, he says he is “confident that we have implemented targeted infrastructure projects … that reduce risk from future storms.”
As far as Quinnipiac goes, Rodriguez admits “you’re never going to be 100 percent” prepared, but he is confident that the annual mandatory state training has everyone as prepared as they can be to respond.
And in New Haven, Fontana recognizes that a category 3 hurricane “would be devastation to the entire coast” but he is confident in his department, which he says “works every day” and “works hard.”
“We prepare all the time. We plan all the time. We don’t respond all the time, and we don’t recover all the time, but we’re confident that we have the necessary strategies in place to handle a hurricane,” Fontana says.
Adding to his confidence is the fact that FEMA recently awarded the city of New Haven a class 7 rating for flood preparedness and recovery – the highest rating available. Having this rating allows homes in the designated 100-year flood zone to get a 15 percent discount on flood insurance. “So I think that puts it in a nutshell.”
The most important thing through it all? Keeping the lines of communication open, Fontana says, at all times.
“Consistent, timely, good information. I always say, ‘Be first, be right.’”
Curt Leng has been the mayor of Hamden for two and a half years. He was first elected in a special election in May 2015, then ran six months later. Now, he’s running for a third term. HQ Press sat down with Mayor Leng to discuss where he stands on certain issues as well as what he hopes to accomplish if re-elected.
What made you want to become mayor in the first place and why are you deciding to go up for re-election?
I’ve been involved with the town actually for 20 years now. I got involved when I was 20 years old and I ran for council as a 20 year old just coming out of high school, in college traveling back and forth from UConn. I didn’t win my first election that I ran as an independent candidate. And then two years later ran as a Democratic candidate and fortunately I’ve been winning ever since.
I got involved to begin with because actually in high school I had to do ten hours of work on a political campaign. So I went to the local person that was about a mile from my house and found that I really enjoyed it and I enjoyed digging into the issues that people were working on, both the neighborhood and debating them and the pros and the cons and really digging into it.
I learned quickly that you can get involved and you can and people will listen to you and people will you know appreciate the work that you do and you can actually get stuff done even when you’re not in office yet as long as you take that step and kind of open your mouth and get involved. And ever since then I’ve been on that track.
I like working to help people. I find this is one of the one jobs…that you can help somebody every single day. You know a call comes in–hey here’s a problem that I have– you can’t solve everything, there’s no question about that. But usually, several times a day, you’re able to help folks and I think that here at the local level, it’s kind of where the rubber hits the road. There’s things we can actually directly do pretty quickly to help people out.
So you’ve been in Hamden your whole life, correct?
I’m 43, I’ve lived here my whole life, except for when I was at school and my family has been here for a hundred years.
What are some of the initiatives you’ve been able to accomplish in the past two years that you are proud of?
A couple that I’m most proud of have been returning our police to walking beats and bicycle patrols–really focusing on community policing. We hadn’t had walking beats in probably forty years and we have our first walking beat that started two years ago and now we have two regular walking beats and we have 10 different bicycle patrols that go out in all different neighborhoods on the canal, on the shopping area.
Town finances is not necessarily an initiative but it’s one that we really focus on a lot and we’ve been able to strengthen the town’s finances quite a bit. Our bond rating has been upheld. We had the first budget without a tax increase in ten years this past year, so that took a lot of work and spent a lot of time with our delegation making sure that our our state funding is fingers crossed still coming through.
So finances would be number two and number three probably it’s not exactly a specific initiative but I think that there’s a community pride I feel is coming back and I think it’s coming from the ability to communicate more with local government with with I think it’s partly the mayor’s office and I think it’s partly the police department I think it’s partly council members having more interaction with people. And also having a lot more events that people get to go to.
Obviously this doesn’t come easily. What are some of the challenges you faced along the way?
I think every day is like pushing a boulder up a hill. Well, it goes back to finances probably is the main challenge because if the town’s finances aren’t good then it’s kind of the foundation in which everything else is built off of so if the finances are not doing well and if you’re not making sure that the pension is doing better than it was–we have pension reform that’s like three quarters of the way through we have to see that through the end–making sure that your spending is not out of control so that you can keep balancing budgets and keeping the taxes down, you know holding the line of taxes at least. Then you can’t do things like expand bicycle patrols and invest in sidewalks and streets. We’ve done a lot of infrastructure improvement.
In fact in the two and a half years years I’ve been mayor…we’ve paved thirty five miles of road in two and a half years.Fifty-six roads happening right now in the 2017 season and we’ve done probably about a mile of sidewalk so a lot it’s a lot of of infrastructure improvement. Even though we’ve got a lot of roads, I certainly know that we have a lot more to do.
Where would you say the relationship stands now between the town of Hamden and Quinnipiac?
Much improved. You know much, much stronger. I’ve been able to have regular communications with President Lahey. We meet, we talk, we text. Sometimes we’re both busy people and sometimes that ends up being the way that we can connect on certain things. So we have a regular communication now and that’s really nine tenths of the whole game, because if you’re communicating then you can say “hey I have a problem with this and this” or “hey can you help me out with this or this” and going both ways. I think its been a much better situation for everybody because nobody really wants bickering and fighting and and Quinnipiac is a great asset for the town globally. There’s problems with off campus housing sometimes yeah and it’s going to happen with any college in any town USA. Starting last year there was much better communication between our police and the campus security.
How do you facilitate balancing the needs of Quinnipiac students versus the needs of other residents in Hamden?
It’s tough. There’s no be easy black and white you know clear cut type of an answer on this one. You know, encouraging the university to build more housing where it’s fit and where people that will live in the units makes sense and you know there’s another two hundred or so beds that are going to be built up on York Hill which is good. That’ll get a certain number of people in and the truth is that it’s not all of the people off campus at all. It’s a small fraction that make it bad.
There’s many times that I talk with residents and I have someone say actually I students next door and they’re really nice and they came over and chatted and said hey if we have a little party or something on the weekend if it gets too loud would you be able to let me know…people learn how to live in a neighborhood and have a common courtesy for each other.
So it’s a balance of trying to figure out how you can have rules that are appropriate and legal that kind of incentivize locations that make more sense for student development period. So it’s a matter of trying to plan these things out and the more that you work I think with the neighbors, university, town, students together which we haven’t perfected yet; I think you’ll get better and better each year. Because other towns there’s always problems but other towns seem to have perfected it better than we have.
And I talked with folks from Fairfield University as an example and Sacred Heart and it seems like they had very very similar problems thirty years ago or twenty five years ago and you don’t hear much about it at all now so you know trying to follow those models I think is something that we need to spend more time on.
So is there anything you think maybe Quinnipiac can or should be doing differently or students in general?
I think it’s all of us have to really make a concerted effort to do a more formalized town gown committee commission and really commit to having faculty, students, government, residents participate in a positive way so it’s not just an airing of grievances. You know probably quarterly, I would think. And we’ve got kind of a framework of it and it’s something that I’d like to try to accomplish over the next over the next term if I’m still here.
Mayor Leng speaks with Hamden residents during his event titled ‘Mayor’s Night Out’
I went to your event Monday night and you had mentioned SeeClickFix. What are the people in the town of and then concerned about?
Traffic is definitely up there without question…we’ve been doing some traffic calming work so it’s physical improvements to roads. Beyond that, we’ve kicked up enforcement a lot. The enforcement this year compared to last year is we did about 500 enforcement actions in the summer of 2016 and summer of 2017 there was 1388, so almost tripled the number of enforcements and we’re in a bunch more locations with selective enforcement stopping and watching, people go through a light, speed trap, all those type of things.
Graffiti and dumping issues occur in any municipality. If you’re fast with them, then they don’t become a problem if you’re not, they do. So SeeClickFix can be a good tool for that.
Any place that you can kind of get information flow back from residents and from the government to the residents even if it’s not completely productive you know, it’s good. Because the more information flow, the better because people seem to get most frustrated when they don’t know what’s happening.
What do you think sets you apart from Salman Hamid and why do you think people should vote for you instead of him?
Record of accomplishment that they can actually look at and say okay has this person accomplished what he said he was going to and do I think that it’s a good amount of progress that I want to see this direction continue and see what happens with another couple of years of his team together.
And then I’ll probably say that experience. I’ve been involved in in government and I understand municipal finances and I have been involved with the many local and state laws that really do bind a lot of the things that we do some good and some constricting. And without knowing these things and having a pretty fluid comfortable handle on them, it would be really really enormously difficult to accomplish things.
And keeping things positive. I think right now there’s a positive vibe about the town and I think it’s important not only for people’s opinions and you know just being happy and proud of your hometown but it also has a value to it outside of Hamden in that if word gets out more I think as it is now that Hamden is a pretty good place to be for a variety of reasons then families are gonna want to invest here, and buy a house and business are going to want to come here and set up shop and it’s good for our local economy and there’s nothing bad about it. So you know, trying to keep promoting that you know the track that we’re on. I think we’re headed in the right direction is probably the simplest way to answer that.
Have you ever gone to your local coffee shop and the barista knows your name and order by heart?
College students have this happen on a daily basis. On a chaotic schedule going from class, to internships, to extra curricular activities and staying up until 4 a.m., whether in the library or out in the bars, majority of those students rely on coffee to keep them awake.
“I drink coffee to stay awake mostly, and I also really like the taste of it,” said Catherine Healey, public relations major.
According to the American Association of Retired Persons, the average American drinks three cups of coffee per day, which translates to 83 percent of coffee drinkers not being able to imagine their life without their java.
How Many Americans Drink Coffee?
Dana White, Clinical Assistant Professor of Athletic Training and Sports Medicine, has been at Quinnipiac University for 10 years, working directly with students and athletes.
Throughout those years, she has often seen students with cups of coffee in her morning classes and informs her students and athletes to tweet about the dangers of abusing caffeine.
“I teach an 8 a.m. class and I’ll see everybody with their coffees so I’ll tweet it out ‘Coffee isn’t breakfast,’” said White.
The amount of caffeine in drinks varies, according to the National Institute of Health (NIH), but it is generally
An 8-ounce cup of coffee: 95-200 mg
A 12-ounce can of cola: 35-45 mg
An 8-ounce energy drink: 70-100 mg
An 8-ounce cup of tea: 14-60 mg
Starbucks offers six different sizes of coffee, each one with names that only regular customers know by heart
Short: 8 ounces
Tall: 12 ounces
Grande: 16 ounces
Venti Hot: 20 ounces
Venti Cold: 24 ounces
Trenta Cold: 31 ounces
White’s recommendation for coffee drinkers is that they should drink one coffee per day, however most people do not realize the different amounts of caffeine in different sizes of coffee.
“If you go get a ‘Venti,’ that is more than two cups of coffee, that is almost three cups of coffee,” she said. “So one cup might be multiple cups of coffee.”
Drinking too much caffeine, which is very common among college students, can lead to health problems, such as restlessness and shakiness, insomnia, headaches, dizziness, rapid or abnormal heart rhythm, dehydration, anxiety and dependency.
Studies have also shown that drinking more a larger amount of cups of coffee per day might have an impact on your GPA.
In a survey with more than 1,000 college students, it was shown that students who drank only one cup of coffee per day had a GPA of 3.41, compared to students who drank more than five cups a day had an average GPA of 3.28.
Although that are many risks about drinking coffee, there are also benefits to it.
According to Harvard’s School of Public Health, it may reduce the risk of Alzheimer’s and dementia, suicide risk, lower the chance of oral cancers and strokes.
Those statistics might be available to Millennials, however, majority of them do not care about it or choose to ignore it.
According to Bloomberg, Millennials count for 44 percent of U.S. coffee demand, an increase from 34 percent to 48 percent from 2008 to 2016.
Millennials are increasing the demand of coffee in the country and an example of that is the opening of Starbucks on Quinnipiac’s Mount Carmel campus.
White does not think that this event will affect students drastically.
“I don’t know that it’s really going to do any more caffeine damage if it wasn’t here,” she said.
Other students, like marketing major Ryan Lawson, have been drinking a larger amount of coffee since the opening of the new Starbucks on campus.
“I drink coffee every day, and sometimes more than once,” said Lawson as he got a Venti sized coffee at Starbucks.
Although Monday mornings aren’t as busy as expected, Starbucks on campus gets extremely crowded throughout the week.
“Usually in the mornings and around lunch time or early afternoon is when it is the most crowded,” said one worker.
Quinnipiac students have always been aware of the huge lines and waiting time at Au Bon Pain, in the first floor of the cafeteria. However, the workers have been seeing a difference.
“We’re definitely less busy since the Starbucks opened, but we still get a lot of students, mostly because of our sandwiches,” said a worker at Au Bon Pain.
A misconception about coffee is that it gives people the energy they could be lacking of in the moment, however, White thinks this is one of the bigger issues about caffeine abuse.
“The real energy you are going to gain is from calories, and a cup of coffee only has about five calories. You can’t just drink coffee and not eat food,” said White.
The United States spends $40 billion on coffee each year, according to the National Coffee Association, with the average price of an espresso-based drink being $2.45 and the average price of a brewed cup of coffee at $1.38.
“I probably spend around $50 on coffee each month, maybe a little less,” said Anica Lazetic, psychology major at Quinnipiac.
Although Starbucks is considered an expensive coffee shop, the fact that Quinnipiac students can use their meal plan money is very helpful.
“It’s mandatory to pay for $200 for meal plan when you’re off campus, and since I’m always cooking at home, I have been spending mostly of my meal plan with coffee at Starbucks,” said Healey.
Although majority of the students think of coffee in a positive way, White believes there are some measures they need to take.
“I think most college students need to be eating better, sleeping more and calming down, so [coffee] can work against you if you take too much of it,” said White.
