Ron is the President and CEO of the Naugatuck Economic Development Corporation, an organization whose sole purpose is to improve the livability of the town of Naugatuck through economic creation and development. Ron walks us through a couple of projects and tells interested students to combine their underlying passion for community improvement with tangible work and internship experience. The more varied their experiences are, the better equipped they will be to tackle future obstacles.
Transcript
My name is Ron Pugliese. I'm a Western Connecticut State College graduate in 1974. I am presently the chairman of the Western Connecticut State University Foundation Board. In my real life, I am President and CEO of the Naugatuck Economic Development Corporation. My function and it's a public-private partnership, which is somewhat of a unique way to do economic development. I do not work for the town, but I work with the town. I have a board, and we have of course bylaws, and the bylaws designate how many people should be on the board, who those people should be, the mayor of the town per his in position, in this case his position is a member. The fact that the Mayor is a Democrat, then we have a Republican member of the town council as a member. And then we have various business people that are on it. The public-private partnership is very interesting, because my role is to do economic development for the town of Naugatuck. I run the industrial park which I believe is probably the best industrial park in the state. I say that and at times I get people from other towns who feel theirs is better, but ours is very good. We're full, we have one vacant building that we're in the process of trying to sell. We don't own that piece of property. It is privately owned, so we're working with the owners and commercial brokers. We also are working on what is one of the really exciting things is a transit-oriented development. By the name it obviously means we're right next to a railroad station. We have a piece of property right downtown that used to be the Naugatuck rubber shop, Naugatuck Unirail Rubber Shop. And so the town now owns it. We're in the process of working with a developer to try to get this transit-oriented development off the ground. Transit-oriented development by definition basically is commercial property, commercial businesses, and residential, adjacent to a train station. That's exactly what we're doing. So that was an external. That's where somebody came in, knew we had a piece of property, knew we were trying to do something with that piece of property. Somebody, a developer came in with an idea, and we bought into it and takes a little while to get everybody on board. Took a little while to get the permits and the approval from zoning and some other factors, and that's really is the one, the job that I do best, is I quarterback all this and we're excited about it. We're excited about what's happening in our town.
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