Updated 12:51 p.m.
By Ann-Marie Adams, Staff Writer
HARTFORD – J. Stan McCauley is a man with a plan for Hartford.
He just needs the opportunity to implement that economic plan and many others that will change the social dynamics crippling the city’s progress, he says. But first, the people of Hartford must choose him on Nov. 8 to be the next mayor.
McCauley, more than 6-feet tall, is a sinewy and erudite man, who speaks in measured tones with few gesticulations. Some know him as ‘Pastor Stan’ from his more than 20-year run on Hartford Public Access Television. He was also the station’s executive director and “a familiar face and voice people can trust.” Some admire his eloquence but are irked by what they deem a tinge of arrogance.
He calls it confidence.
“I think of all the candidates running I’m the most capable of bridging the diverse communities,” he says. “I’m a neutral person. And I’ve been blessed to be on television for over 20 years. If you grew up in Hartford and are from Hartford, you know who I am.”
McCauley, 51, will need that confidence to continue in the 2011 mayoral race. That’s because the Democratic Town Committee in July endorsed the incumbent, Mayor Pedro Segarra, with 51 out of 66 votes. Segarra replaced former mayor Eddie Perez in June 2010 after a Hartford Superior Court jury found Perez guilty of five felonies. McCauley received only four votes. On Aug. 10, however, he reportedly submitted signatures to be a petitioning candidate for the November election. He opted out of the Democratic primary.
Since McCauley announced his candidacy in 2009, the question some people have asked is this: can he win? When asked this same question by a reporter, McCauley’s well-honed oratory skill kicks in instantly:
“The machine is saying I can’t win. That’s a big difference,” says McCauley in his Enfield Street second-floor apartment on a July morning. “That’s the public relations war they’re trying to win.”
From his second-floor office window, he sees a street sweeper as it makes its way pass his house.
“You put people on notice when you’re running for mayor,” he says, referring to the Hartford Public Library’s July 28 mayoral debate about quality of life issues. In that debate, he relayed the story of an aged tree that fell on Enfield Street, blocking the sidewalk for about a day. City workers removed the tree and placed it on an open city lot nearby, but left it there for weeks, he says.
This is the kind of neglect that tires Hartford residents. And Pastor Stan plans to tap into that simmering frustration by elevating himself as someone with a moral authority and the political will to make a change.
Born in Pittsburg, raised in a suburb of Philadelphia, McCauley graduated from Pennridge High School at 17. Afterward, he was a part of an Aviation Technology program. He then moved to Hartford in 1979 to work for Pratt and Whitney as quality assurance inspector until 1987. He left to do full-time ministry and pastured a small church, Light Source Ministries until 2007. He then took a job as administrative assistant at Hartford Public Access TV. He eventually became the executive director. In 2007, he ran as a Republican for mayor. He claims former mayor Eddie Perez’s friends fired him because he spoke out about the “malfeasance, misfeasance, mis-management and sheer stupidity” that permeate city hall.
The Republican-turned Democrat has lived in different parts of the city, except in the northeast, the poorest and most neglected section of Hartford. Stories to illustrate the neglect by city hall officials, politicians, workers, including police officers, abound.
McCauley lays claim to being more connected to those neglected people—because he’s now living among them. He also feels he is the one most likely to provide “a strong leadership with honesty and integrity to serve at the will of the people.”
“If you’re going to talk about a particular community’s needs, you better live in that community,” he says. “Otherwise you’re an outside agent providing comfort. You’re not going to have economic development until you take care of this crime problem in this section. To get rid of crime, you have to tackle the causes of [most] crimes: poverty.”
So McCauley pulled a Corey Booker move because, he says, that’s the community’s barometer for choosing who talks for them. Booker moved into one the most economically depressed neighborhoods in Newark. It was only then Booker understood the daily despair he, as middle class Ivy Leaguer, was far removed from. He was then able to articulate the nuances of the economic woes and social ills that plagued the city’s most needy. It was that understanding that helped get Booker elected to city council and then mayor.
McCauley said he’s unfamiliar with Booker’s story. And although the Hartford entrepreneur from a nuclear family is not an Ivy League or a college graduate, he is seemingly on the same path to attain victory. So without a dime raised from corporate Hartford, McCauley and his team have set out on a “conscious-raising” mission.
“Our emphasis is on raising the consciousness of the people,” says McCauley’s Campaign Manager George Milner. “Our momentum is great in the North and in the South.”
McCauley and Milner know that most politicians understand the city’s issues only in theory and only frequent North Hartford and other neighborhoods during an election year.
He said most of Hartford’s elected officials and workers with six-figure salaries are disconnected from the daily and oppressive cycle in the life of 80 percent of their constituents.
He also seems fully aware of rogue police officers that have “acted like cowboys” and have deteriorated the public’s trust.
“The problem is a police department that treats everyone in the community as a suspect as oppose to dealing with the criminal element,” he says. “Now there’s a toxic relationship with the police and the community because the community resents being treated as suspects.”
Hartford Sen. Eric Coleman, who did not endorse McCauley, agreed with that sentiment.
“Some people think everyone gets the same treatment,” he says. “They think all police officers are boy scouts.”
Like Coleman, McCauley sees life in Hartford with different lens—similar to most of the disaffected and disengaged residents, two thirds of who are first- and second-generation migrants from the South, Caribbean immigrants or new immigrants from Eastern Europe and Central America.
And that’s one reason why McCauley might just win.
He adds: “I don’t have to do town hall meetings to learn about people’s problems,” he says, taking a jab at his opponent, Segarra. “I’ve been listening to their despair for 20 years.”
As to the claim that he might not win, McCauley brushes that thought aside and reminds a reporter that the establishment wrote off former mayors Thirman Milner and Carrie Saxon Perry.
The political machine has gotten it wrong before, he says. So much for their accuracy.
“The perception was that Shawn had $150,000 and he could win. The reality is he can’t win,” he says. “The reality is I can win and they’re very aware of that fact.”
And he knows this much is true: “So goes North Hartford, so goes the city and the region.”
But he cannot win with just North End voters, a reporter tells him.
“You can’t win without the 5th and the 7th districts in the [North End],” he replies. ”Ask a former mayor who was convicted of felony for how he got those votes.”
Perez has adamantly said he is innocent and is appealing his conviction. As for issues in the other parts of the city, McCauley says, their issues are not as pressing.
“They will get their speed bumps,” he says. “But the pressing thing is we have an apartheid city facing an ‘i-Quilt future.”
He then repeats an echo of his earlier mantra.
“So goes North Hartford, so goes the city. So goes the city, so goes the region. The region cannot afford to have a Hartford that is in the state that it is in. Since you cannot contain the crime problem that comes from poverty, you need to provide jobs. Gentrification is a failed approach to the problem,” McCauley says. “The best approach to Hartford is to invest in its residents.”
