Hartford Mayor Pedro Segarra is boasting about his record in fundraising emails to potential donors, saying the city's "graduation rates have more than doubled since I took office."
It sounds good. But it's not true.
In fact, the year he took office, the city’s graduation rates averaged 57 percent. That would be hard to double.
“We just fumbled our numbers a little bit,” said Kevin Coughlin, a spokesman for the Democrat’s campaign. “The first email was an internal miscommunication of the campaign there. The numbers there got mixed up a little bit. So that kind of speaks to that. You know, we’ll fix it and move on.”
But moving on won’t be easy. Democratic challenger Luke Bronin has already pounced on the mistake.
"We just fumbled our numbers a little bit."
Kevin Coughlin
“I just think it’s important that we be accurate about the information that’s used in this campaign,” said Bronin, the former legal counsel to Governor Dannel Malloy. “The graduation rate has not doubled under Pedro Segarra and, in fact, I think that roughly a quarter to a third of kids still aren’t graduating from school as they should.”
Bronin said this kind of error plays into the narrative that Segarra is detached.
“Hartford needs a leader who is getting under the hood, who is in the details and who is an active manager,” Bronin said. “And I think the failure to recognize a misstatement as significant as this one reflects the fact that this mayor views the job more as a ceremonial one and he’s not involved in the day-to-day policy making or the day-to-day management.”
"Hartford needs a leader who is getting under the hood, who is in the details, and who is an active manager."
Luke Bronin
But Coughlin, Segarra’s spokesman, said Bronin is missing the point.
“At the end of the day, you’ve got to acknowledge that graduation rates are going up,” Coughlin said. Here’s what he says the campaign should have written: the city’s graduation rates have doubled since 2006, when the school reform effort began under former Mayor Eddie Perez. Segarra began serving on the council in 2006. Since Segarra took office as mayor in 2010, the average graduation rate has gone from 57 percent to 71 percent in 2013.
In those same fundraising emails, Segarra also took credit for building 1,000 new units of housing – something Bronin said was largely a product of state, not city, investment.
Segarra also criticized Bronin’s tenure in the city, saying that “after only two years of living in Hartford, he’s still so new to our community that he has no idea how far we’ve come.” Bronin said Segarra is wrong, and he knows it. Bronin and his wife moved to the city in 2006. They then left for four years while he worked in the Obama administration. They returned in January 2013.
Bronin isn't the only one running. Other candidates include John Gale and Councilman Joel Cruz, and others are considering a run.
