BRIDGEPORT — Having had the Christopher Columbus statue taken down in Seaside Park, Mayor Joe Ganim indicated this week he wants no role in its future.
Friday marked the end of the 45-day window the Parks Commission gave Ganim to restore the likeness of the Italian explorer to its pedestal. But in a statement Wednesday to The Connecticut Post, the mayor claimed it was not his problem.
“It appears at this point that the statue is in the exclusive jurisdiction of the Parks Commission,” Ganim said. “I need to take no further action on this. It is up to the commission as to what to do, and how to do it.”
His office did not provide further clarification.
Since the parks board’s Aug. 11 vote, both sides of the issue — advocates for Columbus’ return and those who want the monument kept out of Seaside — have been publicly debating how Ganim should respond to the order to replace it.
After being criticized by the Parks Commission and others for unilaterally deciding to place Columbus in storage July 6, Ganim later that month claimed that when it came to the statue’s ultimate fate, “The most prudent response is to allow the parks board to make a decision on how to proceed.”
Banjed Labrador, the commission’s chairman, said this week that was exactly what he and his members did Aug. 11 in directing Ganim to replace the monument without incurring any expense to the parks budget.
“You’d think he’d take the same responsibility to put it back,” Labrador said. “We didn’t take it down. You put it back up.”
Municipal parkland falls under the Department of Public Facilities. Labrador said he reached out Friday to that agency about how to go about returning Columbus to Seaside and was told “nothing can be done unless the mayor signs off on it.”
Ganim’s statement to The Post left Columbus supporters and opponents dissatisfied.
Former state Rep. Christopher Caruso, one of several Italian-American leaders who have been urging the statue be put back, called Ganim’s position “ridiculous” and a “dereliction of duty.”
“He sidestepped the parks board (July 6) so the board ordered or requested the mayor to put the statue back up because the mayor took it down,” Caruso said. “Now he’s ... washing his hands of it and saying, ‘It’s not me, it’s the parks board.’”
The mayor had originally claimed his sudden decision to place the statue in storage was to protect it from threats of vandalism. Similar controversial statues have been targeted in recent months around the country, and either forcibly or peacefully removed. Waterbury’s Columbus was beheaded July 4.
City Attorney R. Christopher Meyer in an early September interview claimed Ganim could legitimately argue the monument should remain in storage for public health and safety reasons to prevent possibly violent rallies and gatherings that might spread the novel coronavirus.
“Remember, we’re in extraordinary times — unusual times — where the mayor’s balancing COVID protections of people and public safety protections of people,” Meyer had said.
Gemeem Davis is a leader of Bridgeport Generation Now civic group that, along with others, has argued Columbus should not be celebrated as a heroic explorer but decried as a symbol of colonialism, slavery and racism.
In regard to Ganim’s recent statement she said, “I think it means he’s not going to do anything with it? He’s not going to pay for it to go back?
“It would be better for the community for him to just say, ‘No, I’m not putting it back. I’m not spending the money to pay for security,’” she said.
All along, Labrador has maintained that putting Columbus back up in Seaside Park was not necessarily a permanent solution, but a means of starting a dialogue over the statue and whether it should be relocated or remain where it has been since commissioned by the Italian-American community in the 1960s.
“And then if it has to come down again, we as a parks board will make that decision,” Labrador said this week.
https://www.ctinsider.com/local/ctpost/article/Bridgeport-Mayor-Ganim-misses-45-day-deadline-to-15597866.php
2020-09-25 20:00:00Z
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