Hartford Mayor-elect Arunan Arulampalam hosts first transition committee meeting – NBC Connecticut

On Friday, Hartford Mayor-elect Arunan Arulampalam sat down to have conversations about the future of the city he will soon be leading.

“From the beginning I have wanted to hit the ground running on day one,” Hartford Mayor-elect Arunan Arulampalam said.

Arulampalam and three transition co-chairs hosted the first ever transition committee meeting at Trinity College to brainstorm ideas on how to make the capital city more vibrant, safer and how to overall improve the quality of life. 

“I have asked them in the morning session, to dream really big for this city, to try to work together through policy groups,” Arulampalam said.

There are 11 policy groups: Arts & Culture, Economic Development, Youth & Education, Quality of Life & Public Safety, Housing, Workforce Development, Public Health, Homelessness, LGBTQ+ Affairs, Undocumented Families and Civic Engagement.

University of New Haven Associate Professor of Criminal Justice Mike Lawlor is a member of the Quality of Life and Public Safety Committee. He said several discussions will be focused on how to prevent crime.

“Young people under 25 tend to be involved in a lot of things people see, the shootings, the auto theft and for almost all these young people you can go back in time to when they were really young and see that they never had a first chance,” Lawlor said.

 Arulampalam said the goal is to help youth make better choices early on by connecting them to the proper resources.

“The idea of the office of violence prevention is to coordinate with all the nonprofits that are working that space, schools and our police force, DCF, to be able to identify and know that there is data, that if a child becomes disconnected from school, from systems of support, that they more likely to commit crime,” Arulampalam said. 

 The committees will continue to meet and put together policy proposals ahead of January.