About 40 Shelton Democrats joined Michele Bialek and her family July 1 to kick off her campaign to unseat Mayor Mark Lauretti this November.
Bialek, the presumptive Democratic nominee for the post, spoke for about seven minutes to an audience gathered at Bricks & Barley on Howe Avenue, reviewing her background and outlining her platform.
She began by noting her and her family’s roots in the city, before confessing that as a teen she had one overriding thought — “get the heck out of Shelton.”
She did — traveling to Europe, where she said she realized how people are, at a basic level, “all the same.”
“We’re family,” Bialek said. “We’re community, and that’s what makes us strong.”
Bialek said she returned to Shelton and met her husband, Fred. The couple eventually opened up Liquid Lunch downtown.
She said she grew more as a person while learning the ropes of the restaurant business — and expanding the eatery to two other locations as well.
Click here to read more about Bialek’s background from a previous story.
“Fred had his culinary degree and I had to run the business, and I had to grow the business, and I had to bring people in and make them feel comfortable,” Bialek said. “And I did that, we did that together, through the worst recession that we’ve seen.”
A January 2014 fire rendered the business’ downtown location uninhabitable, but the couple plan to rebrand the restaurant and reopen soon.
She then took listeners to another one of her “incarnations” — her past study of massage therapy.
“I’m always taken back to my time in massage therapy school,” she said. “We learned a lot about posture. What we learned is that posture isn’t perfect. A good optimal posture is dynamic and it’s balanced, and what we tend to do is overcompensate on the things we know we’re strong in.”
Shelton should be doing the same thing, she said.
“Yes, we need our low taxes. I live here, I work here, I own a business here,” she said. “I don’t want my taxes to go up, just like all of you don’t. I’m not going to change that.
“But the things that I think we are weak on, that we can build on, is our downtown, our city centers, that we can build with community and culture and artisanship and agriculture,” she went on.
She said she’ll make the city’s public schools a priority and try to build a more cooperative relationship with school officials.
“We can afford an amazing education for our children,” Bialek said. “We can take the time and care and money and make sure they have the best education we can afford.”
Though not castigating Lauretti directly, Bialek said City Hall should be doing more to reach out to residents.
“It’s time for us to bring our community together and work together,” she said. “Instead of working in spite of our community to make things happen in City Hall, we need to ask questions and listen to the concerns of our community. It’s time for us to grow Shelton together.”
But as campaign manager Erica Schwarz noted immediately after Bialek’s speech, she’ll need a lot of help.
“The only way we win this election is by contacting all of the voters who are not here tonight, the people who are not quite sure if Michele is their mayor,” she said, asking for volunteers in the campaign’s canvassing efforts — and its efforts to raise funds.
Among those present Wednesday was the last Shelton Democrat to pose a serious challenge to Lauretti, Chris Jones, one of the co-owners of Bricks & Barley.
Asked if Bialek could do him one better and defeat Lauretti, Jones echoed Schwarz’s sentiments.
“She needs to get her votes out,” he said.
