Page 32 - North Haven Magazine Issue 14 Summer 2020

A Message From

aseball and business have taught me four valuable lessons during my athletic
Bcareer and my corporate business career.

Those four lessons include never getting complacent, never giving up, and having
the fierce and unrelenting will to accept failure and to apply as much energy as
possible in turning negative situations into positive outcomes.
Michael J. Freda The storms of this pandemic have created havoc on municipalities across the
First Selectman country, and here in Connecticut there are great financial challenges that cities
and towns are facing.

Credit ratings for many cities and towns across the state are being downgraded because of budgets not being
balanced, deficits being created, mill rates rising and the uncertainty of how this pandemic will affect economic
development in cities and towns across the state and our country.
Here in North Haven, we are doing well. We have reduced our mill rate, we have balanced another budget, and
we led the state in economic development and grand list growth this past fiscal year. We also received word
this past week that the S&P Global Rating agency, for the 4th consecutive year, rated us as a AAA financial
municipality signifying an elite financial status for any municipality.
S&P also declared that during these difficult financial times, North Haven “can maintain better credit characteristics
than the nation in a stress scenario.”
This AAA rating comes at a time when neighboring cities and towns have been downgraded and the rating allows
us to refinance bonds over the next several years and create more debt savings for the town as we continue to
pay for our new middle school and our new police department.

Even though we are doing well right now, I fall back to the lessons I learned from my baseball and business
career.

We cannot get complacent, we will not get complacent and I commit to you as your Chief Elected Official that I
will continue to demonstrate a fierce, focused and unrelenting will to deal with challenging situations that could
adversely affect us.

I love each and every one of you and one of my many goals will always be to continue to try to create positive
outcomes no matter how many challenges we face together.

Sincerely,
Michael Freda

18 Church Street • 203-239-5321 • www.northhaven-ct.gov