Community Urged to Get Involved with NRZ’s
By Chris Seymour | Correspondent at March 26, 2024 | 6:00 pm | Print
With three active Neighborhood Revitalization Zones (NRZs) around New Britain, city officials are encouraging members of the community to get involved, have their voices heard and make a difference.
NRZs are “a collaborative process for communities to work together with government, nonprofits, businesses and neighborhoods,” said Margaret Malinowski, the city’s Neighborhood Preservation Program Administrator and NRZ Coordinator, adding, “And especially trying to target neighborhoods that have become substandard, unsafe and blighted; so the NRZ would be a representation of pulling all these people together to improve the neighborhood.”
Malinowski added that NRZs are a process established in 1995 under former Gov. John Rowland “via a public act, and it was kind of the first of its kind in the nation; we were essentially the pilot program.”
The city’s NRZs—each of which meets once a month—are the North/Oak NRZ, the East Side NRZ & the South Central (formerly Arch St) NRZ; currently dormant, Broad Street is trying to get an NRZ up and running again.
Those who get involved with their NRZs have the opportunity to “make a difference in their neighborhoods,” said Malinowski. “We as government don’t have the staff or the resources to go door knocking and ask, ‘What do you really need?’ The NRZ process and the NRZ meetings are a vehicle where you can come to a meeting, you can voice your problem, you can voice your opinion and we always have a government representative there that can bring it back to the city and energize that department to do something.”
For example, Malinowski noted that residents of the Arch Street area had concerns about various issues going on in their area and brought them to the attention of the police at an NRZ meeting.
“Arch St. had some issues with blight in their neighborhood, with kids hanging around after school, and there were burglaries and things like that,” she stated. “Well, we have an officer at all the NRZ meetings and they take notes and they go back to the chief or to a supervisor and the police then have an easier way of targeting certain neighborhoods. The NRZ meetings are very good as far as the residents getting information to the city.”
The meetings also give residents a chance to meet city officials and get acquainted with them. “We have speakers come in and we will have the mayor come in; we have the director of public works come in and the director of Parks and Rec,” said Malinowski. “The city has all kinds of avenues, including social media, to give information to the residents but in terms of getting feedback and also getting information from them, the NRZ meeting is a fabulous thing.”
Of note, Malinowski explained that one does not need to be a resident of an NRZ in order to attend its meetings and get involved. “Anyone can be a stakeholder; if you go shopping on Broad Street, you can be a stakeholder and come to the meeting—it’s not just the property owners and the tenants that live in that neighborhood,” she said. “It’s also the business owners; and, if you go to a church in that neighborhood, you can come to the meetings as a stakeholder.”
One of the goals for all the NRZs is to promote home ownership and owner occupancy in their neighborhoods, noted Malinowski. “Because we know if the owner lives in the property, the property is usually better taken care of than one that’s just a rental,” said Malinowski.
Though the Broad Street NRZ has not been active of late, the city would like to see the group resurrected. “We are trying to get it active again,” said Malinowski. “Things are going well on Broad Street, and when things tend to go well, people tend to kind of give it a breather.”
The three active NRZs meet as follows: South Central NRZ, first Monday at the NBPD Community Room at 5:45 p.m.; North/Oak NRZ, last Monday at the North/Oak Substation at 7 p.m.; East Side NRZ, first Thursday at the Stanley Memorial Fountain of Life Church at 6 p.m.
For more information on NRZs, contact Malinowski at (860) 826-3341 or [email protected].
