Danbury Mayor Says Summit Sellers Should ‘Put Up Your Best and Final Offer’ On Career Academy Deal

Danbury Mayor Dean Esposito recently met with the leaders from the Summit to discuss the Danbury Career Academy and according to reports, the mayor stopped negotiations and withdrew from the deal.

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We spoke to Dean Esposito on Friday morning (2/4/22) and asked him about the negotiations, below is a portion of our conversation with the mayor.

Lou: There is a lot of talk about the Career Academy in Danbury, Ethan wrote an article about it, let’s start kind of backwards and talk about you walked out of a meeting or backed out of a summit, at the Summit, is that correct?

Dean: Right, you know walked out is a pretty dramatic term for this whole negotiation but your basically right Lou. We were at the table, we were in negotiations with, you know we have a few local attorneys that advise us on these property matters. And, the negotiations were going very, very well initially about two weeks ago. We had a really good deal on the table and the next morning it changed totally with requests from the seller. We went back again; we had a whole other deal on the table and it fell apart again with requests from the seller. At that point, one of the requests that they were actually demanding for them to sell us the property, I could not accept as the representative of the people of Danbury and I had to withdraw from negotiations.

The Summit is the massive facility on the westside of Danbury that used to be known as “The Matrix” and it’d been chosen as the lead candidate, to be the new home for the Danbury Career Academy. The Academy will be a massive education complex that will serve as two schools, a middle school and a high school for the city of Danbury.

Esposito made clear that the city does have backup plans for the school if the deal with the Summit sellers cannot go through. During our discussion, Esposito alluded to some hope for the Summit and the city moving forward. We asked about the finality of this withdrawal, was this negotiation breakdown the end of the line for Danbury and that site?

Lou: You withdrew from the deal, and now it’s not completely dead and they are going to come back to you and try and get you on the same page again, is that correct?

Esposito: Yeah, that sounds right Lou, out of respect to the local representatives of that team, I asked them to put up the best and final offer up, without the stipulation that actually cost me to withdraw. So, it was just one of the items that was totally unacceptable for us to address.

You can listen to our entire interview with the Mayor in the Youtube video on the top of the page. In it, Esposito also addressed reports that the budget for the Career Academy has increased significantly.