The Municipal Voice celebrates its first anniversary

The Municipal Voice, as seen on Facebook Live and Youtube. Senator Martin Looney spoke about the legislative session with CCM President Mayor Neil O’Leary and show host Matt Ford in a lively January episode.

A Year Of Stories

The Municipal Voice celebrates its first anniversary

Just a year ago, The Municipal Voice was in its planning stages, and didn’t even have a name yet. Venturing into a new medium like podcasts and live streaming isn’t something organizations like CCM do every day, so we couldn’t be sure just exactly how it would turn out. One year later, and we can say that The Municipal Voice has allowed us to tell exciting stories, interview guests, and promote municipalities like never before.

The first epsiode featured CCM’s Joe DeLong and Bru Hickey.

Working with The New Haven Independent and WNHH, we set off on October 24 with an introduction to CCM with our Executive Director Joe DeLong. Since then, we have talked with Dr. Richard Cho, the Executive Director of the Connecticut Coalition to End Homelessness and Rev. Bonita Grubbs of Christian Community Action New Haven on how our municipalities are helping to solve homelessness, and the successes our state has seen.

Dr. Richard Cho and Rev. Bonita Grubbs offer ideas to solve homelessness.

We’ve had CJ May and Jennifer Heaton-Jones on to help guide municipalities through the recycling crisis, and giving pointers on how to handle the China National Sword policy that is driving up the cost of recycling in so many communities. And we’ve had Brandon Robertson, Town Manager of Avon, come on with our very own George Rafael to help explain to the general public how towns across the state handle their budgeting.

CJ May and Jennifer Heaton-Jones advised on best practices for recycling.

The Municipal Voice has gotten to interview experts in the field of the Opioid Crisis, the Port of New Haven, and have brought on Doug Hardy from CTNewsJunkie and Paul Bass, Editor and Publisher of the New Haven Independent. All these interviews provided listeners with detailed questions and informative answers in easy to view or listen formats.

North Haven Mayor Michael Freda and CCM’s George Rafael talk budgets.

We are streaming now on Facebook Live, YouTube Live, Twitter, and on FM radio if you live in New Haven County. Afterwards, the audio files are uploaded to SoundCloud and to Apple Podcasts so that you can listen to them wherever you are!

We are reaching over 450 active viewers on average for each episode, meaning people who have actively clicked on and watched or listened to our episodes. Add to that the 1500 people who are listening in on the FM station, and over the course of our first year, we will have reached over 50,000 listeners!

On this episode, Kurt Miller, first selectman of Seymour, and Dale Bruckhart of Digital BackOffice discussed a recent IT upgrade the town made that was sure to save a lot of future heartache. WNHH’s Harry Droz was on the boards.

In our second year, we are looking to grow our audience, reach out to new markets, and continue to tell compelling stories. As always, if there’s a story that you want to hear, or if you have a story to tell, please let us know!

If you would like to be a guest on the Municipal Voice, or if your business would like to sponsor the show, contact Christopher Gilson, cgilson@ccm-ct.org