Bridgitte Prince Says North End Has Waited Too Long

By Noa Climor
UConn Journalism

Bridgitte Prince expe­ri­enced first­hand the dev­as­tat­ing effects of flood­ing in Hartford’s North End, and she used that expe­ri­ence along­side her pas­sion for help­ing her com­mu­ni­ty to fight for her neigh­bors.

Prince is a U.S. Army vet­er­an who lost her belong­ings when her father’s house was flood­ed in 1988.

“I lost all my mil­i­tary mem­o­ra­bil­ia, unforms, medals, memen­tos, arti­facts from dif­fer­ent countries—everything. I lost a great deal,” Prince said in a phone inter­view this spring.

In the years since, she has watched many other res­i­dents of sev­er­al North End neigh­bor­hoods suf­fer. “There are still com­plaints about sewage over­flows,” she said.

She recalled that in 2023, when Gov. Ned Lamont announced a pro­gram to cor­rect flood­ing that includ­ed about $9 mil­lion in grants to pay for home­own­ers’ dam­ages, “he made a com­ment about how this wouldn’t hap­pen in Greenwich or Guilford, and for me that is a clear admis­sion of bias and dis­crim­i­na­tion,” she said.

Prince said she believes that although the Metropolitan District Commission (MDC), the non-prof­it agency that man­ages the sew­er­age sys­tem, has embarked on cor­rect­ing prob­lems in the sys­tem, most of the North End’s prob­lems have not been addressed.

In January 2023, she tes­ti­fied at the nom­i­na­tion hear­ings of DEEP com­mis­sion­er Katie Dykes, when she crit­i­cized the time­line in legal agree­ments that pri­or­i­tized fix­ing CSOs in Wethersfield Cove before those in the North End.

“Climate change can­not allow the MDC to tell DEEP and the EPA that they will get around to address­ing the sewage and waste­water prob­lems in 2040,” she tes­ti­fied, refer­ring to some of the dead­lines for fix­ing North End infra­struc­ture. “The infra­struc­ture funds are here. The fix is now!”

“There’s still a lack of respon­si­bil­i­ty,” she said in this spring’s inter­view. The work to cor­rect the North End prob­lems “has only hap­pened because of our advo­ca­cy. It still would have been minori­ties deal­ing with the sewage over­flows if it wasn’t for our advo­ca­cy and activism. It is being addressed, but not fully resolved.”

The MDC, through spokesman Nick Salemi, declined to com­ment on Prince’s remarks.

Prince said that the state moved more quick­ly and spent more money to help sub­ur­ban res­i­dents whose con­crete foun­da­tions were found to con­tain a min­er­al that made them crack and fall apart. The Crumbling Foundations pro­gram has spent close to $200 mil­lion so far replac­ing dam­aged foun­da­tions in cen­tral Connecticut.

“I’ll go as far as to say I still think it’s dis­crim­i­na­tion,” Prince said, “because when you com­pare it to vic­tims of the Crumbling Foundations, there’s a dif­fer­ence.” Applicants for grants to fix sewage back­ups were required to prove their iden­ti­ties and proof of res­i­den­cy, along with doc­u­ments show­ing claims and repairs.

“When it comes to sewage over­flows and address­ing the dis­par­i­ties and com­pen­sat­ing peo­ple in the North End, who are pre­dom­i­nate­ly Black, mind you, they want them to pro­vide so much.”

She added, “No human should be going down to their base­ment and have to deal with some­one else’s waste.”