PERSONALITIES: East Windsor Rotary to honor Denise Menard for public service

Tim Leininger, Journal Inquirer, Manchester, Conn.
·5 min read

Sep. 24—EAST WINDSOR — Denise Menard has dedicated much time to public service, serving on numerous boards and committees, and in recognition of her decades of work, the local Rotary Club has honored Menard as this year's "Citizen of the Year."

DENISE MENARD

WHO SHE IS: East Windsor Rotary Club "Citizen of the Year."

AWARD DINNER: Thursday, Sept. 29, Nutmeg Restaurant.

TICKETS: $30, available for purchase at Joe's Fine Wine & Spirits, 149 North Road, East Windsor; The Nutmeg Restaurant, Route 5, East Windsor; or by calling Danielle Martocci at 860-466-7188.

"I find it embarrassing because I don't do things for the glory of stuff," Menard said. "My husband's the one that nominated me. I tried to talk him out of it. The Rotary Club 'Citizen of the Year' has a history of having amazing people. To be part of that group is humbling, because they're great people."

David, her husband of 16 years, said, "She's pretty much dedicated her free time to the town, well before my time. She was probably on just about every committee the town has and many cases as chairman. When we were getting married, she decided to run for first selectman. After she retired, she decided to run for the board of ed and is currently active in that. With all of that in her background, it looked like she was a perfect candidate for citizen of the year. I'm proud of her."

The daughter of French Canadian immigrants, Menard grew up in Hartford, where she attended St. Ann's Catholic school before transferring into the Hartford public school system for high school.

With three siblings, two brothers, and a sister, she said, her parents couldn't afford to pay for college for all them.

"My sister and I were not expected to be going to college right out of school," Menard said. "I was put into a program where I learned the brokerage business and it was a fun place to work. It was a great education in investing."

That led to a job with Advest Inc. in Hartford.

It was about 1975, she said, that she made her move to East Windsor.

"This is my town now," she said. "East Windsor is a wonderful place to grow up, have your children grow up. It's a great community."

It wasn't long before she was invited to participate in local government boards and commissions.

"I started on the Elderly Commission," she said. "I went from Elderly Commission to Water Pollution Control Authority. I was the first woman chair."

In 1987, she started working as clerk for the South Windsor Town Council, a position she held until 1991 when she got a job as senior legal secretary for CIGNA.

It was at this time that she went to college, earning a business administration degree from St. Joseph's College, now St. Joseph's University, in West Hartford.

"(CIGNA) paid 80% of my education if I got an A, which I did," she said. "They had a paralegal component of their business program, so I was able to continue there and became a paralegal at CIGNA to a senior paralegal. It was a great, great place to be, Cigna was."

By 1997, Menard had served on East Windsor's Planning and Zoning Commission and the Board of Finance and by this point joined the Board of Selectmen.

In 2006, she left her job at CIGNA to run for First Selectman of East Windsor, working at Friendly's as a lease administrator in the interim.

"I did their leasing," she said. "I did their mortgages if they had any mortgages."

She won her 2007 bid for first selectman, a position she held for eight years until she was defeated by Bob Maynard.

"It was a time to update what we were doing in town," she said regarding her eight years as first selectman. "I was able to do a lot of good positive things. Personnel files were kind of iffy at the time. We established that kind of stuff, brought in more HR related kinds of things that hadn't been really addressed in the past. But I'd been in the corporate world, so I knew what needed to be done to help run a town. There certainly were a lot of things that I had to learn. I'd never dealt with police for instance, and public works. But, we had great staff there and we did some excellent stuff."

After her loss to Maynard, Menard looked for a new job and found it in East Longmeadow, Massachusetts, as its first town manager.

"Wouldn't that be great, to be able to be the one to bring change, to put together what this new charter was saying needed to be changed?" she said. "It actually says in the charter that the person should live in the community. But I had pitched it that I'm not that far away, the town manager does not have to be here. I was part of the community and if there was an emergency, I would be there."

The contract was for three years, she said, and now she is enjoying retirement, but still stays active in the community sitting on the Board of Education.

"I've taken up gardening," she said. "I've been a little successful this year. I used to think I had a brown thumb, but it turned out that I was just too busy to remember to water things and weed things."

She said her political philosophy was to "erase the Rs and Ds" after going into office.

"Whether it be chairman of planning and zoning or first selectman or town manager," she said, "we're all in it to do the right thing. There were people, they were serving the community and you needed to respect their ideas, not their party and that was not that hard to do. In fact, one of the best Board of Selectmen I had was a Republican majority and I was the Democrat. There were two Democrats and three Republicans at the time and it was one of the best boards that I've ever experienced," Menard said.

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