Eight Years of Service: An Interview With Town Councillor Bill Dziedzic. (Part II)

BILL DZIEDZIC PHOTO

This is the second part of The Outsider’s interview with Southington Town Councillor Bill Dziedzic. Bill, who has been a Republican member of the Council for the past eight years, will be stepping down from that position when his term ends this November. Bill sat down with the Outsider for an interview on July 26^th. The first part of the interview, which was published earlier, focused on politics and government; the second part ranges more widely.

You follow the real estate market pretty closely. Is it a good time to be selling your house right now? A good time to be a buyer?

I think we’re in a frozen real estate market. I’ll preface this by saying that all real estate is local – you can’t look at national numbers or even state numbers, it’s extremely local. I think it’s a frozen market: the people who are locked into an interest rate below four percent, or no interest, they are locked in, and they are going to be reluctant to buy a new house and move up and pay more in terms of capital. It’s a frozen market and I think we’re looking at a frozen market for the foreseeable future. Until interest rates either go significantly down or inventory significantly increases, we’re going to be in the same kind of market.

I’ve seen Southington described in opposite terms as a hot market – if a house comes up it sells quickly.

Well, there’s no trading in volume. If a property comes on the market it will get multiple bids, but the transaction volume is not anywhere near any past peak.

Do you have a favorite book?

I would say Doris Kearns Goodwin's Team of Rivals is one of the better books out there. That, and The One Thing by Gary Keller [and Jay Papasan]. I try to periodically reread it. It’s a short read, a refocus-yourself type of book. Gary Keller started Keller Williams Realty, but it has nothing to do with real estate. It’s more motivational, a ‘yay rah-rah’ book. It provides a way to focus your thoughts.

I’m interested in what people in Southington are reading these days.

I got stuck in a slog of reading. I picked up the [President] James Garfield book that just came out. I felt bad for the group of presidents who are post-Civil War, before Teddy Roosevelt. Nobody remembers any of them – Rutherford B. Hayes, Chester A. Arthur. I wanted to read more about them so I’ve been slogging through; I’ve gone from Rutherford Hayes to a 600-page McKinley book. Man, I am done with the Gilded Era! I need a break.

I understand you have a collection of photography of downtown Plantsville. What’s in it, and what are you plans for it?

I have started to accumulate pictures of buildings in Plantsville, and a few that have people in front of them. Sometimes people give them to me: I’ll occasionally post a picture of one to my Facebook page and someone will say to me, “I’ve got this photo, do you want it?” So I’ve been collecting them, buying postcards on eBay. It’s a small amateur collection of photos that I have taken from buildings I have bought and remodeled, where I found them in an office or on a wall just hanging there, never seen before. I’m acting as the steward right now and I’m happy to work with anyone on them. Some are commercial postcards you may have seen before. I think it’s important to preserve that information - those photos represent who we were a hundred or sixty years ago.

Favorite place or places in Southington?

I’m going to give a shout-out to Hydeaway Cafe. Hydeaway is owned by Kevin Hyde. It’s a bar on the corner of West Main and Summer Street. It’s been a number of different bars in the past, I believe it was Stanek’s before that. That’s one of my regular places. I don’t want to offend anyone by naming a restaurant and making the rest mad.

What is the American dream, in your opinion?

That’s a good question. [long pause] I think the American dream is: to have opportunity. It’s to have the opportunity to make the life you want – whether that be personal decisions, professional decisions – to do what makes you happy or whatever you define as the well-lived life, and without government interference. That’s not the most eloquent way of describing it but I think that’s what most people would agree on. It’s close to that, it’s over in that direction.