Kip Koons (Charles A. Koons), was recruited to run for selectman by First Selectman Jayme Stevenson and Susan Marks, and all three are supporting each other as a (currently unofficial) ticket for the GOP Caucus on Monday night.
Kip
Kip Koons, a candidate for a seat on the Board of Selectmen.
The business consultant and just-about lifelong resident (he moved to town as a young child), said he was speaking with Stevenson after an April meeting of the Board of Selectmen in which state Sens. Bob Duff and Carl Leone gave the board what he considered a weak response to local concerns about state meddling in what are traditionally town concerns like zoning in the business districts.
“My first task is to assist First Selectman Jayme Stevenson in maintaining a lean, responsible form of government,” Coons said in a recent interview. He then quoted from his statement to the Republican Town Committee on the night he was endorsed. He said he would work with Stevenson for “a lean, accountable and responsible Republican form of government in Darien while supporting programs and initiatives that are responsive to the changing needs of the citizens.”
Second, he said, he wants to monitor the significant commercial developments that have been proposed (or are expected to be proposed soon) — two of them in the Noroton Heights business district and the other for the Post Road/Cobin Drive block in downtown Darien.
Third, he wants “to protect the town from these continuing attempts from the state […] taking away local control.” He said he’s concerned that a total of 17 percent of the town budget is used to pay for mandates from state government.
When the state isn’t mandating the town to do various things, it’s “directly overriding local prerogatives, such as the proposed Transportation Corridor Development Authority,” he said. That proposal from Gov. Dannel Malloy would have created a state agency that could take land through eminent domain and override local zoning laws, Koons said.
Koons and his wife, Joan, have three grown children.
As a business consultant who helped companies turn-around into profit-making enterprises, sometimes recommending and helping to implement restructuring, Koons said he has experience in working together with people to make big changes and make them work.
After getting his masters in business administration and law degree, he worked in commercial lending for Chemical Bank of New York, as a turnaround officer for a small telecom business owned by venture capitalists, then for almost 20 years with American Maize Products, controlled by the Zeigler-Steinkraus family of Darien (although he didn’t know the family before working for the company). He left his job there as vice president for corporate development and planning and started his own consulting business, Maywood Advisors.
His work in the past seven years has been exclusively for one client, GarMark Partners in Stamford, where he serves as a senior financial advisor helping the private capital fund’s own clients — small-to-medium-sized businesses that need loans or want to sell equity in their companies.
Koons also has an extensive background of membership on boards of directors of various nonprofit organizations. He’s been either president or vice chairman of the boards of the Darien YMCA, Darien Red Cross (since merged into a larger organization), Wee Burn Country Club and Family Centers Inc.
His career in business and service on volunteer boards has given him experience in listening and acting as well as motivating people, as well as dealing with budgets, he said But he’s never run for office or held a government office, until now.
“I’m into it, really, because I think the town needs as much leadership as it can get,” Koons said. “Most of my friends think I’ve got to be nuts [to get involved]. Maybe I am.”