[Cross-posted at MyLeftNutmeg]

The contest to succeed the retiring John DeStefano as mayor of Connecticut’s second largest city is shaping up as a battle between “establishment” candidates with ties to traditional power centers in the city and outsider figures who have built their own political support bases as reform-minded, activist legislators at the local and state level. In part the difference between the insider candidates (Probate Judge Jack Keyes and former economic development czar Henry Fernandez) and the outsider candidates (State Representative Gary Holder-Winfield and Alderman Justin Elicker) is defined by age: the two outsiders are both under 40, approximately the age that DeStefano was when he took the helm in 1994; while Judge Keyes, with close ties to Martin Looney and elements of the old Democratic Party machine, is in his sixties. (He served several terms as City Clerk when Elicker and Holder-Winfield were still in diapers.) Henry Fernandez is only 44, but he is the candidate most closely associated with the old guard around DeStefano, and most likely to pick up support from the business establishment and other institutional interests that have traditionally bankrolled DeStefano’s campaigns.

The outsiders suffer from the fact, or at least the perception, that they are inexperienced two-term legislators without deep ties to New Haven, both having moved to the city since 2000. Neither has citywide name recognition or an obvious base of support.  Elicker is popular in a largely minority area (Cedar Hill) that he has represented since 2010, and in the most recent municipal redistricting he inherited a heavily Latino area in Fair Haven. But conventional wisdom is that he will struggle in the Latino and African-American communities, which make up more than 50% of the city’s population, without support from clergy, organized labor or other traditional power-brokers. Holder-Winfield’s problem is that he is more popular in progressive activist circles around the state, and better known in the corridors of the state capitol, than he is in New Haven. Many in the African-American community believe he has not “paid his dues” and would prefer a different black candidate, such as Kermit Carolina, principal of one of the city’s largest high schools.

The other fault-line separating the insider and outsider candidates is public financing. New Haven is the only city in the state with a public financing system for municipal elections. Established in 2006, the New Haven Democracy Fund provides both grant and matching funds to participating candidates, while limiting the size of individual contributions to $370 and limiting overall campaign spending. The outsider candidates have been unequivocal in their support for the Democracy Fund; on Thursday Holder-Winfield held a press conference on the steps of City Hall to criticize candidates eschewing the Democracy Fund, and a resolution has been introduced at the Board of Aldermen by an Elicker ally that would call on all mayoral candidates to participate in the clean elections program. Meanwhile, the insider candidates have made lame and unconvincing excuses for not participating, aware that their success may hinge on raising large checks from institutional interests.

Interestingly, after criticizing the Democracy Fund in recent years and declining to participate when he ran for his record-breaking tenth term in 2011, Mayor DeStefano has included $200,000 in his proposed 2013-2014 budget to replenish the fund, suggesting that (like Jodi Rell with the state Citizens Election Program) he recognizes that it is important to his legacy. (Read more about that here.) Philosophically most Democrats believe in campaign finance reform and clean elections; but sometimes they are willing to suspend those beliefs for reasons of political expediency. Despite abandoning the Democracy Fund in 2011, DeStefano still won by double-digits. Will New Haven Democratic primary voters in 2013 be equally indifferent to a blatant display of “situational ethics?”

Finally, racial politics cannot be ignored. Race is an issue in the mayoral contest but only indirectly. The insider/outsider fault-line transcends race: Elicker is white, and Holder-Winfield is black; Keyes is white and Fernandez is Latino. But it is undeniable that Fernandez’s background will help him sew up Latino support; that Keyes and Elicker, though representing different elements of the Democratic Party, could end up fracturing the vote in the wealthier and whiter neighborhoods, benefiting the minority candidates; and that a second black candidate like Kermit Carolina would seriously compromise Holder-Winfield’s ability to win.

Who becomes mayor in 2014 will depend largely on which side can more successfully tarnish its opponents: can the establishment candidates successfully portray the outsiders as inexperienced carpetbaggers, or will the outsiders succeed in depicting the establishment figures as too closely tied to John DeStefano and other power centers that have become irrelevant or discredited. Stay tuned for an exciting conclusion to the Elm City Mayoral Showdown of 2013!  

FLASHBACK: Adolfo Carrion, former Bronx borough president who is now having an amusingly bumpy ride as a Democrat-turned-independent-seeking-the-Republican-nomination New York City mayoral candidate, came to Yale’s Slifka Center in December 2008 for a Shabbat dinner and clumsily “let the cat out of the bag” about being tapped by newly elected Barack Obama for a White House position. I happened to be in the audience at the time.

Community choice aggregation could lower electricity rates and boost renewables at the same time — so why aren’t environmental and consumer groups more excited about it?

Governor Dannel Malloy’s proposal to auction off the right to supply the “standard-issue” retail electricity offer that half of Connecticut consumers still receive is the clearest admission yet that the state’s electricity market deregulation has been a failure. Why else would a company fork out $80 million (the governor’s estimate) for the privilege of being the default supplier if it weren’t a raw deal for consumers?

This inadvertent admission of failure highlights the limitations of the governor’s much-discussed Comprehensive Energy Strategy, which does nothing to redress the flaws of deregulation. New infrastructure for natural gas, the centerpiece of the energy strategy, is aimed at saving money for heating-oil customers, but offers little comfort to Connecticut’s electricity consumers, who pay some of the highest rates in the country. The energy strategy, whose final draft was issued in February, credits Governor Malloy’s policies for a 12% “across the board” drop in electricity prices, but neither asks nor answers why so many ratepayers still receive the standard-issue electricity offer that, while becoming more competitive in recent years, is still inflated by 10-20% above the least expensive offer. Although bills issued by UI and CL&P every month to ratepayers are required to contain a list of supplier offers, many consumers are not aware that UI and CL&P have been out of the generation business since 1998 and are responsible only for the transmission part of your utility bill. Some consumers have the opposite problem: they have been harassed so much by the aggressive and sometimes misleading direct marketing of the retail energy companies that they have simply given up on being diligent consumers and comparing supplier offers. Other ratepayers don’t like the hassle of having a “variable rate” suddenly spike without notification. All of these scenarios of market failure indicate why consumers in the 17 states that have deregulated their electricity markets since the mid-1990s pay an average of 30% more for power than their counterparts in regulated states, according to a 2006 Associated Press analysis of federal data.

In recent years, discussions about reforming deregulation have mostly been a side-show in the political fallout of major blackouts. In the aftermath of two devastating storms in 2011 when UI and CL&P botched their response to widespread power outages, there was a surge of interest in allowing municipalities to establish their own utilities. Legislators asked the Office of Legislative Research for reports on the subject and information sessions were held at the Capitol, which revealed that Connecticut’s six publicly owned utilities not only offer lower rates but also greater reliability in major storm events. The nexus with economic opportunity is unmistakable: municipalities with publicly owned, nonprofit electric utilities such as Wallingford have become desirable locations for manufacturing because of the availability of cheap and reliable electricity. But legislators seeking answers after Irene and Alfred also discovered that Connecticut’s six existing publicly owned utilities were all grandfathered into the current deregulated system; state law and enormous capital costs to acquire distribution infrastructure make it almost impossible to establish new municipal utilities. Instead of major reform, the Two Storm Panel recommended more aggressive trimming of the state’s trees.

While it would not directly affect UI & CL&P, there is an alternative approach to mending the flaws of deregulation that is much simpler to set up, and would accomplish many of the same goals, as converting to public ownership. Under a proposal approved last week by the state legislature’s Energy and Technology Committee (Senate Bill 944), a new pilot program in Bridgeport would enable the Park City to become a “community choice aggregator” for retail electricity, potentially saving residents and businesses millions of dollars a year on their electricity bills and being a boon for the environment in the process. Former Federal Energy Regulatory Commissioner Nora Brownell has called the community choice aggregation (CCA) systems in Massachusetts and Ohio “the only great exceptions to the failure of electric deregulation in the U.S.” Could CCA pilot legislation be the first step in rectifying the glaring failures of Connecticut’s deregulation, too?

By allowing cities to aggregate the buying power of individual electricity customers within a defined jurisdiction, CCA asks the obvious rhetorical question: why should energy traders be allowed to make enormous profits from speculating on energy contracts, when a nonprofit or a municipality can provide the same service at a much lower cost, simply by eliminating the middleman’s marketing expenses and profit margin? Illinois, which legalized CCAs in 2009, has had some of the most dramatic results: according to the US Department of Energy, CCA has already saved consumers in Illinois $300 million, with some CCA communities offering rates for generation that are 30-40% below the standard-issue offer.

While CCA originally gained popularity as a response to the Enron-driven California energy crisis in 2001 (it had been adopted on a very small scale as early as 1997), it has evolved into a mechanism not only for reducing and stabilizing prices, but also for promoting renewable energy and climate protection. In the last five years, almost fifty local governments in California (mostly in the San Francisco Bay Area) have implemented CCA, with virtually all of them doubling, tripling, even quadrupling the percentage of renewables in their portfolios compared to the state’s three investor-owned for-profit utilities. In suburban San Francisco, the Marin Clean Energy Authority offers consumers a 50% renewable portfolio at rates comparable to Pacific Gas & Electric, the regional investor-owned utility, or a 100% renewable portfolio at a $.01/kilowatt-hour premium. In Northeast Ohio, adoption of CCA in one hundred mostly rural towns led to a 70% reduction in air pollution as a result of changes in the fuel mix used by generating assets in the system.

Currently, over one million Americans receive service from CCAs, including customers in Ohio, California, New Jersey, Illinois, Massachusetts and Rhode Island. The number of CCA customers will double when Chicago, where voters approved CCA in a referendum last fall, implements its program. (The primary impetus for adopting CCA in Chicago was the lowering of energy costs, but it is also expected to be a boon for renewable energy there.) Chicago proves that CCA can be adopted not only in suburban and rural areas, but also in urban settings like Bridgeport.

To make the system workable, implementation of CCA requires giving municipal aggregators the ability to add customers on an opt-out, rather than opt-in basis. Does that represent the heavy hand of big government? The 50% of Connecticut ratepayers who still receive the standard-issue offer from UI and CL&P (a percentage that is much higher in the cities) are not choosing to pay uncompetitive rates; they are the victims of market failure produced by a poorly structured deregulation that failed to empower consumers. Saving these ratepayers even half a cent per kilowatt-hour by moving them to a cheaper and cleaner supplier would represent a multimillion dollar stimulus package for the state and its economically deprived urban areas. Dissatisfied consumers are always welcome to opt out of the CCA, or vote out politicians who abuse the program.

The governor’s controversial Comprehensive Energy Strategy articulates the uncontroversial goal of providing Connecticut with “cheaper, cleaner, and more reliable electricity.” Community choice aggregation is never mentioned in the governor’s plan, but it could be just as important a step toward achieving that goal as anything that is contained in the energy strategy. Curiously, neither the governor’s office, nor any of the major environmental organizations or consumer groups, bothered to testify at the public hearing on SB 944 — will they come to regret their indifference, or can this potentially breakthrough legislation succeed despite them?

What is the appropriate compensation for a city council member? At $15,000 Hartford’s nine city council members have the highest compensation of any city in Connecticut, but this is still minuscule compared to the $180,000 salaries of Los Angeles’s fifteen city council members and $112,000 for New York City’s 51 council members. At least within Connecticut, when you account for district size (for at-large councils, computed as the total city population divided by the number of council members) the discrepancy largely disappears: most council members (and mayors, for that matter) get about $1 per constituent, with the New Haven Board of Aldermen the one striking exception at less than 50 cents per constituent. But do Board of Aldermen members in New Haven (who make $2000 a year, $2400 for the Board President — numbers that have not been adjusted since 1988) really work only 1/90th as much as council members in LA, or half as much as Bridgeport?

Currently, charter revision commissions in both New Haven and Hartford are looking at including city council stipends in the charter and indexing them to cost-of-living increases, in an attempt to remove some of the politics and demagoguery that often arise in discussions of legislative salaries, which stagnate because they can only be changed in a public referendum. When Hartford Councilwoman Cynthia Jennings recently proposed raising Hartford council salaries to $90,000 per year, she was ridiculed by editorial boards and bloggers alike. But maybe she has a point. Would Connecticut’s big cities, which have long been bedeviled by poor management and even poorer ethics, attract better legislative talent, be more resistant to corruption, and have better governance outcomes if they paid a full-time wage to city council members and abandoned the old-fashioned notion of citizen legislators?

“The Hill,” a new documentary by film-maker Lisa Molomot, follows a group of African-American neighbors who fight to save their homes from destruction when the city of New Haven proposes a new school on their property.

The $64,000 question in New Haven political circles: what’s up with Jorge Perez? Everyone seems to agree that if Perez were to join the wide-open race to succeed the retiring Mayor John DeStefano, he would be backed by most if not all of the city’s most formidable power centers: he would get endorsements from 90% of the Board of Aldermen, the Democratic Town Committee, the powerful Yale unions as well as the public safety unions. But most observers now believe that Perez has decided against entering the race for mayor. While reporting that Perez had officially not made up his mind, the New Haven Independent reported that “over the past two weeks, many New Haven politicos—including some who were reserving their support for him—have concluded he will not run.” Nobody knows what is going on in Perez’s head, and decisions about whether to give up your current job (in addition to his political role, Perez is a banker at the New Haven-based Bank of Southern Connecticut) and run for higher office always consist of many factors. But most people believe Perez just doesn’t have the fire in his belly, and having rarely run a competitive race during his two decades as an elected official, maybe he’s just gotten a little soft, a little too conflict-averse for a three-, four-, of five-way mayoral dogfight.

According to Only in Bridgeport, four members of Bridgeport’s nine-member Board of Education have become openly antagonistic towards interim schools Superintendent Paul Vallas, and the Working Families Party (which has three members on the school board) is now going door-to-door in their campaign against Vallas, circulating a negative flyer about him and asking residents to sign a petition requesting his removal.

Hartford’s Board of Ed has also seen its fair share of squabbling in recent years, both internally among board members and between the board and superintendent. Hartford has a hybrid board of education consisting of both elected and appointed members.

Whether you see the dissension and rancor currently on display in Bridgeport as a sign of healthy disagreement or dysfunction probably determines whether you think school board members should be elected or appointed.

New Haven is the only Connecticut municipality with a fully appointed school board.

Why was this New York attorney testifying at a New Haven charter revision commission meeting?

Although the charter commission has already concluded its four public hearings, New York lawyer Harry Kresky received a “special invitation” to travel to New Haven and tell the charter commission that it should adopt some form of nonpartisan elections in order to open up the political process to non-Democrats, who make up about 40% of New Haven’s voters. Nonpartisan local elections are standard practice in much of the country, and in 2012 California adopted the nonpartisan blanket or “top-two” primary for state and congressional elections as well. The only problem is that changing our election rules is almost certainly not permissible under Connecticut state law, as commission counsel Steve Mednick informed commissioners following Kresky’s testimony. (State law is very restrictive when it comes to election reforms — or at least that is how the Connecticut courts have interpreted state law.) The charter revision commission is operating on a severely compressed time schedule — charter commissions have a maximum of sixteen months to complete their work, but New Haven’s has been directed by the Board of Aldermen to do it in four. When you are operating under significant time constraints, why would you give a special invitation to an out-of-state lawyer to testify in favor of something that the charter commission is clearly not authorized to do? The answer to that question can be detected from the local contact on a press release from IndependentVoting.org announcing Kresky’s testimony: none other than former alderman Darnell Goldson, a “No Labels” supporter and advocate of nonpartisan elections who happens to be BFF with charter revision commission chairman Michael Smart.

Nonpartisan local elections are generally considered a “best practice” in good-government circles, but they are certainly not without perversities and unintended consequences. A recent story in LA Weekly explores a peculiar and somewhat tawdry institution in California politics that is a direct outgrowth of nonpartisan elections, i.e. the slate mailer. In 2012 GOP senate candidate Linda McMahon attempted to delude New Haven voters by associating herself with President Obama. Her cynical ploy failed miserably, but with nonpartisan elections that sort of trickery would be commonplace.

Correction: Alderman Rodriguez is Exploring a run for City Town Clerk