New Haven Politics

Proposed Charter Shifts Balance of Power (Slightly) Away From Mayor

Fri, 17 May 2013 16:27:00 -0400

Having approved a final draft report and issued their recommendations to the Board of Aldermen, the fifteen-member charter revision commission appointed last fall has finally completed the first stage of the lengthy charter amendment process. The proposed amendments to the city’s most basic governing document cover a lot of ground, but a connective tissue of the commission’s work has been to re-balance the scales of power between the city’s executive and legislative branches: giving the “Board of Alders” (the new gender-neutral name for the city’s legislative body) confirmation power over all mayoral appointments, including City Plan, Board of Zoning Appeal, and Board of Education (which currently do not require aldermanic confirmation), taking away the mayor’s seat on some boards (under the current charter the mayor is a voting member of all boards and commissions); and changing two seats on the Board of Education from appointed to elected positions.

There are areas where an imbalance is still evident: for example, the mayor’s unusually broad authority to vote on most boards and commissions, and to initiate “removal from office” proceedings against any elected or appointed official. But on top of a newly assertive board of aldermen which has begun to (for example) seek legal advice outside the Corporation Counsel, the proposed charter changes signal a movement towards a more equal separation of powers between the mayor’s office and the legislative apparatus.

The proposed changes actually continues a process of re-balancing that began more than twenty years ago. In 1992, New Haven’s last successful charter revision referendum abolished the mayor-appointed Board of Finance and transferred its budgetary authority to the Board of Aldermen.

It is sometimes assumed that the “strong-mayor” system in New Haven dates back to the 1950s/1960s and the era of hard-charging Mayor Richard C. Lee, who aggressively sought out ways to expedite his urban renewal schemes and transform New Haven into a “Model City.” In fact, Lee’s attempts to reform the charter were largely opposed by members of his own party and rebuffed by voters; to the extent that he gave primacy to the executive branch, it was more a function of what political scientist Robert Dahl described as Lee’s knack for “political entrepreneurship.” As Dahl explained in his magisterial 1961 case study of New Haven politics at midcentury, Who Governs: Democracy and Power in an American City: “We have seen that in the pluralistic political system of New Haven. the political order that existed before 1953 — the pattern of petty sovereignties — was gradually transformed into an executive-centered order. How could this change take place? There were few formal changes in the structure of government and politics. The city charter not only remained unaltered, but as we have seen a proposed charter that in effect would have conferred full legality and legitimacy on the executive-centered order was turned down decisively in the same election in which the chief of the new order was re-elected by one of the greatest popular majorities on record.” In other words, other factors are at play than the language in the charter.

So when Hartford finally went to a strong-mayor charter in the early 2000s, all of Connecticut’s larger cities had become executive-centered systems, but within the context of each city’s own political traditions. Hartford’s nine-member city council, elected at large, was and remains a different kind of foil to the mayor than New Haven’s 30-member board of aldermen.

Good-government groups may disagree over whether strong mayors improve governance outcomes (the nation’s oldest municipal good-government group, the National Civic League, was for the strong-mayor system before it was against it); but for larger cities they have come to be regarded as basically inevitable. The only large American cities without a strong-mayor system are San Jose, California and Texas cities like Austin, Dallas and San Antonio.

An essentially strong-mayor system is here to stay, but within a fairly broad range of variation. It makes senses that at the end of a powerful mayor’s twenty-year reign a newly reinvigorated Board of Aldermen would re-assert itself as a power center equal to the executive. In that sense, it is another sign that DeStefano’s departure is not just the end of a mayoralty but the end of an era.

In politics nothing is permanent. Even if voters approve the charter revision commission’s proposed changes this fall, the question is not whether a charismatic and motivated mayor will one day seek to undo those changes and restore prerogatives of the mayor’s office at the expense of the legislature; the question is when.

The third New Haven mayoral candidate forum will take place in...

Tue, 14 May 2013 12:03:23 -0400

The third New Haven mayoral candidate forum will take place in Westville this Sunday. State Senator Toni Harp, who missed the first two debates, is scheduled to appear. My sources tell me that the organizers asked Mayor DeStefano if he wanted to be the moderator, but he turned them down.

List of Mayoral Debates and Candidate Forums

Tue, 14 May 2013 11:30:35 -0400

2013 NEW HAVEN MAYORAL DEBATES AND CANDIDATE FORUMS

SCHEDULE (best available information):

May 7 - Downtown 6 pm Gateway Community College

May 13 - “Youth Forum” in the Hill, 6:30 pm Boys & Girls Club 253 Columbus Ave

For more information, call 203-789-5614.

May 19 - Westville 4 pm at Davis Street School

This forum will focus on economic development issues.

July 16 - Metropolitan Business Academy (Wooster Square), 6 pm, format TBA

This forum will focus on “safe streets” and neighborhood issues.

Late August / Early September - Details TBA

DeStefano's Long Shadow

Thu, 02 May 2013 13:52:36 -0400

Mayor DeStefano’s influence will continue long after he is gone, not just in the sense that his name is ubiquitous in the cornerstones of city construction projects he has authorized, including dozens of schools rebuilt to the tune of $1.5 billion; or in the sense that he is working overtime to get his name on as many plaques and markers as possible before he leaves office, no matter how little he had to do with the project or achievement in question.

Over the course of his ten terms, Mayor DeStefano has made hundreds if not thousands of appointments to the city’s forty-odd boards and commissions. Every sitting member of every city commission (excluding the Proprietors of the Green, of course) was appointed by DeStefano, and most of them will continue to serve after he is gone. He will re-appoint dozens of board and commission members this year alone; these appointees will continue serving until 2016 or 2017, depending on the length of their terms. (Most boards and commissions have three- or four-year terms — longer than the term of office for mayor and aldermen.) Two Board Of Education members have terms that expire this fall — filling these seats will give DeStefano the opportunity to extend his influence on the Board of Education until 2017. He could even conceivably appoint himself to fill one of those seats. (In 2012 Hartford Mayor Pedro Segarra appointed himself to the school board — Hartford’s charter, unlike New Haven’s, does not automatically give the mayor a vote on the Board of Ed.) DeStefano’s appointments to influential bodies like the City Plan Commission and Board of Zoning Appeals (the latter has five year terms) will continue to serve as late as 2018.

While most board and commission members have terms that expire between May and September, a few commissioners’ terms will expire on 12/31/2013 or 1/1/2014. For example, all four New Haven members of the Greater New Haven Water Pollution Control Authority, whose foreclosure policy and environmental indifference have generated controversy in recent years, have terms that expire at the end of the year — literally moments before the new mayor will be sworn in. Will DeStefano attempt to fill these seats at the 11th hour, or will he let the new mayor make his or her own choices? Will the Board of Aldermen — which has power of confirmation over most appointments, with the notable exceptions of City Plan, BZA, and Board of Ed — stand in the way of any attempt by DeStefano to extend his influence beyond the political grave?

Is Alderman Mike Smart Still Running For City Clerk?

Tue, 30 Apr 2013 17:21:04 -0400

Is Alderman Mike Smart still running for city clerk? He was expected to jump in the race against incumbent Ron Smith, possibly on a ticket with Jack Keyes, until Keyes opted not to run. Smart would have joined his aldermanic colleague Sergio Rodriguez, who is running for clerk unaligned with any of the mayoral hopefuls.

Smart, who has represented Ward 8 (Wooster Square) since 2004, is considered a close ally of the pro-labor political apparatus that came into power in 2011 and 2012. With Toni Harp now in the race, Smart could conceivably be the second fiddle on the labor-backed ticket. On the other hand, a Harp/Smart alliance would make a lot less sense than a Keyes/Smart one in terms of racial and geographic balance, which traditionally has been a primary consideration in constructing a mayor/clerk ticket. (Kermit Carolina is running with Anne Lozon.)

Here is a profile of Smart from 2010 by Andy Ross, a “socially compassionate, fiscally objective” Wooster Square resident who is considering a run for mayor.

The second mayoral debate is scheduled to take place on May 7 at...

Thu, 25 Apr 2013 14:29:50 -0400

The second mayoral debate is scheduled to take place on May 7 at Gateway Community College.

The Dogs That Didn't Bark: Impressions of the First Mayoral Debate

Wed, 24 Apr 2013 15:21:00 -0400

Politics is all about identifying the dogs that didn’t bark. That is certainly the case for the first New Haven mayoral debate of 2013, sponsored by the Yale Democrats last Saturday, which was significant less for what was uttered by the four announced candidates (Toni Harp wasn’t in the race yet, and “exploratory” candidate Kermit Carolina was at the debate but as an audience member rather than a participant) than what was left unsaid. By any reasonable measure, after twenty years in office John DeStefano casts a long shadow over the political landscape, but his name was hardly mentioned by the current crop of Democratic candidates. When New Haven’s longest-serving mayor did enter the discussion, it was in the context of school reform and the return of community policing, both of which the candidates praised. Justin Elicker, who has inherited much of the anti-DeStefano infrastructure that backed Jeffrey Kerekes in 2011, obliquely criticized DeStefano by talking about his frustrations with the school board. But he also effusively praised the pro-immigrant resident ID card program that DeStefano established in 2005 along with Kica Matos, Henry Fernandez’s wife. For his part, Fernandez (who is most vulnerable to charges of running for DeStefano’s 11th term) recently made a somewhat pathetic stab at distancing himself from his former boss by saying that he thought DeStefano was too slow to embrace school reform, and needed to “listen better.” But even that extremely modest level of criticism never arose at the debate, whose few moments of negativity (a.k.a. ‘contrast’) had mainly to do with participation in the Democracy Fund.

The civility towards DeStefano stands in marked contrast to 2011, when challenger Jeffrey Kerekes made a stinging critique of DeStefano the centerpiece of his campaign.

To some extent DeStefano has managed to blunt the attacks of critics and shore up his legacy with his evolution on school reform and community policing, which he resisted for many years before embracing in recent years. But assaults on DeStefano’s record on taxes, transparency, and a host of other issues that Kerekes used to great effect in 2011 seem to have lost their political currency as well.

If the first debate is any indication, the 800-pound gorilla in the 2013 mayoral race is not DeStefano but the labor-backed political apparatus that now controls the city’s political machinery down to the ward committee level. When this apparatus was swept into power in 2011, it was both a symbol and result of the waning influence of DeStefano’s political coalition in the neighborhoods, which now seems to be blossoming into outright irrelevance. Responding to a debate question about working with the Board of Aldermen, Matt Nemerson most clearly articulated the idea of being, as a “progressive businessman,” the right mayoral complement to the revamped Board of Aldermen, but all of the candidates were painfully aware of the need to praise the jobs-and-youth-focused agenda of a legislative body that has emerged as a power center in its own right, with a de facto if not de jure influence equal to the mayor. For these candidates the labor-backed coalition that became ‘the new sheriff in town’ in 2011 is significant in a way that lame-duck DeStefano is not. With nine months left in office, DeStefano is neither popular enough for the candidates to associate themselves with, nor unpopular enough to use as a foil. In other words, he is irrelevant. It is a curious fate for someone who has dominated the political landscape in New Haven for nearly a quarter century.

The other dog that didn’t bark has to do with town-gown relations. Traditionally Yale becomes a punching bag whenever the City faces a major budget crunch, as it does now. The City’s already precarious budget situation could become truly catastrophic if the state eliminates PILOT reimbursements as the governor has proposed. One of the signature accomplishments of both DeStefano and retiring Yale President Rick Levin has been to improve and depoliticize the town-gown relationship, but the potency of the issue has clearly not gone away, as the current Board of Aldermen openly used the threat of holding up Yale development projects and reopening the High/Wall Street lease agreement to help the Yale unions secure generous contracts from their employer last year. The town-gown brinksmanship that some worried would be fed by the rise of the labor-backed political apparatus does not appear to have spilled over to the mayor’s race: none of the candidates have broached the populist bromide of taxing Yale as a miracle solution to the city’s perennial budget problems, and went out of their way to praise the town-gown detente forged under DeStefano and Levin. At the first debate Holder-Winfield said Yale was the only reason that New Haven “doesn’t look like Bridgeport,” which at least one Bridgeport columnist didn’t appreciate. Elicker, who has two Yale degrees, stressed the superiority of town-gown partnership to confrontation, as did Nemerson, who has a management degree from Yale, is married to a Yale professor and was involved with starting Science Park, a partnership involving both the City and Yale. (Fernandez holds a Yale Law degree; Harp attended a Yale graduate program, as did her late husband Wendell. This Yale Alumni Magazine story details the profusion of Yale connections among the candidates.)

Maybe the candidates were merely tiptoeing around the sensibilities of an audience consisting mainly of Yale students. But many Yale students, including the Ward 1 alderwoman, have been involved in pushing a tough line against Yale as supporters of the unions; and surely they are perfectly capable of distinguishing between Yale the self-interested employer and Yale the beneficent institution of higher learning. The fact is that, while all the candidates have made overtures to the Yale unions for support, none of them have stooped to using the kind of populist rhetoric to demonize the city’s largest employer and private landowner that have sometimes been used in labor struggles against Yale.

For many years, New Haven’s political landscape has been paralyzed by a poisonous dichotomy of DeStefano loyalists and haters, with no constructive middle ground, and with an undertow of unproductive rhetoric inflaming town-gown tensions, even as those tensions have generally subsided since DeStefano and Levin began their partnership in the early 1990s. If those aspects of a toxic political culture are at last behind us, the mayoral race of 2013 is truly the dawn of a new era in New Haven politics.

Who Will the New Haven DTC Endorse For Mayor, and Does It Matter?

Thu, 11 Apr 2013 18:21:00 -0400

One of many reasons the 2013 New Haven mayoral contest will be so interesting to watch is that it is the first to be conducted under the backdrop of the new labor-backed party machinery that was swept into power in 2011 and 2012.

The field of candidates is beginning to crystallize, and the party endorsement convention is barely 100 days away, so it is not too early to begin asking: who will gain the support of New Haven’s Democratic Town Committee when it meets on July 27 to endorse a Democratic candidate for mayor? Board of Aldermen President Jorge Perez would have wiped the floor with his opponents, getting the large majorities on the town committee that DeStefano achieved at the height of his influence. But with Perez declining to enter the race, and a crowded field (four declared candidates, one with an exploratory committee, and another expected but undeclared) that seems to grow by the day, the outcome of the DTC convention has become more difficult to predict.

The DTC is made up of 60 people, two ward co-chairs from each of the city’s 30 wards. They are elected in March of even-number years, following the previous year’s aldermanic elections. (It’s not clear if the terms of ward co-chairs will be extended to four years if aldermanic terms are extended under a current charter revision proposal.) The ward co-chairs represent the party machinery at its most grassroots level: they appoint most of the members of the district-level ward committees, and vote to endorse citywide candidates (registrar of voters, city clerk and mayor).

After the watershed 2011 municipal election in which 14 labor-backed candidates knocked off incumbent aldermen, including the sitting aldermanic president, labor and its allies worked in 2012 to elect new ward co-chairs and assert control over party infrastructure at the district level. Labor-backed candidates won most of the nine ward co-chair primaries in March 2012. These fresh faces have amalgamated the DTC into the new political apparatus affiliated with the Yale unions and the labor-backed Connecticut Center for a New Economy (CCNE).

On the surface, the preferred mayoral candidate of this apparatus is unclear – it is easier to say who they will not endorse. Here perception can matter more than reality. Fernandez has strong progressive credentials but is perceived as too close to the old guard around DeStefano. Labor sees Elicker as an unreliable maverick, friendly but not loyal to union interests. Kermit Carolina is an ego-driven longshot with no track record. These disqualifying perceptions may or may not be accurate, but they will be hard to reverse in the next three months.

That leaves State Representative Gary Holder-Winfield and Probate Judge Jack Keyes. One one level Holder-Winfield is a plausible favorite of the new party apparatus: he works for the AAUP union, and has been supported by labor in the past as a counter-weight to the DeStefano machine. But he is also perceived as supporting school reform initiatives that make teachers unions queasy (lately he has been pushing back on the notion that he is too “pro-charter”), not to mention that he could be a more important labor ally by continuing his rising trajectory in the legislature in Hartford.

Keyes — former city clerk, law partner of State Senate Majority Leader Martin Looney, longtime probate judge and old-school Democrat – would seem to be the favorite by default. In his professional capacity, and as the only candidate who has run citywide, Keyes has developed broad (but not necessarily deep) connections across the city, which may give him a head start on sewing up support from a DTC that comprises every neighborhood and ethnic group in New Haven. But it is the Looney connection that could be decisive: Looney’s legislative aide Vinnie Mauro is the Vice Chairman of the DTC, and Looney could be extremely helpful in securing labor backing. According to party by-laws, DTC Chair Jackie James doesn’t get to vote on the endorsement, and has professed neutrality, but she may have tipped her hand when she told the New Haven Independent that Keyes “has great relationships” and “will do very well.” Was she referring to the DTC endorsement, the election, or both?

Even if Keyes (who has not formally entered the race – despite reports to the contrary, some people think he never will) is the frontrunner going into July 27, the DTC endorsement will have marginal impact on the outcome of the race. First of all, a five- or six-way contest favors the candidate with the most enthusiastic followers and the strongest neighborhood base. That would seem to benefit the outsider candidates: Elicker, who enjoys strong support from the politically active East Rock neighborhood and garnered enough small donations to quality for a public financing grant in six days; Holder-Winfield, a favorite of progressive activists; and possibly Kermit Carolina, who showcased his strong base in the African-American community at a recent campaign rally. The other reason the DTC endorsement is unlikely to matter is that, for all the talk of the subservience of the new party apparatus to the CCNE agenda, the endorsement will not be packaged with full-fledged labor support. Without Jorge Perez in the race, the calculus for labor is muddied: why expend financial and political capital for a candidate who, in a crowded field, has a much better chance of losing than winning? In 2011, the CCNE apparatus scored numerous victories at the aldermanic level but stayed out of the mayoral election completely; they may decide to stay on the sidelines again in 2013.

The July 27 endorsement convention will offer an interesting window into the psychology and organizational dynamics of the revamped party machinery in New Haven. What it will not do is determine the outcome of the mayoral election.

Another Alderman Joining the Race for City Clerk?

Tue, 09 Apr 2013 15:24:00 -0400

Word on the street is that Ward 8 Alderman Michael Smart has decided to enter the race for City Clerk, joining Alderman Sergio Rodriguez in a challenge to incumbent Ron Smith for the $50,000/yr, 20-hour-a-week job that is stipulated by state law.

[Alderman Mike Smart]

In the past clerk candidates have run on a ticket with mayoral candidates, but that tradition appears to have fallen by the wayside. The New Haven Democratic Town Committee will hold a convention on July 27 to endorse candidates for mayor and clerk.

Does It Matter If Cross-Endorsement is Confusing to Voters?

Mon, 01 Apr 2013 14:36:00 -0400

Are cross-endorsements confusing to voters, the argument made by Senator Don Williams in promoting legislation that would ban the practice? It is hardly an affirmation of Senator Williams’s bill to admit that the answer is undeniably yes: for most of the congressional and state legislative races where there were cross-endorsements in 2012, there were more “unknown” party votes for the cross-endorsed candidate than votes on the minor-party line. In other words, many voters were confused by the appearance of Chris Murphy’s name in two different places on the ballot and voted for him on both the Democratic and Working Families lines — in fact more voters did this than voted for Murphy on the Working Families alone. This is known as an “over-vote” — while it still counts as a vote for Murphy, it doesn’t count as a vote on the ballot line of either political party. This is extremely confusing for post-election auditors who count ballots by hand for comparison to the machine count. But it also suggests that voters who did vote for Murphy exclusively on the Working Families Party line, or Linda McMahon on the Independent Party line, knew exactly what they doing by eschewing the major-party ballot lines.

[Senator Don Williams]

One could also ask: does it really matter if cross-endorsement is confusing to voters and post-election auditors, when it is not at all confusing for optical-scan machines that actually count the votes, and therefore does not actually lead to spoiled ballots?

Well, remember this whole situation in 2012? Republicans claimed that, according to Connecticut’s ridiculous and confusing ballot position statute, they deserved top position on the ballot because in the previous gubernatorial election Dan Malloy received fewer votes on the Democratic Party line than Tom Foley received on the Republican line. (Malloy’s margin of victory was provided by votes on the Working Families line.) The GOP took the case all the way to the Supreme Court and won. If you think that having the top ballot line really matters, then cross-endorsement matters because it takes some votes away from the Democratic line (if not the Democratic candidate), and voter confusion leading to over-votes takes even more.

Democrats have now ‘solved’ this problem by changing the ballot position law, though not without controversy. If it really wants to adopt the good-government approach, Connecticut should adopt randomized ballot position to eliminate primacy effects.

Senator Williams should be applauded for his efforts to simplify voting, but pursuing this laudable goal by giving voters fewer choices is problematic. The privileges of voters who want more choices should be respected, too.

New Haven Mayoral Race Becomes Battle of Insiders vs. Outsiders; Campaign Finance Takes Center Stage

Fri, 29 Mar 2013 12:52:07 -0400

[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...

Mon, 25 Mar 2013 19:57:50 -0400

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.

A PILOT PROGRAM FOR FIXING DEREGULATION

Mon, 25 Mar 2013 14:15:00 -0400

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?

In His Final Budget, DeStefano Recognizes the Democracy Fund Is Important to His Legacy

Mon, 25 Mar 2013 12:32:00 -0400

Despite criticizing the management and relevance of the New Haven Democracy Fund in recent years, Mayor John DeStefano has generously included $200,000 in all three of his 2013-2014 budget ”options” to replenish the Fund, the state’s only public financing system for mayoral elections. DeStefano had originally supported and participated in the Democracy Fund for several election cycles after it appeared in 2006, but abandoned it when he ran for his record-breaking tenth term in 2011, when he outspent challenger Jeffrey Kerekes 15-1. (In 2011, participating candidates would have been limited to spending $340,000 under the Democracy Fund — DeStefano spent more than twice that.) When asked to justify his abandonment of the clean elections program he had once championed, DeStefano declared that the Democracy Fund had been ”neutered” by the 2010 Citizens United ruling, which legalized unlimited corporate spending on elections.

But perhaps DeStefano’s budget request indicates that he believes the Democracy Fund is not irrelevant after all, and keeping it out of insolvency is important for his legacy?

Mayoral candidate-in-waiting Jack Keyes, despite supporting campaign finance limits in the past, seems to be parroting DeStefano’s rhetoric about the Democracy Fund’s irrelevance. But Citizens United makes the Democracy Fund more relevant, not less: Keyes seems to completely misunderstand the rationale of public financing of elections, which is to create a counter-weight to corporate spending and Super PACs. Is he concerned that the Democracy Fund would hamstring his own pursuit of special-interest money?

New Haven Aldermen are Underpaid, Or Are They?

Fri, 22 Mar 2013 17:56:00 -0400

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...

Thu, 21 Mar 2013 16:53:00 -0400

“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.

What's Up With Jorge Perez?

Tue, 12 Mar 2013 16:18:00 -0400

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.

Since he was first elected to the Board of Aldermen in 1987, Perez has watched as many of his aldermanic colleagues have ascended to higher office: Toni Harp went from the Board of Aldermen to become a powerful state senator and co-chair of the state legislature’s Appropriations committee, Cam Staples rose from East Rock alderman to become co-chair of the Finance, Revenue and Bonding committee in Hartford and mounted a (failed) bid for Attorney General; Roland Lemar has risen to Assistant Majority Whip in the lower house of the General Assembly; Gerry Garcia ran for Secretary of the State. Perez has served several (non-consecutive) terms as President of the Board of Aldermen, but never run for higher office.

Some politicians — for example, Dick Blumenthal, who served as Connecticut’s Attorney General for twenty years before running for higher office — are just congenitally cautious and calculating. You get the feeling they have their eyes on higher office but have trouble pulling the trigger. But with Perez you get the sense there is no great yearning to move up the ladder of political influence, no trigger to be pulled. Despite his longevity on the Board of Aldermen Perez is still a comparatively young man — he turned fifty in 2012. But in politics you only get so many chances. Is Perez still waiting for the right moment, or will he happily watch as the mayoral train leaves the station?

Something You See in Connecticut's Other Big Cities, But Never in New Haven

Fri, 01 Mar 2013 18:34:06 -0500

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 is the Charter Revision Commission Wasting Time on Ideas That Are Clearly Illegal?

Fri, 01 Mar 2013 18:00:00 -0500

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.

Brackeen Jumps The Gun

Thu, 28 Feb 2013 16:37:00 -0500

Within hours after the New Haven Independent reported on Tuesday that Alderman Sergio Rodriguez is “exploring” a run for the 20 hr/week, $50,000/yr city clerk position, his Ward 26 challenger Darryl Brackeen sent out the following statement:

Good Evening Supporters,

I hope this message finds you well. I just wanted to give a quick update on the progress that has been made for the campaign since our announcement in January.

First of all, the news has come that my opponent Alderman Sergio Rodriguez (incumbent) is not running for the Ward 26 seat. Which means that we have cleared a hurdle and the way has been made for our campaign toward a path of victory.

It wasn’t clear whether Brackeen was privy to information about Rodriguez’s plans that hadn’t actually been reported, or whether he had simply misinterpreted Rodriguez’s announcement, but a few hours later Brackeen issued the following statement to supporters:

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

In his defense, at least young Darryl didn’t say that Sergio had died.

Young candidates can be forgiven for making mistakes, but they should also learn to take responsibility and apologize when they screw up royally.