Power Grab? Or Sidewalk Democracy?

The latest fix to the way the city divvies up road-paving and sidewalk repairs has some people celebrating a victory for democracy — and others warning of an aldermanic power play.

The debate took place as a new version of a sidewalk ​“equity” bill was submitted for review this week by the full Board of Aldermen.

The bill passed through the aldermanic Finance Committee last week. It comes up for a final vote by the full board on July 2.

The bill calls for setting up a new committee — two city officials, two aldermen and a civilian chosen by the aldermen — that would control a pot of $1.75 million to pave roads and put in new sidewalks. It would also set aside $160,000 to be divided equally among aldermen for tree-trimming.

The bill addresses a longstanding concern in some circles that City Hall controlled the allocation of sidewalk repairs and paving for political gain.

Click here to read the bill.

In response to the bill, the city asked the board Monday to issue another $160,000 in bonds to pay for the changes suggested by the bill, and to keep trees trimmed in town.

The bill arose from an idea originally put forward by Wooster Square Alderman Mike Smart. He sought to equally divide money for sidewalks, paving and tree removal and trimming between all the city’s 30 wards. He sought to prevent the mayor from using those key city-services as a way of rewarding or punishing lawmakers. The administration has denied that it uses money that way.

The bill calls for spending $100,000 on two studies to create ranked lists of the quality of the city’s roads and sidewalks. The five-person City Resources Allocation committee would use those lists to determine which projects the city should tackle first. The lists would be posted on the city website.

The committee would control $1 million out of $1.4 million allocated towards sidewalks the budget for next fiscal year, which begins on July 1. And it would control $750,000 out of $900,000 set aside for road paving. The rest of the money would be used at the city’s discretion for ​“urgent unforeseeable projects” that ​“pose a public safety risk.”

Other money set aside to leverage state and federal dollars for specific paving projects would remain untouched.

The work builds on a project led by Chief Administrative Officer Rob Smuts in 2009 to grade the city’s roads in effort to create more objective criteria for which ones get paved. Smuts’ department’s website hosts a list of the condition of all streets. You can look up your street in this spreadsheet and also see which ones have been paved.

Smart’s bill seeks to continue that method of grading city streets — but take the control away from the mayor in determining which get fixed.

Dixwell Alderwoman Jeanette Morrison, one of three aldermen who drafted the bill, called it a ​“great opportunity” to bring in a new era of ​“equal distribution” of city services.

In the past, ​“it was just the mayor held the budget and he dictated how it got done. How he did it? Who knows,” she said.

The bill passed by a vote of 6 to 2 at the Finance Committee last Thursday.

East Rock Alderman Justin Elicker gave one of two ​“nay” votes. He took issue with the makeup of the new committee tasked with allocating the money.

As aldermen grappled with how to dish out limited money between neighborhoods, Aldermanic President Jorge Perez made a breakthrough in early May by proposing a simple solution of ​“two plus two.” The idea was to have a committee of two city officials and two aldermen decide how to spend the money.

Then a subcommittee, comprised of Smart and Aldermen Morrison and Evette Hamilton of Edgewood added a plus-one — a member of the public, chosen by aldermen.

Morrison said Tuesday that the panel chose to add a community member in order to have an ​“outside” perspective. The extra person would serve as a ​“neutral body,” she said.

Elicker protested that the new committee leans in favor of the aldermen. He called that no better than the current system.

“Currently, the majority of influence is in the mayor’s hands,” Elicker said. ​“Now, the majority of influence is in aldermen’s hands.”

Downtown Alderman Doug Hausladen, the other ​“nay” voter, agreed.

“We’re replacing one political process with another,” he said in an interview.

Under the proposed system, in order to get a sidewalk fixed downtown, Hausladen would have to lobby two of his colleagues and a member of the public.

“They’re claiming this is a win for the people,” Hausladen said, but it’s ​“not true.”

He said aldermen failed to depoliticize the process. He said he’d prefer to have Smuts’ department give quarterly reports to the aldermanic City Services and Environmental Policy Committee on what work has been done, and what remains, along with the transparent posting of the index of street conditions.

Morrison replied that in the past, the public was not aware of any ​“system” governing how the city decided which streets get paved. She said the new system will be more transparent, and based on publicly available data.

Smart said choice of the fifth committee member would need approval from the Aldermanic Affairs Committee, and would not necessarily always side with the board.

CAO Smuts said Perez’s proposal of ​“two plus two” would give a healthier panel, because both sides would be forced to come to consensus rather than having a three-person majority.

Elicker argued that the fifth panel member should be appointed by the mayor, then approved or rejected by the board, as Congress does with presidential appointments. Smart rejected that idea.

“We want to get it out of the hands of the mayor,” responded Smart Monday.

He pointed to a passage in the city charter — Article 9, Section 45 — that gives aldermen ​“sole authority over all streets.” The city Department of Public Works shall execute all orders from the board regarding ​“paving” and ​“repairs” of streets, the charter stipulates.

CAO Smuts (pictured) raised concerns that the makeup of the committee would give majority power to aldermen, shifting street-paving and sidewalk repair away from the control of licensed city workers and into the hands to politicians.

The system ​“has the potential for abuse,” he said.

Smuts said he has concerns that the goals of ​“fairness, transparency and effective use of taxpayer money” ​“may not be best advanced by how the system is set up.”

Morrison later replied that the city is free to put licensed experts onto the five-person committee that oversees the funds. She said city engineers aren’t the only ones with expertise — aldermen who spend time in their wards every day have a great sense of what needs repair — including the rather straight-forward question of which trees need to be trimmed.

She said the new system will give her something tangible to bring back to her constituents — including a man on Admiral Street, who she said has been begging for new sidewalks for four years.

About The Trees …

Smuts and Elicker also said they were concerned about a missing $160,000 that Smart’s bill would take away from another pot of money and put towards tree-trimming citywide. That number represents the annual cost to the city if each tree-trimmers visited each ward for one week, Smuts said. 

Smart’s bill calls for setting aside that $160,000 for tree-trimming and divvying it up equally between each of 30 wards, so that each ward can see a week’s worth of tree-trimming. The money would come from a $350,000 line item in next year’s capital projects budget, paid for by issuing city bonds. Smuts said the city needs that money for two purposes: $200,000 to maintain the safety of streets by hiring outside contractors to remove large trees that the city’s tree crew can’t handle, and $150,000 for tree plantings, which are usually done by Urban Resources Initiative, a not-for-profit contractor.

Taking $160,000 from that fund would eviscerate URI’s tree-planting budget, Elicker noted.

Smuts came forward with a solution Monday: He proposed borrowing an extra $160,000 in city bonds, and thereby increasing the pot of money from $350,000 to $510,000 to accommodate the request. That proposal will need a public hearing and a separate vote.

Elicker said he doesn’t support that solution. He said aldermen should have found somewhere else to cut if they wanted to take that money away; or they should have requested more bond money in next year’s budget before approving it two weeks ago.

Alderman Smart responded that his subcommittee tried to work out a budget transfer, but were unable to come to agreement with the city. He said his new system would be an open and transparent one, with committee meetings taking place in public, and all the data made public about the conditions of the streets. If a person suspected a street was paved for a political favor, they could look at the list and see objective data about whether that street was in worse shape than their own, he said.

“You’re going to have the data to back up what was done,” he said.

A Chicago Model

Hausladen said in the name of transparency, the city should take a page from Chicago Alderman Joe Moore. In Chicago, all aldermen get $1 million per year for ​“beautification” — the same types of services Smart is focusing on. Instead of making decisions behind closed doors about how to spend that money, Moore chose to take the question to voters in a process called ​“participatory budgeting.”

In doing so, Moore ceded power to his constituents, letting them vote directly on which infrastructure projects to fund. Click here to read more about how the process works. The model, led by a not-for-profit called the Participatory Budgeting Project, has since spread to New York and California— learn more here.

Bringing that model to New Haven streets and trees, Hausladen argued, would be the best way to achieve true democracy.