Melissa Bailey Photo
Future buds? Malloy and DeStefano share a stage at this weeks “New Haven Promise” schools event.
Michelle Turner Photo
Hopkins: “New Haven needs to be heard.”
The city that gave Gov.-Elect Dan Malloy his margin of victory knows what it wants in return. The list might surprise those familiar with campaign IOUs.
Democrat Malloy beat Republican Tom Foley in last week’s gubernatorial election (which stretched out to this week thanks to ballot-counting bungling) by a mere 5,637 votes.
New Haven gave Malloy his largest vote total—22,298 — and largest margin of victory, 18,613 votes. That was approximately 5,000 more than the margin in his next most favorable city, Bridgeport.
And Malloy swept New Haven without the help of the local Democratic machine, whose leaders, including longtime Malloy opponent Mayor John DeStefano, largely sat out the election. A team of City Hall outsiders pulled the vote for Malloy. Malloy promised some of those organizers as far back as the summer primary that if he becomes governor, they’d be his go-to people in New Haven.
Malloy’s exact words at the time: “When it comes to New Haven, you are the faces I see. When it comes to New Haven you are the leadership I believe in. When it comes to New Haven, you are the people I will return to to make decisions.”
Those organizers, like Dixwell activist Lisa Hopkins, are preparing to call in that debt.
“We kicked ass over every other city in the entire state,” Hopkins said Thursday. “We worked hard. So the voice of New Haven needs to be heard.”
Malloy said Thursday night that he agrees with New Haveners’ requests and hopes to fulfill as many as possible — while facing a looming $3.3 billion (and counting) deficit.
Hopkins said she’s looking for Malloy to put women and blacks and Latinos in top positions and to support job-creation and job-training programs in fields like biotech and construction. “I want to see things for regular folk,” she said. “No hidden agendas. No cloak and daggers.”
Paul Bass Photo
Holder-Winfield at Malloy campaign HQ on Whalley Avenue on Election Day.
Another key Malloy supporter in New Haven, State Rep. Gary Holder-Winfield, was open from the start of the campaign about part of what he was looking for: He wanted a governor who would sign a bill abolishing the death penalty. Holder-Winfield succeeded in getting the legislature to pass such a bill only to have Gov. M. Jodi Rell veto it. Malloy promised throughout the campaign that he would sign such a bill—even when that position threatened to sink his candidacy in the home stretch because of the Petit murder trial.
“In addition to that, I’m looking for a governor who’s responsive to the needs of Connecticut’s major cities. Those are the people who put him in office,” Holder-Winfield said Thursday. “I’m not asking for anything specific. It’s more an approach to doing government. New Haven has a large not-for-profit community that benefits the city. Certain budget approaches could devastate that community.”
Labor union organizers were also a central part of Malloy’s New Haven vote-pulling team. Unions backed Malloy in the hope that, unlike Foley, he’d avoid privatizing state jobs and cushion more of their jobs from upcoming state budget cuts.
West Rock neighborhood vote-puller Honda Smith, who worked hard on the Malloy effort, said she wants Malloy to deliver tax relief to New Haven: Full funding of the Payment in Lieu of Taxes (PILOT) program, which reimburses cities for revenue lost on tax-exempt hospitals and colleges; and state enabling legislation that would allow New Haven to institute a commuter tax, a 1 percent sales tax, and a hotel tax.
In that regard, Smith — and to some extent other Malloy supporters — sounds a lot like Mayor DeStefano, who has been at odds with Malloy ever since Malloy portrayed him as wearing a dress in a particularly harsh 2006 gubernatorial primary campaign ad.
DeStefano has been pushing for years for that state enabling legislation.
Asked on Thursday what his Malloy wish list for New Haven would look like, DeStefano reeled off three ideas:
• A “Coherent Job Strategy” that targeted tax incentives and other economic development programs to industries that have long-term competitive advantages in cities: life sciences and other “knowledge” industries in New Haven; financial services in Stamford and Hartford; manufacturing in Bridgeport and Waterbury.
• A new education policy that “incents and rewards innovation and change” the way the Obama Administration has pursued under Education Secretary Arne Duncan: steering money to local programs that set clear and higher standards, “define accountability and goal-setting,” and improve curriculum, the way Massachusetts has particularly succeeded in doing.
• Helping cities out with two “at-risk” populations. More pre-release programs to help the 25 ex-cons who return to New Haven from prison each week make that transition. More programs for people with “pathological” mental health and substance abuse, to avoid spending more money less effectively on having patients dry out in hospital emergency rooms, for instance, rather than in stronger clinical substance abuse facilities.
“I differentiate [this kind of list]” from [old-fashioned] political things like who gets a judgeship, or who gets $50,000 for a Little League field,” DeStefano said.
Read the list of requests, Malloy said in an interview that he agrees with DeStefano and with the New Haven vote-pullers who worked hard for him.
“Everything you just talked about is in the 76 pages of policy recommendations” that his campaign published, Malloy said. “There’s no body of disagreement.
“I want to deliver as many of these as possible. Doing them all in the first year is impossible” given the yawning budget deficit.