Model for the future: The protected Crescent Street cycletrack.
What the city's cycling network should look like?
Make way for 90 new and upgraded miles of cycling-friendly infrastructure — including a 400 percent increase to New Haven’s protected bike lanes — if the recommendations included in the city’s recently completed “active transportation” plan ever bear fruit.
Bolstered by personal stories and political calls to arms, over two dozen affordable housing advocates made their final plea for city government to invest tens of millions of dollars in federal pandemic-relief aid into more, better, and cheaper shelter.
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Laura Glesby |
Jul 11, 2022 8:56 am
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Darrisha McIver outside the Barbell, where she competed in double dutch, acted in plays, and got her first job.
Visions for a revived community center glimmered in Trowbridge Square alongside the fireflies, as alders, city officials, and Hill neighbors discussed the future of the building that once housed the Barbell Club.
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Thomas Breen |
Jul 6, 2022 1:55 pm
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Jacobson takes the oath Wednesday.
With a promise to build back community trust in local law enforcement by reducing crime while respecting the residents cops serve, Karl Jacobson was sworn in as the new chief of the New Haven Police Department (NHPD).
The city made its bid for a potential spot in U.S. diplomatic history Tuesday, as alders voted unanimously in support of a nonbinding resolution urging President Joe Biden to resume an Obama-era rapprochement with the Caribbean island nation.
Jacobson after vote with board Majority Leader Richard Furlow.
Cops who showed up to support Jacobson Tuesday night.
The Board of Alders voted unanimously to confirm Karl Jacobson to become the city’s next police chief, praising him for integrity, humility, and community connections — and calling him the leader needed at a time when “a healing has to take place between the community and the police department.”
“Two incidents that were terrible. … Both incidents are not an example of what we want police to be.”
The assistant police chief offered that assessment of how New Haven officers’ treatment of Richard Cox earlier this month compares to Baltimore officers’ treatment of Freddie Gray in 2015.
Asst. Chief Jacobson and LaQuvia Jones hug after Monday night hearing.
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Members of the public testify in support of Jacobson. First row, left to right: Gwen Williams, Ronnie Huggins, Tracey Suggs. Second row: Lt. Dana Smith, Sgt. Cherelle Carr, Maria Rodriguez. Third row: Rodney Williams, Virginia Spell, retired former Chief and future Yale Chief Anthony Campbell.
Two mothers of homicide victims praised his compassion.
A former police chief praised his humility.
A community organizer praised his authenticity.
A young police officer praised his mentorship.
A man he had once arrested praised him for always showing up, and for always caring.
Those were just some of the accolades heaped on Assistant Police Chief Karl Jacobson Monday night during his confirmation hearing to become the city’s next permanent police chief.
Seth Godfrey recalls FBI visit during testimony Thursday night.
U.S.-Cuba diplomacy was the topic of discussion at City Hall, as alders advanced a measure calling on the president “to build a new cooperative relationship” with the Caribbean nation.
The occasion was a hearing Thursday night held by the New Haven Board of Alders Health and Human Services Committee.
The three alders present — committee Chair Darryl Brackeen, Fair Haven’s Sarah Miller and Downtown’s Alex Guzhnay — heard testimony on a nonbinding resolution to end the U.S. blockade against Cuba and reverse President Trump’s reversal of President Obama’s policy of increasing ties between the two nations.
The Elicker Administration is now looking to pay outside attorneys $159,000 in total in a bid to hold a city-hired contractor accountable for cracking concrete outside of the Canal Dock Boathouse.
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Thomas Breen |
Jun 21, 2022 11:29 am
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Empty storefront at 846 Congress, now approved for residential conversion.
A New Jersey-based landlord won permission to convert two vacant Congress Avenue storefronts into two two-bedroom apartments, in the latest example of property owners around the city seeking to change empty groundfloor places to shop into occupied groundfloor places to live.
Affordable housing activists at City Hall Monday evening.
Should the city spread tens of millions of dollars in federal pandemic-relief aid across a hodgepodge of housing, vocational technical education, youth engagement, business support, and climate resiliency initiatives?
Or should it spend a bulk of that money in a concentrated effort to buy rental properties away from megalandlords and subsidize New Haven’s most struggling tenants?
Alders heard both arguments while deciding how to allocate $53 million of the city’s one-time Covid-relief bounty.
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Laura Glesby |
Jun 13, 2022 9:27 am
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Fair, Esdaile, Spell, and Grady.
Two retired law enforcement professionals and two lifelong activists committed to holding the police accountable arrived at City Hall to receive honors from the Board of Alders for their work on opposite sides of the uniform.
Get ready to remove those ear plugs: If Giovanni Zinn has his way, the city will buy a new garbage truck that lowers the sanitation system’s carbon footprint and that doesn’t emit the signature 5 a.m. screech of its diesel-powered counterparts.
City officials join Quinnipiac Gardens tenants and tenant union organizers for Thursday press conference. According to LCI, Quinnipiac Gardens has no outstanding housing code violations.
(Updated) The mayor and top City Hall housing officials traveled to an apartment complex on the east side of town to promote a newly proposed law empowering tenant unions — and to encourage renters to band together to advocate for fair rent and safe living conditions.
Up next at Long Wharf Theatre (clockwise from top left)?: Model smoking INSA pre-rolled joint; theater's sign on Sargent Dr.; INSA cannabis chocolates; theater's current home in the Food Terminal.
That possible future won a vote of support from an aldermanic committee that greenlit the legal sale of marijuana on Long Wharf — including on an industrial stretch of Sargent Drive where a Massachusetts-based cannabis dispensary hopes to move in to the longtime, soon-to-be-former home of Long Wharf Theatre.
Wildaliz Bermúdez has a vision for New Haven’s Fair Rent Commission: Not just to consider disputes over individual rent hikes, but to piece together a big-picture sense of housing costs and living conditions in the Elm City.
The next time New Haven decides whether to “scoop and toss” municipal debt, a small group of officials will continue to make the call without a broader debate and vote among the full Board of Alders — despite the efforts of a city alder to make a change.
At least, that was the outcome of the latest vote on an effort to change the process by which municipal debt restructurings take place.
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Thomas Breen |
May 27, 2022 3:02 pm
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City Librarian John Jessen.
A decades-long champion of reading and neighborhood engagement who bolstered the public library system’s social services as he led it through a pandemic, City Librarian John Jessen passed away from cancer on Friday. He was 56 years old.
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Thomas Breen |
May 26, 2022 2:06 pm
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Entrance to Wheeler Street waste-transfer site.
A controversial Annex waste transfer station won permission to keep its doors open for another two years — so long as it takes extra steps to cut down on rodents, bad smells, speeding and idling trucks, and inadmissible wet trash.
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Thomas Breen |
May 26, 2022 1:44 pm
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Ed Mattison (center) chairs a 2019 City Plan Commission meeting.
For the past 14 years, Ed Mattison has had as up-close of a view as anyone of New Haven’s changing built environment — and has helped guide that development through countless volunteer hours spent trying to balance the strictures of land-use law with the real-world needs of people and neighborhoods.
It was a good run. Mattison announced Wednesday that, thanks to an obscure and sometimes overlooked city law, he’ll be stepping down from his post on the City Plan Commission to make way for new voices to take the lead.
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Maya McFadden |
May 26, 2022 11:36 am
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Educator Amber Moye at City Hall: New Haven "shouldn't be indebted to a system that doesn't work."
Amber Moye told city lawmakers she and her fellow teachers got a glimpse of how to change the way kids learn to read — how she believes New Haven is ready to follow the state in making the shift.
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Thomas Breen |
May 24, 2022 1:19 pm
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Monday night's full Board of Alders meeting.
Board of Alders map
Newly approved redistricting map.
New district lines for the city’s 30 wards are now locked in for the next decade, now that the Board of Alders has voted unanimously to approve a redrawn map that accommodates New Haven’s recent Census-counted population growth.
At Monday's budget hearing, clockwise from top left: Finance Committee Chair Marchand, Newhallville Alder Avshalom-Smith, city union members filling in the chamber and calling for good contracts, Majority Leader Furlow.
Even in times of apparent fiscal plenty, New Haven’s needs are so great, its fixed costs so persistent, and its coffers so relatively strapped that taxes have to go up.
That argument prevailed Monday night as the Board of Alders approved a final new city budget that cuts the mill rate by over 9 percent, and then phases in new higher property values over two years instead of five.
