Toppled: Esserman, Black, Harries.
(News Analysis) For the third time in three months, a top city official was hounded out of office — the latest shape-shifting in a new era in New Haven power politics.
Superintendent of Schools Garth Harries was the latest casualty, getting his walking papers just this week. Mayor Toni Harp’s administration called out the troops who showed up at a Board of Education meeting to help Harries keep his job in the face of calls for his head by board members, retired administrators and parents. But by the evening’s end, even the mayor’s supporters voted in favor of a deal to pay Harries to leave office Nov. 1, 20 months before his contract expires.
A similar deal was struck Sept. 6 to pay Police Chief Dean Esserman $99,500 to leave office 17 months before his contract ended, after widespread protests by rank-and-file cops and community activists.
The Harp administration’s apparent choice to become the new fire chief didn’t even complete an “interim” period in office before a union president’s persistent public attacks drove him to drop his name from consideration for the permanent spot. He stepped down July 8.
Each of these episodes, especially Esserman’s, involved factors specific to their departments and personalities.
But they all occurred in part because of changes in who runs New Haven, and how. The upheavals at the three government services with which citizens interact most directly can be traced to a political transformation that began in 2011.
What happened in 2011?
That year, New Haven’s most effective vote-pulling force, Yale’s UNITE HERE locals, turned their attention from electing governors, senators and presidents to taking over New Haven’s Board of Alders (then named the Board of Aldermen).
The campaign was years in the making. Inspired by a Los Angeles community-labor organizing effort, the UNITE HERE locals canvassed city neighborhoods to find out what issues people cared about most. They cultivated a platoon of candidates with roots in the community and, in many cases, connections to UNITE HERE or other unions.
The campaign grew out of complaints UNITE HERE heard whenever it sought community support for its contract battles with Yale, New Haven’s largest employer. The complaint: You only come around when you need something. It wasn’t enough to argue that better wages and working conditions at the city’s largest employer helped fight poverty and stabilize New Haven. The solution was to develop a broader progressive agenda in partnership with the grassroots and then elect people to put it into action.
The results were staggering. UNITE HERE already had deep support on the 30-member Board of Alders. With the campaign, 15 UNITE HERE-backed candidates won Democratic primaries for alder. Only one lost (and he two years later became part of the team).
The candidates promised more open government, more democracy, more local jobs, a return to community policing, a rebuilding of neighborhood youth centers. The platform resonated with voters.
Then, in early 2012, a UNITE HERE slate swept primaries for Democratic Town Committee seats. It was official: Its team now controlled the local party.
In a closed-door UNITE HERE mass meeting, Local 35 President Bob Proto could proclaim that UNITE HERE’s “control” of local politics enabled it to reach a new contract from Yale six months early, without a strike.
What happened when they took office?
Even before the new alders took office, then-Mayor John DeStefano reacted to the primary victories by bringing in a new police chief — Esserman — with a mandate to bring back community policing.
In office, alders set to work establishing a new center with Yale and corporate leaders to steer unemployed New Haveners into jobs. They also drew up a citywide plan for new youth centers; the state eventually came through with money to build a new Dixwell Community “Q” House.
Despite fears that “labor” would now run government and open the trough to city workers, UNITE HERE did not form an alliance with teachers’ unions or municipal unions. They didn’t go to bat for the unions in negotiations or budgeting. The alders intervened only when UNITE HERE’s specific interests were at stake — holding up a deal to sell an unused city property to a charter school until they won some unionization promises, not for teachers, but for cafeteria workers.
The rap on the new alders was that they would jack up taxes to pad union salaries. In fact, they succeeded in having the city avoid tax increases.
The alders also rewrote the city charter, New Haven’s constitution, then convinced voters to ratify the changes. The changes took some power away from New Haven’s historically strong mayor’s office and gave it to the alders: Alders would now, for instance, have to confirm any new mayoral appointments for police chief or fire chief or development administrator. And they added two new elected positions to New Haven’s Board of Education, which had been the state’s last fully mayorally appointed school board.
This was all seen as a slap at Mayor John DeStefano, who ruled the city for 20 years with an iron hand. DeStefano saw that he was next in the new team’s sights. Under DeStefano, New Haven had seen two decades of political continuity and stability. Rather than fight for survival and perhaps leave a loser, DeStefano announced his retirement in 2013.
What was wrong with stability?
To some people, nothing. Developers and architects and construction companies knew whom to pay off with campaign contributions (for mayor, for governor in 2006), to get government work. Nobody fought at the Board of Education. New school buildings got built. Yale and the city got along, cooperated on projects, with mutual respect.
To others, “stability” meant stasis. (Click here for an analysis of DeStefano’s tenure as mayor.)
The same schools superintendent stayed in office throughout DeStefano’s term. The smartest political mind in town and a successful fundraiser, he kept DeStefano in power by using the leverage of the city’s largest government bureaucracy to nurture the black middle class and ensure that no independent black politician gained enough support to seriously challenge DeStefano, a white politician who had lost his first race for office (in 1989) to a black candidate supported by education interests. Patronage and political loyalty trumped competence when it came to important hiring decisions, even if that meant allowing the education offered at, say, a leading high school to deteriorate.
While the mayor’s Board of Ed rubber-stamped all directives without challenge or debate, beautiful new school buildings went up. But the education that took place within them, despite heroic efforts by many teachers and principals and students, was by all measures producing dismal results. Even DeStefano admitted as much when, eyeing his legacy toward the end of his term, he declared that he would upend how the schools did business and initiate a nation-leading reform drive.
The fire department had stability, too. One chief, Michael Grant, for more than a decade. Meanwhile, racial divisions simmered; overtime reeled out of control.
The police department did not have stability. When Esserman arrived, he was the department’s fifth chief in five years. The department had largely abandoned the arrest-as-last-resort, partnership-building community policing approach that had steadily cut crime in the 1990s. Murders and shootings, especially of young African-Americans, were climbing steadily back to pre-community policing levels.
DeStefano also had his clashes with corporate leaders (like his crashing of a United Illuminating press, in the above video; and high-profile opposition to the demutualization of the old New Haven Savings Bank).
Until his retirement, the DeStefano camp believed only one other politician in town could match his popularity and, at least until 2013, pose a strong enough threat to unseat him. But that politician, State Sen. Toni Harp, was happy in Hartford. She never took him on.
And she decided at first not to seek the seat when it opened in 2013 and a crowd of other candidates rushed in. UNITE HERE and other allies prevailed on her to change her mind. She won the 2013 mayoral election, but with less of a margin than expected. Another new, unorganized electoral force emerged in town — newer New Haveners, in many cases, more suspicious than other voters of party organizations and labor unions.
Harp promised a new style of government — more inclusive, with policy crafted in collaboration rather than set in City Hall and rammed through boards and commissions. With decades of experience as a legislator rather than an executive, she sang the praises of democratic decision-making and promised to be a “partner” with alders.
With a newly empowered Board of Alders and a soon to be partially-elected school board, she would have little choice.
How’d that work out?
Again, depends whom you ask.
The mayor’s office has been able to galvanize wide community support to tackle goals once deemed impossible. It overcame years of Yale interference to get the old Palace theater on College Street reopened as a now-thriving downtown music hall. It tore down the vilified fence separating the West Rock public-housing developments from Hamden (in video). The administration succeeded in getting a state law changed so they could begin building state-funded two-way protected bike lanes, and officials managed to find a solution to seemingly intractable division between the plan’s proponents and opponents. The mayor personally convinced state agency heads to allow probation and parole officers and child-protection workers to share information with city teachers and school administrators and cops in order to help teens in trouble stay out of jail and in school. These aren’t small matters.
The alders, as expected, have flexed their muscles. At times they fought with the mayor’s office. One year Harp’s administration failed to get approval for a new state-funded school on the Southern Connecticut State University campus, then got it passed the next year.
Its original agenda in parts passed, the alders didn’t come up with a new agenda. And decision-making, rather than becoming more open and democratic, went dark and opaque. Board meetings lasted mere minutes. All discussions took place behind closed doors. Board leaders rarely gave genuine interview with the press to explain decisions. Instead, UNITE HERE-backed alder leaders mimicked their foes in Yale’s administration by issuing vague, content- and fact-free press releases, but rarely actually responding toquestions.
That left people guessing. Especially when labor relations took a turn for the worse on Yale’s campus as talks neared on a new contract. Suddenly alders were for months, or longer, holding up development projects that seemed to have little or nothing to do with Yale labor interests. One project in the Hill had nothing to do with Yale. The alders said they were using development approvals as a chance to bring legitimate grassroots parking concerns to the fore, but often the meager results they produced seemed to have little connection to the larger tax and building-permit revenue, job creation, and neighborhood development at stake for the city.
Meanwhile, the poisoned campus labor relations helped sour the relationship between Yale and City Hall, for better or worse. Yale’s administration reverted to its 1980s form of responding to every union provocation with over-the-top attacks on any politician daring to stake even a middle ground. Suddenly the mayor and other top city administrators were not invited to a downtown groundbreaking or a Yale presidential press conference called specifically to attack top elected officials. Yale even threatened to destroy the city’s credit rating by delaying an annual payment in order to retaliate against UNITE HERE alders.
Unlike the Board of Alders, the Board of Education saw its own public meetings grow longer with newly elected members on it. They argued for hours, insulted each other, and squabbled over assistant principal appointments. At least one respected new hire changed her mind about entering that environment.
However, the ed board, too, closed the door on the public. It started holding executive sessions that kept the public waiting two, three, four hours for a public session.
What some viewed as “politics” and “obstruction,” others viewed as a democratic corrective to decades of rubber-stamping. In this view, the board has offered needed oversight of a superintendent who didn’t come from the classroom or the local school system and had too many ties to the charter school movement. The long public meetings and insistence on following procedure were viewed as checks on power.
Superintendent Harries saw public opposition kill a plan to have the Board of Ed pay a charter group to start a new supposedly joint school. An effort to divide Hillhouse High School into smaller specialized mini-schools fell apart amid both programmatic opposition and clumsy communication.
Harp took control of the school board, vowing to bring about needed change by advancing early-reading programs and working through the division. The two camps on the board entered into a form of marriage therapy — and continued fighting more than ever.
Harp also vowed to bring change to the fire department. Her administration succeeded in dramatically reducing overtime, for instance. But, in part due to labor relations missteps, it was mired in as many parochial fights as ever, with factions feeling emboldened. That was clear when retired firefighter Ralph Black returned as the interim chief and candidate for permanent chief. Administration officials worked closely with him on continuing improvements. But fire union President Frank Ricci asserted that Black wasn’t following procedures for, say, timing the announcement of a promotion. Ricci crashed press conferences, kept up the pressure, and Black retreated.
What about the police?
While New Haven’s political waters churned, Esserman for years remained above the fray. His strong management, combined with good work by his cops, had kept crime down, even as it rose in some other cities. With a few exceptions — including a deep-seated aversion to the First Amendment and citizens’ rights to hold police accountable — the department enjoyed broad public support. And real change happened: Walking beats were renewed, gang intelligence was buttressed, social-service partnerships were renewed, cold cases were cracked. Violence went down.
Like any chief, Esserman made enemies. Especially when making change. But they alone couldn’t bring him down.
His own personality problems could — never-ending insults and threats to his own rank and file and members of the community at large. Those problems grew to the point that the chief berated the Secret Service and threatened to pull local police protection for visiting First Lady Michelle Obama, all because he didn’t get an immediate answer about his place in the motorcade. His accumulating discipline problems rendered him unable to discipline a high-ranking cop who repeatedly violated department rules and, in the view of one investigator, the law, in how she dealt with immigrants and a citizen photographing the police. Esserman could no longer direct his force to follow the basic tenets of community policing — respecting and earning the trust of the community.
So it wasn’t just old-school cops resistant to change who wanted Esserman out. All factions of the department supported a no-confidence vote, and community members rallied, too, to see him leave office.
Focused on results, Mayor Harp was his last defender. She didn’t want to see him go. Focused on results — improved graduation rates and test scores, lower absenteeism — she was Harries’ last defender, too. In the new New Haven politics, the mayor’s support did not carry the day.
So … is this democracy? Chaos? Change?
Markeshia Ricks Photo
Board of ed at a “healing retreat”: It didn’t go well.
So to supporters of strong central authority and limited democracy, New Haven is in a state of chaos.
Others would point out that for all the drama, at least for now the police department is running well. The fire department has made progress and has a new chief with apparent support. The school system is a mess, with plenty of bright spots. It has been a mess, with many bright spots, since the late 20th century.
Defenders of democracy would point out that, for all the drama, endangered development projects all eventually got approved. Developers continue to seek to build here, without public aid. Important school decisions must now be discussed in public. Plans do often improve, or have better chances to succeed, if more members of the community weigh in. And, most of all, New Haven’s most powerful institution, Yale, doesn’t get to set the rules for how government makes decisions. And taxes haven’t gone up.
The best solution to a struggling democracy, goes one argument, is more democracy.
Other defenders of democracy would argue that the barricade-busters of the past five years have in some ways retreated to the same dark corners of privacy to which they promised to bring light.
As for change — is charter school-oriented policy “change”? Is teacher-driven policy “change”? Is labor-oriented policy geared to the interests of working families “change”? Or is it a cover for not “labor’s,” but one important union’s, workplace interests?
For all of the daily drama in the soap opera of New Haven politics, what matters to most voters is how chaos or democracy or change or stability affects safety on the streets, the size of their tax bills, the quality of the education their children receive.
And for all the maneuvering by different political interests for the past five years, their broader agendas on that score aren’t always clear. The labor-backed alder majority, for instance, has never weighed in on the big questions of education policy. Instead they’ve gone to court with the Harp administration over the length of terms of school board members.
The next months will continue as a choose-your-own-adventure story in New Haven politics: What happens next will constitute “chaos” or “democracy” or “stability” depending on who defines those terms, and how.
Harp has chosen new leaders who have made promising first impressions at the police and fire departments. The alders have just invited the public to help them craft an updated agenda. The Republican Party has issued its own new agenda. The Harp administration is promising to bring new efficiencies to the fire department, update community policing, and turn New Haven into a “city that reads.” In the end, the fate of those agendas will determine whether political upheaval produces positive change or more of the same in a new package. For all our mishegas, New Haven has been Connecticut’s city on the move, a place where people who care keep scheming and dreaming.