Zoom
Alders listen in on Monday’s Finance Committee virtual hearing.
Over 50 New Haveners packed the latest city budget hearing and turned it into a nearly four-hour referendum on Yale’s local response to the Covid-19 crisis so far.
Their assessment? Not good enough.
That critique emerged again and again Monday night during the Board of Alders Finance Committee’s third and final public hearing on Mayor Justin Elicker’s proposed $569.1 million general fund budget for Fiscal Year 2020 – 2021 (FY21), which starts July 1.
Because City Hall remains closed to the public during the sustained local state of emergency around the novel coronavirus outbreak, the three-hour-and-forty-eight-minute meeting took place online via the Zoom teleconferencing app.
Just as at during the previous virtual public budget hearing, most of the 56 public school teachers, students, parents, labor advocates, and other New Haveners who testified Monday focused their comments on Yale’s immense wealth and its state-sanctioned, tax-exempt nonprofit status.
They called on alders to step up pressure on the university to use more of the money that it does not have to pay in taxes each year to bolster the city’s ailing, property tax-reliant general fund and public school budgets.
Click here to read the university’s response to similar lines of critique, which notes the taxes it does pay on its commercial properties as well as its voluntary financial contributions to the city and the community programs like New Haven Promise.
That earlier hearing took place on March 31, just two weeks into the city’s Covid-19 pandemic.
Over a month and ten days later, city finances are reeling from plummeting revenue. Dozens of disproportionately black and brown locals have died and thousands have gotten sick. Public schools remain closed with all instruction moved online.
Meanwhile, those who tuned in to testify Monday night sharpened their critique of the university to cover what they described as delayed and insufficient action to help its home city during its time of need.
“Yale has the resources today to contribute far more to meeting the needs of our city during this emergency,” said Edgewood Democratic Ward Committee Co-Chair Art Perlo.
“Power concedes nothing without a demand,” he said, quoting 19th century abolitionist orator Frederick Douglass. “In that spirit, we say to Yale: ‘Your neighbor’s house is on fire, and you have a hose. Don’t worry about your water bill.’”
“Yale is working with the city to get through the pandemic together and will continue to do so,” university spokesperson Karen Peart told the Independent by email Monday night.
She linked to this webpage, which provides a comprehensive overview of Yale’s efforts to date to support New Haven during the Covid-19 pandemic.
Those efforts, according to that list, include 1,400 clinical faculty in the Yale School of Medicine serving as front-line health care providers and treating patients at Yale New Haven Hospital; the creation of a “Yale Community for New Haven” fund, to which the university has contributed $1 million towards a fundraising goal of $5 million; the creation of a field hospital in Payne Whitney Gymnasium’s Lanman Center; Yale School of Public Health faculty and students volunteering with the city on its contact tracing program; the suspension of rent in March and April for over 100 city businesses located in university-owned buildings; the continued employment and payment of the 6,000 New Haven residents who work at the university; and the opening up of 500 beds on campus for local first responders and hospital personnel to stay in. Peart said that a total of 29 first responders and local funeral home workers are currently staying in the university’s dorms.
Almost every one of the 56 people who testified Monday night acknowledged that Yale has contributed some to support New Haveners during the Covid-19 pandemic. But what it has done, they said, pales in comparison to what it could do as a university that recently posted a $30 billion-plus endowment and a roughly $90 million annual operating surplus.
Furthermore, they said, some of the university’s highest-profile actions of support to date —l ike the opening up of dormitories for first responders — came only after public outcry at its initial intransigence.
“In recent weeks, as the crisis deepened, Yale has cried poor while sitting on David Swensen’s $30 billion endowment,” testified Andrew Giering, a third-generation New Havener and Yale Law School graduate. “Instead of stepping up to the plate, Yale is using New Haven’s budget crisis, and the Covid-19 crisis, to step back and claim that it’s already done all it can. Yale is washing its hands of New Haven.”
Connecticut Students for a Dream community organizer and Beaver Hills resident Anthony Barroso agreed. He said he has seen firsthand through his work with the Semilla Collective that hundreds, likely thousands, of undocumented immigrants in this city are in desperate need of food and financial assistance during this crisis.
“Yale University has never been so wealthy,” he said. “This is an opportunity for Yale to turn the page” and start a new relationship with the city it’s called home for centuries.
“For me, I don’t understand how Yale can say that it’s doing enough,” said Alex Guzhnay, a Fair Haven high school senior who said he will be attending Yale on a full scholarship next year.
“Pressure by the New Haven community on Yale really does work,” he added, urging the alders and the city to press Yale for more.
“Philanthropy can be a useful band-aid, but it does not meet New Haven’s real needs,” said New Haven Public Schools Advocates leader and parent organizer Sarah Miller. She called on the university to help the public schools with adequate funding for a librarian and nurse in every school, as well as toilet paper and art supplies that teachers don’t have to pay for out of their own pockets.
“It’s time for them to admit that there is enough to actually help the community thrive,” said local landscaping business owner Jayuan Carter.
“We should no longer continue to fight on words of, ‘There’s not enough.’ There is enough.”