A Case For Elicker

(Opinion) A young person moves to New Haven to attend graduate school at Yale. They fall in love and get married. They buy a house in an affluent neighborhood. They start a family. They discover a passion for policy and politics and run for alder. With a forceful determination tempered by a quiet and reserved style, they win a seat and successfully represent their ward. They have day jobs in management at a major New Haven nonprofit, and successfully lead their organization for several years. In 2013, they run for mayor of New Haven.

This story outlines the lives of both Toni Harp and Justin Elicker. Obviously, there is much that differentiates these two people, but it’s important to remember their similarities, and how similar their relationship to New Haven is in many respects.

I supported Justin in 2013 and I support him now, but I admire Toni Harp as well. If you’re reading this, it’s likely that you, too, care about this city and its future, and I hope that you also find reasons to admire both of our mayoral candidates. They’re heroes to me because they’ve chosen public service as their career, and they’ve learned to do it well.

In 2013, we didn’t know what kind of mayor either of them would be. In 2019, we have a pretty clear idea about Toni Harp. She’s achieved some important things — notably, we’ve seen a sharp decrease in the number of youth who have died by gun violence in the past six years. In addition, the downtown development that took off under John DeStefano has continued apace. Still, she’s made some critical mistakes, and she simply hasn’t been the great mayor the city needs.

Jason Bartlett and Carol Birks should never have been chosen for the important jobs they hold. They have done more harm than good. Better-qualified candidates must have been available for both positions; we know they were for superintendent. Mayor Harp’s insistence that they were the right people for those jobs damaged important city institutions, particularly the public schools. Alongside public safety, education is the most crucial service the city provides its residents, and it’s where New Haven spends the majority of its money.

In budgeting, the mayor has been penny-wise and dollar-foolish: she has borrowed millions of dollars to pay interest on existing debts, an unsustainable shortcut that will make our future debt payments far more onerous. Raising the actionable level for lead detected in the blood of New Haven’s most vulnerable residents and cutting the number of inspectors to save money was a mistake with an enormous impact, both on the children affected and the city budget when the lawsuits are settled. LCI’s failure to enforce smoke detector regulations on a landlord in the Hill cost two lives in May. While that error can’t be directly blamed on the mayor, it suggests that LCI inspectors are overworked or under-resourced to a critical degree. 

The population of New Haven is roughly equal parts black, white, and Latinx; we are lucky to live in the melting pot of national legend, but it sometimes seems that those communities barely speak with each other. The sense of division that Trump has fostered and exploited in the nation is present here, too, though there are very few fans here of the President or the once-great party that now cowers behind him. It may not be possible for the mayor to heal those divisions or even to get New Haveners talking with each other across the visible and invisible boundaries of race, class, and neighborhood, but I’d like to feel that he or she was trying. I haven’t gotten that feeling from Mayor Harp, with whom it is notoriously difficult just to get a meeting.

I am convinced that Justin will do better. He did an excellent job as an alder and as director of the Land Trust, he has run a responsive and creative campaign and, as Mayor Harp did before him, he has bound his life and his family’s into the life of the city — he owns a multi-family house with his wife, and their older daughter started kindergarten at Columbus Academy on Grand Avenue last week. 

We New Haveners are fiercely proud of our city, and at the same time we want it to be better, even if we don’t always know how to make that happen. The Democratic Party has governed New Haven, and its primary has selected the mayor of the city, for 66 years running, since Dick Lee was first elected in 1953. Despite its occasional flaws and errors, the party defines the core political values of our city, and I want New Haven’s Democratic voters to choose a forward-looking person for our next mayor.
If you are a Democrat, go vote on Tuesday, and vote with optimism that New Haven can do better. Vote for Justin Elicker.

Tim Holahan is an NHPS parent and a labor organizing software developer who lives in Westville.