New Crew Has Chance To Make Change

(Analysis) A power vacuum is opening in New Haven. Will newly elected alders help fill it?

Signs of the emerging vacuum were on display in our most recent elections.

On Nov. 2, five new alders were elected to the Board of Alders. All ran based on coalitions they built with their neighbors; none were recruited or backed by the citywide coalition that has dominated local elections and government since 2011, Yale’s UNITE HERE unions.

That year UNITE HERE recruited a slate that won 14 out of 15 alder primaries, then cemented a majority on the Board of Alders that has ruled for a decade. Then the UNITE HERE crew pushed out ward committee chairs in 2012 primaries, effectively taking control of the local Democratic party. In 2013 it successfully pushed a charter revision that transferred power from the city’s executive branch to the alders. And in 2013 it pushed out a 20-year incumbent mayor and recruited and elected its own, Toni Harp.

None of the alder candidates this year ran against that coalition. In fact, a couple — like Alder-Elect Sarah Miller in Fair Haven’s 14th Ward and Devin Avshalom-Smith in Newhallville’s 20th — have worked alongside unions in activist causes. They have expressed no desire to challenge the coalition.

But a subtler shift was on display. Along with the potential for new, independent initiatives and energy in local politics and government.

Both Avshalom-Smith and Beaver Hills Alder-Elect Shafiq Abdussabur succeeded alders who had been recruited and continually supported by the UNITE HERE coalition, archetypes of the union’s community-labor-government strategy over the past decade. Avshalom-Smith and Abdussabur assembled grassroots community coalitions and replaced (in a primary in one case, in maneuverings leading up to a potential primary in the other) leaders closely associated with UNITE HERE. That’s a change.

That comes on top of 2019’s decisive Democratic mayoral primary, in which UNITE HERE backed Harp, then a three-term incumbent — and their candidate — lost. That was a change too. Other factors were at play, but there was no mistaking the contrast with 2011, and the idea that the organization is unbeatable.

Meanwhile, the coalition’s dominance over elections and government led to a crowning achievement last month: UNITE HERE’s two main unions, Locals 34 and 35, reached their third straight contract with Yale without a strike since the 2011 takeover. The new contract lasts through 2027, guaranteeing living wages and benefits and job security to the city’s largest workforce. Local 35’s president has been clear with members that the Board of Alders majority was a key factor in winning those contracts.

UNITE HERE has since moved the strategist who oversaw the 2011 – 2013 New Haven victories, Gwen Mills, out west and up to the number-two spot, secretary-treasurer, of the national union.

After 10 years of victories, a reassessment would seem to loom of UNITE HERE’s experiment in intensive municipal electoral and governing decisions. Will it continue to recruit the alders and ward co-chairs and seek to steer local decisions? Or revert to a role of simply throwing it weight behind independently developed candidates loyal to the union in its fights with Yale (as it has with Mayor Justin Elicker) and pulling back from the day-to-day municipal government and ward-level electoral agenda?

“Ten years is a generation,” observed one longtime local political leader. ​“It’s their turn to figure out — do they redefine themselves? What’s the next wave going to look like?”

A Decade Later …

The UNITE HERE-led coalition doesn’t hold such debates — or any debates, including over city government decisions — in public.

Local 35 President Bob Proto, one of the city’s top political power brokers, hinted at the recent union contract vote that he’s preparing to retire. He asserted in a conversation with the Independent that the UNITE HERE political coalition is as committed as ever to fighting to hold ​“large employers” like Yale accountable: ​“Yale just added another $10 billion to the war chest — a drop in the bucket would reduce class sizes and add technologies to the schools. It wouldn’t make a dent.”

He also noted that their candidate slates have never consisted only of UNITE HERE members, or even union-affiliated activists: ​“We never leaned just toward the union label for the candidate. We always lean toward who has the right values. Who has the right take on issues that align with ours. That’s how we’re going to continue to move forward.

UNITE HERE continued in recent years to recruit and elect alders from within the ranks of its union and affiliated New Haven Rising community action group, including Ellen Cupo, Charles Decker, and Carmen Rodriguez. And the 2011-spawned team still calls the shots on the Board of Alders. Some of its original recruits — Board President Tyisha Walker-Myers, Alders Jeanette Morrison and Adam Marchand — continue to play leading roles in crafting legislation. They push community priorities. (Morrison led the charge for the new Dixwell Q House, for instance.) They spend long volunteer hours reviewing the nitty gritty of budget line items and proposed building projects and appointments to top city posts and commissions. Walker-Myers remains firmly in charge of the legislative body.

But outside of affordable housing, the alder majority has ceded policy creation back to the executive branch. On schools, on policing, on tax policy, on absentee landlords, on fiber-optic and the digital divide … the alders remain in a crucial position of vetting decisions. But beyond crafting nonbinding resolutions on national and global issues, they no longer choose to drive the train.

The ​“Jackson 5”

Enter the newly elected alders: Miller, Avshalom-Smith, Abdussabur, retired principal Sal Punzo, and Ward 1’s Alex Guzhnay, a New Haven-raised son of Ecuadorian immigrants.

They did not run as a team. They do have an opportunity: not just to advocate for their constituents’ ward-level quality-of-life concerns, like fixing broken streetlights and sidewalks and tackling blighted properties. But also to take initiative on broader issues.

“We’re the Jackson 5,” quipped Abdussabur, a community organizer and retired police sergeant who during this year’s alder campaign unveiled his own 10-point plan to combat rising crime and worked with neighbors to respond to racial and religious divides. ​“I’m Tito!”

“I’m pro-labor,” said Avshalom-Smith, who in his day job serves as clerk of the state legislature’s Labor and Public Employees Committee as an aide to State Rep. Robyn Porter. ​“I do appreciate diversity in any room. The five of us are homegrown.”

Sarah Miller, like Abdussabur, has a history of tapping citywide contacts to wage effective campaigns. Abdussabur played a leading role in designing and then obtaining money to launch New Haven’s street outreach workers program, for instance. Miller played a central role organizing parents concerned about air quality in public school buildings to delay the reopening of schools during Covid-19; she teamed up with Karen DuBois-Walton and Kica Matos to launch an ongoing campaign to ​“reoccupy” crime hot spots in Fair Haven. She has helped successfully organize against a developer’s plan to build new apartments in the abandoned former Strong School.

Miller noted that ​“it’s too early” to gauge the impact of the election of new grassroots-backed alders. But ​“it’s always a good thing when longtime community activists are in a position to represent people.”

Indeed, the UNITE HERE coalition remains the big player in town. Senators, the governor, mayoral hopefuls will still take union leaders to lunch negotiating their support and showing up when requested at protests. At this point, no potential electoral coalition with a differing perspective on local issues has materialized.

But the recent wave of elections has shown that a vacuum exists for well-organized individuals and individual campaigns. And pressing issues remain unaddressed in town from a perspective independent of the executive branch. In 2011, for instance, amid rising violence, the then-new UNITE HERE-allied majority demanded a return to a 1990s New Haven-style community policing, and it happened. In 2021, amid rising violence, the decade-old UNITE HERE-allied majority has been silent about a return to 1980 New Haven-style policing based on a military model that prioritizes technology and technocracy above community connection, diversity, and accountability.

The best parallel of what to expect from the ​“Jackson 5” alders may lie in the Class of 1987: Four alders newly elected that year, also with independent grassroots coalitions. They, too, in some cases replaced representatives of what was then the ruling local political coalition. They took office at a time of change, as a party leader expert at holding together factions tragically died in a car crash (the late Democratic Town Chair Vincent Mauro Sr.) and as civil rights and anti-machine Democrats were preparing to elect the city’s first Black mayor (in 1989).

All four were women: Dwight’s Toni Harp (who ran on a joint slate of Black reform Democrats and the first iteration of New Haven’s Green Party), Beaver Hills’ Elaine Braffman (same ward Abdussabur won this year), Edgewood’s Liz McCormack, and Fair Haven’s Robin Kroogman (same ward Miller won this year).

They all launched long effective careers in elected office. They championed ward issues. Harp also quickly became a leader in crafting citywide change in policing and homeless policy. Braffman led the charge to hold absentee slumlords accountable and monitor city spending.

They did not form an opposition coalition. They did speak up. They did organize action. They did make a difference, and usher in change. New Haven will be watching the new not-team to see if history repeats itself.