A week after a car slammed into traffic-calming crusader Erin Sturgis-Pascale’s house, the Fair Haven alderwoman got a chance to press the mayor for more action to tame the city’s streets. His response was noncommital.
“Traffic calming measures are going to be expensive,” Mayor John DeStefano told Sturgis-Pascale (pictured) and some 30 neighbors Thursday night. “As the school construction program winds down, the question is: Is that where we proceed to make the next big investment?”
Clearly Sturgis-Pascale thought so, as did many of the neighbors whom Chatham Square organizer Lee Cruz and his parrot Bibi (pictured) invited to their Clinton Avenue house. It was one in a series of political house parties organized by the mayor’s reelection campaign.
“We have articulated a vision for traffic calming in Fair Haven and for the rest of the city,” Sturgis-Pascale pressed. “But do you see funding opportunities now in the stimulus package and with [U.S.] Sen. [Chris] Dodd, who’s been to the city a lot recently, and elsewhere? Where do we turn?”
In addition to Fair Haveners, representatives from at least five other grassroots groups from around the city — Westville, West River, East Rock, Upper State Street and Wooster Square — were present.
Campaign manager Keya Jayaram said the mayor had already held three of what she terms “coffees and conversations.” Two to three a week are scheduled for the balance of the campaign, beginning with another in Westville next week. All are private and many, like Cruz’s, are Facebook organized.
Thursday evening’s theme was the contribution of citizen activism and its relationship to the city life.
“In all my years in public life,” the mayor reflected, “I have never seen so much citizen activism.” He attributed the increase in part to the growing numbers of young people moving back to the center city and to cross-neighborhood activities such as the online SeeClickFix.
One example of that activism: the traffic-calming campaign launched in Fair Haven by Sturgis-Pascale. It generated a citywide grassroots movement and a Complete Streets law.
The mayor acknowledged the importance of the issue at Thursday’s event. He fielded questions on other concerns ranging from an out-of-sequence siren on the Ferry Street Bridge to littering to neighborhood preference in magnet schools.
He said his key issues in the campaign are the foreclosure crisis, violent crime, and school reform.
And what of traffic calming?
The mayor cast his answers to Sturgis-Pascale in a larger context, which also enabled him to tick off his achievements.
DeStefano called attention, for example, to increased enforcement of traffic rules, which received a ripple of approval, particularly from Fair Haven activist David Zakur.
He also acknowledged the corollary benefits of greater enforcement of the traffic code with a nod to Ben Berkowitz’s, the creator of SeeClickFix. “The police made a traffic stop recently,” the mayor said, “that was based on a posting. And guess what: In the car was heroin. It was the first bust, and of a drug dealer, based on SeeClickFix- generated traffic stop.”
“Look,” he said, as other members of his audience expressed their frustration at anarchic driving conditions, “we would have dearly loved to have red-light cameras too. But we were shot down recently. By the ACLU. We’ll have to try again on that.”
Ultimately, the mayor suggested that traffic-calming measures come down to money. “What about that bridge over there?” he said, referring to the 50-year-old Grand Avenue Bridge. “The repairs we made in the 1980s are just not good enough. Ultimately we’re going to have to take it off its foundations and fix it. I need to be able to find $20 million to do that in a way the city won’t have to pay for it, as we did with the Ferry Street Bridge. That’s pretty important.”
When Sturgis-Pascale pressed him on transportation stimulus money, the mayor suggested that most of the federal money, going through the state, would be spent on the rail yards and on the Q‑Bridge crossing project.
The mayor (pictured with Berkowitz) reconfirmed that of the $14 million being divvied up by regional groups such as the Southern Connecticut Regional Council of Governments, money would be forthcoming for the Quinnipiac Avenue redo, both its phases.
He reiterated his commitment to redeveloping Route 34 corridor and then expressed optimism about a federal grant for what is called a “small starts” project to fund a trolley line that would run along College Street.
That proposal, the mayor said, goes through Senator Dodd’s committee. “Actually,” he said to Sturgis-Pascale, “I think we have a pretty good chance to get it.”
He didn’t include in the list some of Sturgis-Pascale’s traffic-calming wish list: the bump outs, the chicanes, medians, roundabouts and other capital improvements on the streets and curbs that slow down traffic.
“I sit on my stoop,” she said, “and the cars race by and I can practically reach out and touch them.”
“Well,” he replied, “you are one of our 30 appropriators” on the Board of Aldermen.
Susan Regan (pictured with David Zakur), a Fair Haven resident, said she felt the mayor in his answers was thoughtful and sincere. Chris Heitmann of the Westville Village Renaissance Alliance agreed, but added the DeStefano was non-committal about whether the city should be helping neighborhood groups avoid competing with each other for scarce city resources.
Nevertheless the mayor received generally high marks. It was unclear how many $30 contributions he garnered to help him qualify for the publicly funded campaign he is launched upon.