Union Targets Mayor’s Ed Board Influence

Leaders of the city’s teachers union called for the school board to have two additional elected members — and for the mayor to be stripped of his ed-board voting powers.

Wilbur Cross High School teacher and New Haven Federation of Teachers (NHFT) executive board member Melody Gallagher put forward those proposals Thursday night during the first public hearing held by the recently empaneled Charter Revision Commission. 

The meeting took place in person in the Aldermanic Chamber on the second floor of City Hall.

The commission is charged with the once-a-decade responsibility of gathering testimony and issuing recommendations on how if at all to change the city’s foundational governing document. The commission will meet multiple times per month until mid-May, when it plans to send a report to the Board of Alders to review and vote on. The alders will then finalize a question, or multiple questions, about alterations to the charter that will appear on voters’ ballots in November.

The Board of Alders and Mayor Justin Elicker have identified a number of topics — including whether or not to grant four-year terms for the mayor and alders, and whether or not to drop residency requirements for some city department heads — as priorities for the commission to consider during its deliberations.

The 10 members of the public who turned up to testify in person Thursday night and nearly 20 others who submitted written testimony in advance of the meeting put forward a host of recommendations. Some spoke in support of four-year terms for mayors but not alders. Some spoke in opposition to dropping residency requirements for top city officials. Others backed the splitting of the traffic authority from the police commission as well as shaking off of bureaucratic processes so that more sidewalks can be installed more quickly citywide. Still more spoke in favor of dropping life-time appointments to the parks commission.

Gallagher was the last to testify in person at Thursday’s meeting.

Speaking up as both a Westville resident and a representative from the teachers union, Gallagher called on the commission to support two specific school-board related changes to the charter. 

The testimony she provided in person Thursday night echoed that written and submitted to the commission in advance by teachers union President Leslie Blatteau, Executive Vice President Pat DeLucia, Executive Secretary Mia Breuler, and Treasurer Mike Pantaleo. (Click here to read that testimony in full.)

First, she argued, the number of elected members on the Board of Education should be increased from two to four.

“Public education is one of the fundamental pillars of democracy in this country,” she said. ​“Democratic oversight and community control of our city’s schools are a necessity to protect and support public education in the years to come.”

Gallagher said that increasing the number of elected school board members from two to four — and, therefore, dropping the number of mayoral appointees on the school board from four to two — would ​“increase New Haven voters’ direct impact on the Board of Education.” She said that splitting the ed board elected members’ districts from two halves of the city to four quadrants would make it easier for people running for a seat on the Board of Education to build relationships with and represent the interests of their constituents.

“We are concerned about the outsized influence that the mayor’s appointees can potentially have on the board, and believe that more direct representation of the city’s residents will better ensure the community’s concerns and proposed solutions are more intentionally considered.”

Second, in order to preserve a system of ​“checks and balances,” Gallagher called for the mayor to be stripped of his voting powers on the school board. He should remain on the board, she said, but should not be allowed to vote.

“The seven voting members of the Board of Education should be made up of New Haven residents without the executive privilege of the mayor’s office,” Gallagher said. ​“When the mayor has one of those seven votes, it takes the power away from people who can bring their ideas and experiences to the crucial work of governing our schools.” She added that stripping the mayor of his voting powers would also ​“minimize the role of politics in decision-making in our schools.”

While Gallagher was the only member of the public to call for the mayor to be dropped from the school board’s voting rolls Thursday, she was not the only one to press for more elected members.

John Carlson, who chairs the city’s Republican Party and who ran against Elicker in the 2021 mayoral general election, called the Board of Ed ​“a de facto command center” for the mayor in its current makeup.

“Elected members are people whose only purpose is to promote student achievement and wellbeing,” he wrote in pre-submitted testimony. ​“They have no alternative motive and owe allegiance to no one other than the children of New Haven. Elected members work independent of the mayor, they are not appointed by one and owe that office nothing.”

James O’Connell, who has previously run as a Republican for elected school board seats and lost, also urged the commission to support increasing the number of elected members on the Board of Education. He claimed that New Haven is ​“the only municipality in the state that doesn’t have a fully elected Board of Education.”

Elicker: Current Set-Up Works

Reached for comment after Thursday’s meeting, Elicker argued that the school board should stay with two elected members, and not increase to four. 

“I think the current make up of members to the Board is appropriate,” he told the Independent. ​“Two elected members gives the public more direct influence while balancing the importance of having members who are knowledgeable, productive and hardworking but may not necessarily be good at getting elected.”

Elicker also pointed out that, after nearly a decade of having two elected board positions, very few people have actually run for those seats.

“Expanding the number of elected seats when already these elections haven’t been contested in a meaningful way wouldn’t lead to more strong board members,” he said.

“Finally, we’ve seen many other towns with fully elected board members struggle to function well during Covid when special interests drive people to run. Having appointed members buffers from that type of politics.”

The mayor also pushed back on the suggestion that the mayor should be stripped of school board voting powers.

“I also think having the mayor as an active member of the board is very important. The mayor sees firsthand the needs of the district and can also articulate the concerns and needs of the city,” he said. ​“Not having the mayor would risk creating an us-versus-them dynamic between the board and the city which wouldn’t be productive.”

Traffic / Cop Commission Split

In a local mirror image of recent organizing efforts for traffic calming at the state level, safe streets advocates made up the largest contingent of those testifying in person and via submitted written testimony for Thursday’s Charter Revision Commission.

Those advocates called for two specific changes to the charter.

First, they moved to have the city’s Traffic Authority separated from the police commission.

“The traffic authority is an entity required of each municipality by the state, and it is charged with approving most changes to our streetscape,” former Downtown Alder Abby Roth said both in person and via written testimony. 

Currently, the Traffic Authority is made up of the exact same members as the Board of Police Commissioners. She called for the city to split these two bodies from one another and to create a new Transportation Commission that could focus specifically on matters of transportation safety, equity, and access.

“The police commission has a lot of other things to focus on, and street infrastructure isn’t really their priority,” she said.

New Haven Safe Streets Coalition organizer Lior Trestman agreed. He pointed out that police commissioners are appointed by the mayor for their expertise on matters of policing, and rightfully so. But that doesn’t mean that they’re the best fit to oversee matters of traffic and transportation.

A new, separate Transportation Commission could consist of New Haveners ​“who are specifically experts and interested in how we build our streets. It’s not a trivial matter. It’s quite complicated.” New Haven deserves ​“a group of people interested and dedicated to the task of looking at those questions.”

The second major charter-revision push put forward by safe streets advocates involved the automatic approval of all new sidewalks.

“Currently, we require a notice and hearing for the addition of new sidewalks,” one such advocate, Isabel Rooper of the Yale Sustainable Food Program, wrote in pre-submitted testimony. ​“This makes it slow and arduous to add sidewalks where we don’t have them, so I support the City preemptively approving all sidewalks, in hopes that we can achieve a 100% sidewalk network in our city.”

Mark Abraham wrote in with a similar request in his own pre-submitted testimony. ​“I am writing to support a proposal to revise the Charter that would eliminate the need for a special notice and/or hearing to add sidewalks or similar amenities for people who do not have access to a car,” he wrote. ​“It should be possible to add sidewalks and bike lanes, and similar infrastructure, anywhere in the city without the need for slow and costly approval processes.”

Drop Residency Requirements?

In testimony before the commission Thursday, former Beaver Hills Alder and current Democratic mayoral challenger Shafiq Abdussabur leveled his criticism at the Elicker’s endorsement of dropping residency requirements for certain department head positions.

“We always want to advocate for people who work for the city to live in the city,” Elicker told the Independent for a charter-revision-focused article in December.​“For certain department heads that is crucial, like public safety. You want your police chief and fire chief living in the city, being close. But for others, it’s not necessary, and the residency requirement makes the city much less competitive and able to hire.”

“It should be absolutely unthinkable that the elected leader of our city of 135,000 people thinks he cannot find the right people to lead our city in our city,” Abdussabur said Thursday night.

“It should be amusing that an administration can tell us one week that New Haven has been named by the New York Times as one of the top 52 places in the world to visit and then tell us they can’t pay someone a six-figure salary to move here.”

“But today,” Abdussabur continued, ​“the unthinkable has happened. And today, I am not amused.”

He said that New Haven citizens ​“deserve to be governed not by outside forces, but by their fellow citizens,” and that the city should keep its residency requirements for top city jobs.

4-Year Terms For Mayor & Alders?

After Abdussabur finished his public testimony, Charter Revision Commissioner Jack Keyes asked him if he has any opinion on four-yea terms for alders or on the local legislature’s size or compensation. 

“Not at this time,” Abdussabur replied.

Keyes asked his question after a number of people Thursday night testified in support of increasing the mayor’s term to four years and keeping alders’ terms at two years each.

Roth, another former alder, called for four-year mayoral terms and two-year aldermanic terms.

She called four-year mayoral terms ​“consistent with executive roles at the state and federal level. Moreover, the mayor has to build a team, develop and execute initiatives (both of which can be hard to do on a two-year timeframe), and run a citywide campaign, which is time-consuming and costly.

“In contrast, maintaining the two-year alder term, the default term under state law, is appropriate. Our representatives at the state and federal level have two-year terms. Unlike the mayor, alders do not have to recruit staff. Moreover, alder campaigns cover small geographic areas and so there is not a big hurdle to run. Many alder elections are, unfortunately, uncontested, so there is no hurdle at all.”

City Point resident Andrew Giering agreed.

He said during Thursday’s public hearing that lengthening the terms for alders would ​“further entrench a Board of Alders that is already fully entrenched, due to incumbency advantage and the relatively small size of New Haven’s wards.”

Alders often run opposed. Extending the alders’ terms to four years would make sense only if the city also adopted term limits, Giering argued.

“However, increasing the length of their terms without implementing term limits would reduce alders’ accountability to the residents who elect them while also limiting others’ opportunity to serve. … Shorter terms and more frequent rotation on the Board [of Alders] will help keep our local government as transparent and democratic as possible.”

Click here and here to read all of the written testimony submitted to the Charter Revision Commission Thursday.