Voters Tuesday will decide: Should an alderman play nice with City Hall and get more neighborhood favors? Or fight from the outside for structural change?
That’s the underlying question in the Sept. 13 Democratic primary in Ward 2, which includes the struggling Kensington Street area as well as gentrifying Dwight Street. This question has faced voters and local politicians for decades. Rarely has it been as starkly presented as in this race between maverick incumbent Joyce Chen and energetic newcomer Gina Calder.
And the question has real-life consequences for a neighborhood like Dwight, racked by unemployment, shootings, aimless kids in trouble, and rundown housing. The Chen-Calder contest is one of the most closely watched of a slew of hotly contested races across town Tuesday, part of a larger battle over the future direction of the Board of Aldermen and of the city.
For such an unassuming, sometimes cryptic figure (she poses no threat to Ronald Reagan’s title as “the Great Communicator”), the 26-year-old Chen has managed to draw the citywide Democratic Party leadership to her ward gunning for her ouster. She’s party enemy #1. She has irritated party leaders since her surprise election in 2001. She was one of two Green Party candidates who won that year on a reform platform. That’s not supposed to happen in one-party New Haven. In fact, no third-party candidate had won office before that for generations, perhaps more than a century. The Green victories pushed Democratic Mayor John DeStefano to reform his government and embrace clean elections and environmental positions.
DeStefano’s citywide political operation poured into Dwight two years ago to try to unseat Chen, considering her election a fluke. (Twenty-eight out of 30 Democratic seats on the Board of Aldermen apparently seemed too few for comfort.) City officials figured they could isolate her from important neighborhood decisions like an ill-fated quest to seize and demolish a block of successful Upper Chapel Street small businesses using eminent domain in order to build a new school. Yet Chen won reelection, because she quietly earned the trust of everyday people in her neglected neighborhood. She bought a house on violence-plagued Kensington Street; it’s now a hangout for parents as well as teens often unwelcome elsewhere in town.
Since then Chen became a Democrat. But she’s still an outsider, an independent, and the party establishment has organized to try again to oust her in next Tuesday’s rematch. It nominated 24-year-old Calder, like Chen a religious Christian and an idealistic Yale grad from modest circumstances now employed in a health-care reform job, to run against her.
Surprisingly, party leaders chose not to capitalize on Chen’s greatest liability — “a crucial vote against gay rights on the board. It turns out Calder sound remarkably like Chen on that issue. (See related story, “HMMMMM“)
“No Will Do”
Calder plays up the fact that she’s on good terms with City Hall and its allies, that she won’t be fighting City Hall.
“You have to pick your battles,” Calder argues over a bowl of chili one recent afternoon. She comes across as a bright, energetic, outgoing young woman; the Connecticut Health Foundation has tapped her for a program grooming health-care leaders of the future. “It’s not always about fighting. Sometimes it’s about relationships, how well do you get along with your colleagues on the board.” Sometimes an alderman has to make “concessions” on citywide issues to obtain needed help for a neighborhood or “to get more in the long run,” she says.
Chen’s response to that philosophy: “If I can have a sidewalk and I have to trade my integrity for that, I’m sorry. No will do.”
She questions the idea that obtaining jobs or program money or sidewalks for individual constituents even ends up benefiting a neighborhood in the long run, especially if that means allowing a powerful mayor’s office to dictate policy and run the city without scrutiny.
“Maybe the mayor might grant a sidewalk here and there and expedite that for loyal people. There’s no question about that. I don’t think it’s worth the trade-off, because there will be a greater number of people affected by a citywide issue. One of the most basic desires [of voters] is that we have clean and honest government. Unfortunately, some of these so-called trade-offs involve a compromise of how clean our government can be.”
Or how much working-class people pay in taxes. Chen cites one case that earned her the wrath of City Hall this past term: her insistence, along with other independent aldermen, to fight a proposed three-mill tax hike. Her group of independent aldermen worked long nights going over every line item in the budget and helped bring the increase down to 1 mill. “We were taking an adversarial position. We were not rubber-stamping what the mayor wanted. If we did rubber-stamp that, people here were going to be hit up again.”
Define “Leadership”
The fight-or-make-nice question has particular resonance for the biggest challenge facing Dwight: finding something constructive for kids to do. After a summer filled with shootings and crimes committed by masses of kids on bikes, just about everyone bemoaned the lack of programs for teens. Citywide, youth advocates are wondering when the same kind of energy going toward helping Hurricane Katrina victims will be focused on reopening the Dixwell Q House, reviving programs like LEAP, creating new after-school programs. (Mayor John DeStefano disagrees that the city has been letting kids down. Hear his take by clicking here, or read it here.) Both Calder and Chen note that the city built a spanking new community center — “yet it’s empty and locked most of the time instead of hosting rec programs.
Whose fault is that?
“I fault the leadership,” Calder says.
The leadership. As in City Hall?
No. As in Alderwoman Joyce Chen.
“This summer was rough. Part of that was that they had no place to go. It was Joyce’s responsibility to make sure something was going on for our youth,” Calder says. “One of the things that makes me different from a lot of candidates is that I recognize you have to be creative about where you get resources. The budget may not allow for extra programs for youth in the community. Where else can you go? What about Empower New Haven? What about the churches? When the city is not able to support you, you don’t just throw up your hands.”
The city is able to help, but City Hall needs to be pushed to free up money, Chen responds. “I do think” the mayor has dropped the ball on youth, she says. She supports an effort by Board President Jorge Perez to use some of the proceeds of the sale of the Water Pollution Control Authority for youth programs like LEAP (Leadership, Education, and Athletic in Partnership).
Chen also says helping kids begins with getting to know them, which she has done. Visit her house in the afternoon, and you hear the phone ringing continuously. One teen wants a ride across town to pick up a new wheel, a “gift” he stashed behind a tree. (Sorry, Chen said.) Another young man, out of prison, seeks a job; Chen links him up with neighborhood volunteer Greg Smith, who indeed finds him a custodial position. Walking on a neighborhood patrol in the evening, she greets kids and young men by name, following up on prior conversations about their families or their school or job prospects.
Chen does agree with Calder that the community needs to find other sources of support for programs besides the city, including its own volunteer time. She’s been meeting with parents and talking about launching a rec program. However, she says that it takes time to organize right. She has been involved in shorter-lived projects, like a grieving mothers’ group, that “worked for their season” but didn’t last. She wants this new effort to last longer.
For her part, Calder helped organize a bicycle block party this weekend, so kids could show off their bike riding, obtain helmets and repairs, and get tips on safety and the laws from the cops.
Also on youth policy, Calder would like to see a better “pipeline between high school and college.” She’d also like to see more kids trained for careers in health care, partly by extending feeder high school programs down to middle and even elementary schools.
She’s not just a hand-picked stand-in for the mayor’s people to take back control of Dwight, Calder insists.
“No, it’s not true,” she says. “I just had the blessing of knowing some people who were supportive and had connections to City Hall.”
How’s the mayor doing? “I would say,” she says, “he’s doing a wonderful job.”