Paul Bass Photo
Earmark Community Project Bucks: DeLauro, DESK board Chair Timothy Opstrup, board veep Alyse Sabina, and Steve Werlin at Wednesday's event.
U.S. Rep. Rosa DeLauro delivered a seven-figure homeless-helping check written from an account she created in Washington to a downtown New Haven homeless agency, confident that changing Capitol winds won’t stop more checks from heading this way in the future.
Nora Grace-Flood file photo
DeLauro delivered the $1,438,399 check Wednesday to the Downtown Evening Soup Kitchen (DESK) and homeless drop-in center that opened in 2021 at 266 State St. (pictured above).
The federal dollars will enable DESK to upgrade the building to create a basement commercial kitchen to prepare fresh meals, a “softer” “trauma-focused” redesign of the first-floor daytime drop-in center, a second-floor medical clinic run by the Cornell Scott Hill Health Center (plus showers and small-meeting space), a reworked fourth-floor administrative area, plus a new elevator and HVAC system.
“This is a big deal,” DeLauro said at a formal check-presentation event held on DESK’s first floor. “This saves lives.”
The check she brought Wednesday was actually an enlarged facsimile of the legal tender.
The enlargement made a larger point signified by three words in the lower left-hand corner: “Community Project Funding.”
DeLauro: "This saves lives."
That’s an updated term for what people used to call “earmarks.” The term refers to money designated for specific community-based projects in individual Congress members’ districts that get tacked onto larger bills to help win their support.
Congress banned earmarks a decade ago amid criticism that they too often represented “pork” that served special interests rather than the public good, hidden deep inside bills so the public never even noticed them.
DeLauro revived them two years ago with upgraded standards and renamed them “community project funding” when she became House Appropriations Committee chair. The new rules limited them to nonprofits, added vetting by the Government Accountability Office (GAO), and required Congress members to attest that they have no personal financial interest in the recipient organizations. Members’ requests are also published so the public can review them.
The $1.4 million DESK money was part of $26.9 million bevy of “community project” grants she obtained for Greater New Haven in her final weeks as committee chair as part of the the $1.7 trillion fiscal-year federal government bill Congress passed before rushing home for the December holidays.
Hill Health CEO Michael Taylor (pictured above) said the idea for the clinic grew out of discussions begun in 2018 in the wake of the mass “K2” poisonings on the Green. It was agreed at the time that downtown could use a spot where people can be checked for drug poisoning or overdoses, relax a while, and get connected to long-term help.
That reflects one of the broader goals of the DESK facility, which opened last year: Combining immediate help (meals, a safe place to hang out) with longer-term support and case management for people to transition from homelessness to permanent housing and stable lives. A “front door,” as DESK Executive Director Steve Werlin put it at Wednesday’s check ceremony.
Werlin said he expects work to begin on the building redo when the weather warms and DESK completes its contract to run an overnight winter “warming center.” He said he hopes to cut the ribbon by year’s end.
DeLauro was asked about the fate of “community funding” projects now that conservative Republicans have regained control of the House and she will no longer chair the Appropriations Committee.
She responded that she is confident they will survive. She then noted that the House Republicans voted after November’s elections not to keep rather than end the new system, but rather to “tweak” it. Which means more enlarged checks may arrive in the future.
