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Heimer: Expanding public financing to City Clerk's race would be "an increase in democratic participation."
New Haven’s Democracy Fund wants to test expanding its pioneering mayoral public financing program to other citywide races to make them more often contested and competitive.
That’s why the program’s board voted to request $60,000 from the mayor’s upcoming Fiscal Year 2025 – 2026 budget to fund a pilot program for citywide seats, including City Clerk, Registrar of Voters and Board of Education.
The board held that vote last Wednesday night at their first meeting of the new year, which took place on the second floor of City Hall. At the same meeting, the board unanimously approved their standard election-year request of $250,000 for the fund’s mayoral public financing program, matching the amount allocated in 2023.
The pilot program grant request specifically covers “other municipal offices,” which leaves the door open for expansion to include alder races. Democracy Fund Administrator Aly Heimer explained that the money, if apportioned in the city’s annual budgeting process, would go toward researching the effects of expanding public financing grants and some form of a pilot for competitive races, likely starting citywide.
Currently, only mayoral candidates are eligible for support from the Democracy Fund, which provides an initial public grant and matching funds to eligible mayoral candidates in contested races who agree to cap individual donations and swear off contributions from political committees.
The fund has proved popular (current Mayor Justin Elicker has used it in all five of his races to date) and some research shows that municipal public financing can increase the competitiveness of elections.
That’s the hope of Lesley Heffel-McGuirk, the Democracy Fund board’s chair, who highlighted how the fund requires recipients to attend a debate, which could increase interest in oft-neglected down-ballot races.
“I think the program as it is right now does a lot to increase participation in municipal elections, which is notoriously difficult to get people to care about. I think it brings a lot of transparency to the funding of those elections,” Heffel-McGurik told the Independent after the meeting. “It makes sense as we look forward to the next era of this board, to look at where else we could be effective in both increasing participation in these elections and increasing transparency. Other citywide offices make sense to me, and so does expanding it to the alder program.”
Not all board members were in favor of the request. While the budget request passed on a 3 – 1 vote, member Jim O’Connell voted no, citing concerns about overspending taxpayer dollars.
O’Connell also objected to the inclusion of the Registrar of Voters race, describing it as “an intra-party squabble, rather than an election where the whole city would participate.” State law requires that municipalities have both Democratic and Republican registrars.
This is not the first time in the past year the Democracy Fund has explored expanding public financing beyond mayoral races.
Last July, as part of a broader revision of the fund’s ordinance, Heimer and two other board members presented to the Board of Alders Legislation Committee a proposal that would expand public financing to all municipal races, including aldermanic elections. The committee ultimately tabled the proposal.
“They tabled it essentially because they didn’t want to create an unfunded mandate and asked us to come back when we had a clear sense of what the program would look like and how much money it would actually cost,” Heimer said. “So this is the budgetary request to complete the work that the Legislation Committee asked us to do when they passed half of the thing we asked them to pass.”
In November, as part of the same ordinance revision, a proposal advanced to the full Board of Alders that would have expanded public financing to the City Clerk election. But the expansion was stripped as part of a package of amendments introduced by Wooster Square Alder Ellen Cupo. Both Cupo and Board of Alders President Tyisha Walker-Meyers did not immediately respond to requests for comment on the amendments.