Thomas Breen photo
New Haven Ward 9 Committee Co-Chair Sarah Locke and DTC Chair Vinnie Mauro.
The four Democratic mayoral candidates honed their campaign stump speeches — with lists of accomplishments, idealistic visions for the future, critiques of the status quo, and even some stand-up comedy — as they sought to win the local party’s endorsement.
Incumbent Mayor Toni Harp and Democratic challengers Justin Elicker, Wendy Hamilton, and Urn Pendragon made those pitches Tuesday night at the Democratic Town Committee’s latest meeting in the Betsy Ross Parish Hall on Kimberly Avenue in the Hill. (Seth Poole has also filed papers to run as an independent.)
Sixty local politicos filled the century-old, wood-paneled gathering space to hear the various candidates pitch them on why they should be the next leader of the city. With only five minutes on the stump and no immediate opportunity to answer follow-up questions, the candidates focused their speeches on broad priorities and on why each thinks that he or she has the resume, the personality, the determination, the leadership skills, and the nerve to make the city a better place to live.
Tuesday night’s DTC meeting.
Harp stressed the reduced crime, higher graduation rates, and reams of new construction that have taken place during her five-plus years in office. Elicker promoted his enthusiastic love for the city and his resolve to spread the wealth and economic activity currently concentrated downtown into the city’s neighborhoods. Hamilton scolded the city for living beyond its budget and for not working hard enough to extract greater annual contributions from Yale University. Pendragon said she would prioritize cracking down on slumlords and boosting renewable energy projects — and told a few anti-establishment jokes in between.
All four are vying for the DTC’s endorsement at the local party’s July 18 nominating convention at Career High School on Legion Avenue.
Ward 9 Committee Co-Chair Sarah Locke and DTC Chair Vinnie Mauro explained that each of the city’s 30 ward committee will be meeting between now and the convention to hold non-binding votes that will recommend how those committees’ two neighborhood co-chairs should cast their ballots at the convention.
Whichever candidate gets the most votes at the convention wins a place on the Sept. 10 Democratic Party primary ballot. The candidates who do not emerge on top after the convention can petition their way onto the primary ballot by gathering signatures from 5 percent of locally registered Democrats, which City Clerk Michael Smart said comes out to roughly 2,000 signatures in total. Candidates have until Aug. 7 to submit those petitions to the City Clerk’s office.
Click here and here to read about past ward committee-sponsored Democratic mayoral candidate forums, in which each of the candidates dove deeper on what they plan to do if elected.
“We Have Made A Difference Together”
Mayor Toni Harp.
As she has done throughout her campaign, Harp spent her five minutes before the DTC arguing that New Haven should stay the course on public safety, education, and economic development that her administration has set since she was elected in 2013.
“If you go to Hartford, if you go to Waterbury, if you go to Bridgeport, you don’t see what we have here,” she said. “And what we have here, we have built together and we’ve done it by working together.”
The city’s murder rate has dropped to a 50-year low during her time in office, she said.
Both school attendance and graduation rates are up, and youth intervention programs like YouthStat have kept teens most vulnerable to being involved in a violent situation off the streets and in the classroom.
“Everybody knows that we’re building more and more apartments,” she said. Roughly 2,000 new market-rate units have come online her time in office, she said. Another 1,000 affordable units have been built in the past five years, she said, another 1,000 are “on the books.”
She thanked the city’s state delegation multiple times for helping pass a $15 minimum wage and a new paid family and medical leave program, and said those accomplishments were the result of close collaborative relationships between New Haven’s delegation and City Hall.
“We have made a difference together,” she said. “We will continue to be the most vibrant, the exciting city in Connecticut. Let’s continue to do it together.”
“We Can Do So Much More”
Justin Elicker.
Elicker, a former East Rock/Cedar Hill alder who came in second place behind Harp in the 2013 mayoral race, said he’s running again because he sees New Haven as a story of two cities, with wealth and power and privilege concentrated in just a few small pockets and great hardship and obstacles to success everywhere else.
“So often government isn’t doing enough in promoting real progressive democratic values,” he said, “to move the dial on poverty and start to undo income inequality and give people the opportunity they deserve in this city.”
What the city needs, he said, is world-class education, not just world-class school buildings. It needs an “economic system that doesn’t overlook certain populations,” and taxes that are kept “under control.”
These might sound like “pie-in-the-sky ideas,” he said, but the state’s delegation proved this year that challenging progressive policy initiatives are realizable with the right people are behind them.
The path to a brighter future, he said, lies in “a Board of Education that’s committed to the values of putting kids first,” and a superintendent dedicated to the welfare of parents, teachers, and students, and not administrators; holding Yale accountable and having a “long-term vision for what Yale can give to this city”; and having job training programs that directly connected people from low-income neighborhoods with prospective employers.
“We can do so much more,” he said.
“I think I can do a good job,” he added. “I think I can do this. Not alone, but with you.”
“Milked By The Wrong People”
Wendy Hamilton.
Homelessness advocate Wendy Hamilton and affordable housing activist Urn Pendragon in turn focused their campaign pitches on tearing into the status quo — sometimes with high-level, ambitious administrative goals, sometimes with sardonic jokes and alliteration.
“The city is a cash cow that’s been milked by the wrong people,” Hamilton began. If elected, she said, she would fire the entire economic development department, replace the superintendent, let city police officers choose their own chief, and hire a new corporation counsel. She said she already has her eyes on one who has integrity, and is still in law school.
“One of our biggest problems is the income gap,” she said, “the wealth gap that is a crisis for this city and causing a lot of pain.”
She pledged to create a new department in City Hall just focused on improving quality of life in the Hill and in Dixwell, and committed to shaking down Yale University for a $250 million annual contribution to the city’s coffers. Yale currently gives just over $11 million a year.
Urn Pendragon.
Pendragon, for her pitch, started off with a few jokes that she said she hadn’t performed in public before.
“Don’t steal, don’t lie, and don’t cheat,” she said. “The government doesn’t like competition.”
That prompted a few audible gasps in the crowd.
She once met an honest, caring politician who listened when she spoke and acted on behalf of the public welfare, she said next. “Then I woke up.”
No response from the crowd.
Jokes aside, she said a Pendragon administration would ramp up penalties on slumlords, and levy criminal charges if poorly maintained housing leads to the death of a tenant.
She cited the Room for All coalition‘s role in pressuring the city to draft an inclusionary zoning ordinance and to create a new permanent Affordable Housing Commission as model policy initiatives her administration would prioritize to combat the affordable housing crisis.
“This is me as a nonpolitician helping the community,” she said. “Imagine what I can do when elected.”
She also stressed her commitment to renewable energy. She owns a small portable solar panel, she said, as well as a small wind turbine. She said she plans on holding a public demonstration at one of the city’s farmers markets sometime soon to show off exactly how this technology works, and how it would benefit the city.
Vinnie Mauro photo
Celebrating the end of Tuesday’s meeting. This photo was taken as part of a collaboration between the Independent and Artspace in anticipation of a new photography exhibition in which photographers hand over their cameras to their subjects. The photos will be shown at Artspace in late July.
Click on the Facebook Live video below to watch the full DTC meeting.