Elicker Expands The Tent

Justin Elicker attracted a crowd of supporters who look like New Haven to the opening of his mayoral campaign headquarters, in part by embracing the causes of some of his opponent’s most public critics.

“When you look around the room, there are many familiar faces” from the last time he ran for mayor in 2013, Elicker said in a speech to 40 supporters Sunday afternoon at the formal opening of the headquarters inside a former barber shop across from Stop & Shop on Whalley Avenue.

Stalwarts of that 2013 campaign, such as Fair Haven community organizer Lee Cruz and Westville Democratic ward committee co-chair and legal aid attorney Amy Marx, were among those in attendance Sunday.

“There are many new people,” as well, Elicker noted. ​“People are ready for a change.”

Elicker has repeatedly said since launching his campaign for the Democratic mayoral nomination that he needs to build new support in New Haven’s lower-income and racially diverse neighborhoods to unseat incumbent Toni Harp, who defeated him in the hard-fought 2013 mayoral election. Elicker, who is white, drew most of his votes in predominantly white census tracts that year. Harp is the city’s first African-American female mayor.

“We want to see new ideas,” said Mario Garcia, a state health official who served as the city’s health director from 2010 – 2014 and who showed up to support Elicker Sunday.

The 40 people in the headquarters Sunday were roughly divided among African-American, white, and Latino people active in the city, similar to the city’s overall racial make-up. As Elicker pointed out, plenty of them were new to the Elicker campaign bandwagon.

Some are outspoken critics of Harp’s record on public education. Elicker enlisted Board of Ed member Ed Joyner introduce him at Sunday’s event; Joyner served as Harp’s transition team co-chair after her 2013 election, then broke with her soon afterwards and became her most outspoken school board critic.

The crowd also included former school board member Carlos Torre, whom Harp did not reappoint; and retired Hillhouse educator Robert Gibson, who publicly spoke out against changes at his former school and has often testified at hearings against Harp’s administration. Joyner and Gibson supported Harp’s 2017 campaign opponent as well. ​“It’s time for some new leadership, a new vision,” Gibson said Sunday.

In listing top campaign issues, Elicker in his speech called for a Board of Ed that is ​“less about bickering,” more about improving children’s education.

Training For Middle-Class Jobs

He also singled out Nichole Jefferson, who along with her family was present at the event and is volunteering for his campaign. Jefferson has been embroiled in a years-long battle against the Harp administration after getting fired in 2015. She used to run both the city’s Commission on Equal Opportunities (CEO) as well as an affiliated private job-training nonprofit called the Construction Workforce Initiative (CWI) out of the same office. The CEO is charged with enforcing a city ordinance requiring the hiring of black and and Latino and female workers and minority-owned and female-headed firms on government-funded construction projects.

Elicker told the crowd that he’d like to see neighborhood people share in the benefits of all the investment taking place downtown during the current building boom. New Haveners should be getting more construction jobs, he said, ​“instead of dismantling the CWI that Ms. Jefferson worked so hard on.”

A state mediator and then a state judge ruled in favor of a challenge filed against Jefferson’s firing by her AFSCME local, at the time run by Cherlyn Poindexter (who also appeared at Sunday’s event). The judge’s April 2 ruling stated that the Harp administration succeeding in making its case that Jefferson acted ​“egregiously” under the law, but that it mishandled the firing. The city has to prove that Jefferson’s behavior was so ​“incorrigible” that it had to fire her outright rather than follow a series of steps of progressive discipline. The city failed that test, in the judge’s opinion. The city is appealing his ruling. (Read about that here.)

After his speech, Elicker was asked if he disagrees with the argument that the same city official shouldn’t simultaneously run a nonprofit out of the same office dealing with many of the same people with public money.

“I don’t want to say, ​‘This is the right model’ or ​‘That is the right model,’” Elicker began in response. He insisted the more important point is to increase the amount of job-training supported by the city. ​“There’s a number of permutations of how we do it,” he said.

He pointed to the work of nonprofits like EMERGE, which helps ex-offenders obtain landscaping and other jobs; and ConnCAT, which trains phlebotomists and lands them internships at Yale New Haven Hospital. Construction and health-related jobs pay middle-class wages, he noted; he said the city should be contracting with more nonprofits to help New Haveners obtain those jobs.

Pressed on the issue, Elicker said, ​“I don’t support the model of people working for the city and a nonprofit at the same time.”

Asked about Elicker’s criticism, Mayor Harp maintained that her administration is fostering training partnerships.

“We have partners with the Laborers Union to develop a pre-apprenticeship program at Hillhouse High School that is every bit as effective as the previous program in getting into apprenticeship programs, if not more so,” she argued.

She added that New Haven Works — an agency created by Yale’s unions, city elected officials, and private-sector leaders — ​“currently coordinates the pre-apprenticeship program that Mrs. Jefferson ran. While done differently, it certainly is doing the work.”

Elicker argued that New Haven Works can be doing much more, and that it should expand to cover more construction and health-care jobs.