Change Motivated Key Elicker Volunteer

Andrea Atkinson-Downer proudly cast her vote for mayoral challenger Justin Elicker Tuesday, just as she did 6 years ago.

This time, her vote helped propel the former East Rock/Cedar Hill alder and nonprofit leader to the Democratic nomination for the city’s top seat.

Atkinson-Downer, an electrical engineer who was born and raised in Newhallville and has spent the past 20 years living in Amity, was one of the star volunteers for Elicker’s campaign this year. She spent the past month knocking doors, making calls, and pitching neighbors on the west side of town on behalf of Elicker and against incumbent Mayor Toni Harp.

She spent four hours Tuesday afternoon greeting voters outside the Ward 27 polling place at Mauro-Sheridan Interdistrict Magnet School, and reflected on her path towards supporting Elicker, who soundly defeating Harp in Tuesday’s Democratic primary. Atkinson-Downer’s racially diverse ward was one of the proving grounds where Elicker erased an advantage Harp had over him in their first electoral match-up in 2013.

“I believe in Justin,” Atkinson-Downer said. ​“I believe in his leadership experience. I believe in his integrity. I believe in his honesty.”

She said that she supported Elicker in 2013 because ​“he was fresh, he was new.” She respected the work he had done in representing not just East Rock but Cedar Hill when he was Ward 10 alder.

In the intervening years, she said, she was impressed with how Elicker revived and transformed the New Haven Land Trust. The way that he has led his 2019 mayoral campaign so far, she said, limiting himself to relatively small individual donations through his participation in the Democracy Fund and overseeing a volunteer team that knocked doors in every neighborhood, has only reinforced her admiration.

His work at the land trust and his campaign serve as ​“the preliminaries for how he’ll run the city” if elected mayor in November, she said.

“If you could run an organization so well on a small scale,” she said, ​“you could do it on a larger scale.”

She said she was also very much motivated to support Elicker because of a multitude of concerns she has with the Mayor Harp and the way the city has been run for the past three years.

“It’s like a war zone out here,” she said about violent crime in her neighborhood. Whenever Mayor Harp holds a press conference that violent crime is at a record low, as it statistically is citywide, Atkinson-Downer said, she feels like she hears about two or three people shot on just about the same day.

“The homeless youth,” she said, ​“the lawsuits, the 11 percent tax increase, the China trip, the school board.” All these issues have plagued the Harp administration, she said.

“We have new apartments going downtown,” she said. But ​“there’s no affordable housing in the neighborhoods. Downtown looks beautiful.” But out where she lives, the trees need to be trimmed.

Living next door to a Mandy Management-owned building herself, she said that the city lets large-scale landlords running predominantly low-income housing off the hook too frequently when they don’t keep their buildings up to code.

“We need to set some strong policies in terms of monitoring, ​‘Are they meeting code?’” she said. I’m a landlord in Hamden, she said. ​“It keeps the landlords honest.”

Walking door to door in her neighborhood with former alder Tom Lehtonen and neighbor Doreen Lee, she said, she heard time and again ​“a lot of frustration. People are tired. They don’t know what they’re getting from the city” when their trees aren’t trimmed, and they still feel unsafe outside.

As for Harp’s statement that she primarily represents black and brown neighborhoods in the city, Atkinson-Downer, who is African American, said she wants a mayor who bridges the racial divide.

“My thoughts are, ​‘All lives matter,’” she said. ​“We need to come together in this city.”