Thomas MacMillan Photo
Johnson: Staying put.
Mayor Toni Harp convinced her top neighborhoods official to turn down a Hartford job offer by giving him a $22,000 raise — and a new mission.
The official, Erik Johnson, executive director of the Livable City Initiative (LCI) neighborhood anti-blight and development agency, had already told Hartford’s city government he would accept a new job there as the number-two development chief. He was to begin the job on July 7 at a $125,000 salary, according to his would-be new boss.
“Erik, do I have a crack at [keeping] you?” Mayor Harp asked him after learning the news, she recalled in a City Hall interview Tuesday afternoon.
“I’m willing to listen,” Johnson replied.
Harp then decided, she said, that “we’ve got to do everything we can do to keep him.”
Paul Bass Photo
That was more than a week ago. Harp dispatched her chief of staff, Tomas Reyes (at left in photo, with Harp), to negotiate with Johnson to keep him on. Those negotiations continued through this past weekend.
“This wasn’t all about money,” Reyes said. Money was an issue — Johnson’s New Haven salary had been slated to rise to $98,230 in the new fiscal year beginning July 1. But Johnson also sought to redefine the mission of LCI itself. Harp had promised to do that in last year’s mayoral campaign.
The negotiations ended with a two-part agreement: Harp will raise Johnson’s salary to $120,000. She will do that by dissolving LCI and creating a new version, which Johnson will head.
The new version will hearken back to a previous mission. LCI will continue to oversee code enforcement. But its central focus will now become housing and neighborhood development. Harp said the working title for the agency is the Office of Housing and Neighborhood Development (OHND). That’s what the agency was called before former Mayor John DeStefano dismantled it in the 1990s to create LCI, with its mission of at first bulldozing vacant homes, then tackling blight and assigning individual problem-solving staffers to different neighborhoods.
“I want to get away from this Livable City brand and get back to OHND,” Harp said.
Johnson confirmed Reyes’ and Harp’s account of the negotiations and the outcome.
“The mayor can be persuasive,” he said. “She is committed to building a better New Haven.”
Harp said the details of how OHND will carry out the mission remain to be worked out. Her administration was tentatively planning a press conference for some time Wednesday to announce the broad new changes.
In his new capacity, Johnson will still technically report to city Economic Development Administrator Matthew Nemerson. But he will assume day-to-day responsibility for housing and other development projects in city neighborhoods. “Matt is the guy I’m sending out to get companies to locate here,” Harp said.
Harp noted that Johnson had planned to leave City Hall at a crucial time for three major development efforts he had been overseeing:
• The remaking of the parking lot-infested stretch connecting downtown with the train station and the Yale medical area in the Hill, including Church Street South, back into a busy, walkable neighborhood chocked with housing and offices and/or stores. Johnson, along with former development chief Kelly Murphy, crafted a detailed “Hill-to-Downtown” plan in conjunction with neighbors. He shepherded the plan’s overall vision to approvals. Now it needs to be filled in on the ground. Click here and here, here, here, and here to read more about that.
• The reclaiming of 16.2 acres of abandoned median land along Route 34 between Dwight Street and the Boulevard, property the city bulldozed a half-century ago to make way for a highway that was never built. Johnson shepherded to approval a $50 million plan to build new offices, stores and a hotel on the first 5.39 acres of that land. Now he’ll oversee the planning for the rest of the land, including an upcoming “charette” with neighbors, some of whom opposed the first 5.39-acre plan as a suburban-style office-retail strip-park with no housing and too much parking. The goal is to create a walkable neighborhood again with a mix of housing and stores. Click here, here, here, and here to read more about that.
• The construction of a new urbanist-style mini-village of apartments, stores, and open space atop the grave of the old New Haven Coliseum. Johnson and Murphy negotiated that deal and got it approved. Much remains to be done to see it through — and to complete the broader plan for “Downtown Crossing,” gradually filling in the Route 34 Connector mini-highway-to-nowhere between the post-Coliseum project and the new 13-story Alexion Pharmaceutical tower under construction. Click here, here and here to read more about that.
More broadly, OHND will focus the Harp administration’s efforts more on increasing housing in general, Harp said.
“What I learned in grad school and what we know as a nation — and seem to have forgotten — [is that] you’ve got to have worker housing, entry housing for people,” Harp said. “That’s how we grow. That’s how we help the region grow.”
Toward that end, Johnson just unveiled a new campaign to convince people to buy and occupy homes in New Haven neighborhoods, with the lure of interest-free energy-improvement and downpayment loans for city workers and military vets. Billboards for the campaign have gone up on the highway; a website has also launched. That campaign has just begun and will require extensive follow-through; the goal is to nudge up New Haven’s homeownership rate from 31 percent to above 35 percent rather than rely on outside investors to buy homes and rent them out. Click here to read more about that campaign.
“Erik had a vision of developing amenities in our neighborhoods that would make people want to live in New Haven, even in our working-class neighborhoods,” Harp said.
The unusually public effort to keep Johnson in City Hall taught Harp a lesson, she said.
Her tendency is to encourage people “to grow” professionally, even if that means losing them to another employer. In this case, given the projects Johnson had been shepherding, she felt she needed to try hard to keep him. “Sometimes,” she concluded, “you have to fight” to keep “the talent you have.”