Paul Bass photo
Brian Jenkins and Tom Goldenberg outside the Armory at Sunday's endorsement.
Brian Jenkins returned to a former armory in his old stomping grounds to issue a call to arms: to elect Tom Goldenberg as the city’s next mayor.
Jenkins, who served as Beaver Hills/Ward 28 alder from 2002 – 3, made that endorsement Sunday in front of the vacant former state armory complex on Goffe Street.
Jenkins, the second generation of a politically influential West Rock family (his mother Bess Jenkins served as Ward 30 Democratic co-chair, his sister Portia as Ward 30 alder), now lives outside Atlanta in Rockdale County, Georgia. He said he still spends a lot of time here visiting family and has been paying attention to this year’s four-way race for the Democratic mayoral nomination.
He credited Goldenberg, until recently a McKinsey consultant who moved back to New Haven five years ago, with doing a good job listening “to the people who are living in the city.” “I am encouraging the entire Black community in the city of New Haven to get behind Tom Goldenberg.”
Jenkins said he chose the location of the announcement to highlight their desire to have at least part of the 160,000-plus-square-foot former armory become a “youth drop-in center” where “young people can bring entrepreneurship” and “address health issues” and receive “homework assistance.” Some 100 New Haveners, including Goldenberg, attended a May 10 brainstorming session about the facility’s future.
Goldenberg said he embraces that idea along with placing programs to developing minority-owned businesses.
He was asked what lessons can be learned from previous attempts to place such programs in the armory, and then across the street in the Community Outreach Center, during the Harp administration.
He responded that public input will be crucial to the process. (Watch him respond in the above video.) “We don’t have it fully spec’d out. Let’s talk to the community.”
Brian Jenkins, Tom Goldenberg, Portia Jenkins.