4 Run As A Team For Hill Alder Seats

Four candidates are running together for the Hill’s Board of Alders seats, pledging to work together to bring jobs to the neighborhood and more neighborhood input into future development.

The four Democratic candidates, all of whom are running unnopposed at this point, announced their candidacies in a joint press conference Sunday in Trowbridge Square Park.

“When we are united, they say together we stand and divided we fall,” said Ron Hurt, who is running to fill the Ward 3 currently held by Latrice James, who is not running again. The other three candidates — Ward 4’s Evelyn Rodriguez, Ward 5’s David Reyes, and Ward 6’s Dolores Colón — are incumbents.

Hurt, who has lived in the neighborhood 12 years, promised to involve young people in volunteer community service projects, like a community clean-up taking place this summer. He is an elder at Deliverance Temple Pentecostal Church and active in the community management team; he has played a public role in supporting a state bill to reexamine Yale’s tax exemptions and in opposing President Donald Trump’s immigration policy. He cited rent and homeownership as among the biggest challenges facing the Hill. With high unemployment and pending cuts in social services, residents of the area have struggled to maintain jobs, he noted.

All four candidates focused in on unemployment, as well as underemployment. Hurt said the alders must address the issue ​“head on,” urging major corporations like Yale and the hospital who have the ability to hire from within the community.

In December 2015, Yale promised New Haven that they would hire 1,000 residents, 500 of whom from neighborhoods of need, including the Hill. Colón, whose ward includes City Point and Long Wharf and Church Street South, said Yale hasn’t moved fast enough on that promise, and the alders need to hold the university to it.

Over the years, crime has plummeted in the neighborhood, said Colón who has served on the Board of Alders since 2001. But some unemployed or underemployed residents have turned to drug dealing where they have faced extreme violence, she said.

“No one wants to sit on the corner selling drugs. They want to be inside with their family watching a DVD,” said Colón, who underscored the community’s need for union jobs.

With regard to community safety, Evelyn Rodriguez promised to promote more block watches. As residents get to know each other, they may be more inclined to protect one another, said Rodriguez.

Rodriguez, appointed to her seat in May 2016, said in her first elected term she hopes to strengthen the neighborhood management teams to build better communication with constituents and with agencies and resources in communities.

For Dave Reyes, a self-proclaimed ​“homegrown Hill boy” running for his second term in Ward 5, the priority is keeping families with children in the neighborhood. Now, 85 percent of graduates from Hill Central School end up attending college, he said; he said he wants to narrow that 15 percent gap.

Reyes spoke of ensuring that when Church Street South gets rebuilt, families who lived there get to return if they wish. (Since they’ll have portable Section 8 rent subsidies, they’ll have a choice.) He vowed to continue to push to ensure that the overall proposed Hill-to-Downtown initiative connects the two neighborhoods, builds population density in the area, and attracts new businesses and jobs.

Throughout his first term, Reyes said, he has worked to make the community safer by adding speed bumps in the neighborhood. For his next two years, he said, he wants to build upon community policing efforts to further build relationships between residents and cops. With a new police chief committed to community engagement and body cameras for cops on the way, Reyes said, he predicts the relationship will only improve.