Paul Bass Photo
Voters waiting four hours to cast ballots. Jackie James (below).
Markeshia Ricks Photo
Jackie James, a former city small-business chief, has returned to a short-term government post to help New Haven’s voting registrars avoid more Election Day headaches.
The Registrar of Voters office has hired James on a $50,000 contract to work for three months to help the beleaguered Registrar of Voters office plan better for this year’s primary and general elections, in the hopes of preventing problems like hours-long waits and botched ballot-counting. (Click here to read about all the errors in the handling of the most recent botched election.)
James, a former city alder and Democratic town chair, won the contract in a competitive request for proposals (RFP) process. Her Gem Consulting Services firm beat out another bidder, Daniel Penn Associates of West Hartford.
The contract calls for James to create a “strategic plan” for the registrar office, addressing Election Day worker shortage and trainings, “organization structure,” logistical voting process,” “same day voter registration,” and “time management.”
“Gem Consulting Services will also assess tools utilized to set priorites, assess resources, review communication procedures, strengthen operations, ensure that employees and other stakeholders are working toward common goals, establish agreement around intended outcomes/results, and assess and adjust the officers’ direction in response to a changing environment.”
James said Monday that her goal is to “building a bigger infrastructure on Election Day. … We’re doing an assessment where some of the areas of need are within the office, and at various polling places,” she said.
To that end, she’s looking to help the registrars put together training for poll workers and find more people to serve on election days; and “networking to elected officials and various stakeholders.”
“We need people who know what they’re doing at the polls. We also have to have the ability to train them,” James said.
She also said the registrars need a bigger budget so they can hire more poll workers. Monday night the department gets to make that pitch to the Board of Alders at a public budget hearing.
The Registrar of Voters Office, which is legally separate from the mayor’s office, put out the bid and hired James. Mayor Toni Harp said her office was willing to find the money to fund the assessment because of the pressing need to avoid another election mess.
“We don’t want the experience at the polls to keep people way from” voting, Harp said during her latest appearance on WNHH FM’s “Mayor Monday program.”
James is one of two women who left City Hall amid conflict with Mayor Toni Harp’s previous economic development administrator, Matthew Nemerson.
James filed a complaint in 2016 charging Nemerson with creating a hostile workplace environment; Nemerson in turn began proceedings to fire her for alleged subordination.
The Harp administration and James resolved the dispute by negotiating a severance package.
Nichole Jefferson Next To Return?
Nichole Jefferson.
The other ex-department head — Nichole Jefferson — may also be returning to city government. But not at the request of the Harp administration.
Nemerson fired Jefferson as executive director of the Commission on Equal Opportunities in 2015, sparking a drawn-out and acrimonious legal battle. In the most recent development, a Superior Court judge last week ruled that the city must return Jefferson to her job because it improperly fired her. (The Register’s Mary O’Leary first reported on that decision.) 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.
Now Mayor Harp’s team has to decide whether to appeal that decision, and keep an expensive fight going; or end the legal battle and enable a political foe to return to government.
The long-running dispute began over institutional ethics and transparency, and developed into a battle over the rules for removing government employees.
When Jefferson ran the CEO, she simultaneously ran a nonprofit with a similar mission out of the same office, dealing with the same unions and contractors whose work she was charged with regulating in her city job. She enjoyed a reputation for hard work and producing results.
When Toni Harp took office as mayor in 2014, supported by critics of the CEO, she installed one of those critics to run the commission that oversees the agency. Then her administration fired Jefferson. It cited ethical concerns about how the city agency and nonprofit intertwined, and what it said were Jefferson’s refusals to produce documentation, including Form 990 tax returns, for how her nonprofit spent public money. City Hall also said it couldn’t find years worth of minutes for meetings of the commission charged with overseeing the CEO.
The city wrestled for months after the firing with Jefferson and her supporters for physical control of a city-owned building that housed the agency. When the city eventually regained control, officials said they found furniture gone and the facility vandalized, with cement poured down the drains. (Jefferson said the furnishings belonged to her.)
Jefferson adamantly denied any unethical behavior or failure to account for spending.
She also swung back against accusations from the Harp administration that she had committed crimes. The administration handed the U.S. attorney’s office a report alleging serious criminal behavior by Jefferson — and the office concluded that the accusations had no merit.
In addition, confidential internal emails from the corporation counsel’s office were made public, stating that the mayor personally was looking for ways to fire Jefferson and her staff— a revelation that helped Jefferson’s cause as she appealed her termination.
Jefferson charged the city unjustly fired her and smeared her reputation. Siding with the city on some specific claims but with Jefferson on others, the state Board of Mediation and Arbitration ruled last year that the city must reinstate Jefferson and pay her for lost back wages. The Harp administration appealed in Superior Court, where a judge last week upheld the mediation board’s ruling.
Harp said Monday during her WNHH radio appearance that she expects to make a decision this week about whether to file an appeal of the latest ruling.
“We looked at the decision the judge made. It seemed to be at conflict with itself,” she said, declining to discuss the specifics of the case further because it’s a personnel issue.
Click on the video below to watch the full episode of “Mayor Monday” on WNHH FM:
WNHH’s “Mayor Monday” is made possible with the support of Gateway Community College and Berchem Moses P.C.