Thomas Breen photo
DuBois-Walton at presser: Mayor’s job is to find way to do what’s right.
If something appears wrong — like city government OK’ing, with almost no questions asked, $900,000 in state tax breaks for companies accused of fraud and controlled by an imprisoned sex predator — what should a mayor do?
Mayoral candidate Karen DuBois-Walton offered an answer Thursday that differed from the one offered by her opponent: Find a legal way to do what’s right.
DuBois-Walton made that argument Thursday afternoon during a press conference on Clarendon Street in the Annex.
DuBois-Walton, who is challenging first-term incumbent Mayor Justin Elicker for the Democratic nomination for mayor this year, spent most of the 15-minute presser calling for using increased state aid in part to lower local property taxes. (See more on that below.)
She ended the press conference by criticizing the current mayor for a lack of political and legal vision for how he handled this year’s Connecticut Neighborhood Assistance Act (NAA) Tax Credit Program list of local applicants.
The Elicker Administration and the Board of Alders signed off this year on requests totalling $900,000 by six companies that have been accused of fraud in federal court, and that are looking to participate yet again in the annual state tax credit program. All six are controlled by imprisoned Rabbi Daniel Greer. Greer can’t get the state tax credits without that initial city approval.
DuBois-Walton brought the issue up one day after top city attorney Patricia King released a five-page memo defending and justifying the city’s actions as appropriate and within the bounds of state statute.
DuBois-Walton argued that a mayor need not just automatically accept legal advice that justifies a potential misuse of public money. Rather, she argued, a mayor can press for a legal basis to take action that benefits rather than harms the public, and can seek to independently assess the situation.
“This is about setting a vision and aligning with our values,” DuBois-Walton said on Thursday. “Where we see something that’s wrong, we can’t just be about going about things the way they’ve always been done. We’ve got to explore every option we have to chart a path forward that reflects our values, a path that is rooted in equity and who we want to be as a city.”
King’s memo argued that the city was right to approve the tax break requests, and that the city can review relatively few criteria when determining a local nonprofit’s eligibility for the state tax credit program. The city’s, including the mayor’s, position is that the city has no ability to say no to an agency seeking tax credits under the program if it submits paperwork attesting it is spending money as promised; that it has no ability to independently assess if that is true or make judgments about who should receive government help to rebuild neighborhoods under the program. They have contended that state statute vests all substantive review authority to the state, and leaves the city’s hands tied during the local approval process.
Why, DuBois-Walton was asked, shouldn’t the mayor follow that legal advice?
“We have to ask attorneys to go back and find out not just, ‘Is this OK that I do it this way?” DuBois-Walton said. “But, ‘What are my other alternatives? What possibilities could we be exploring? Where could we push the envelope on this?’ This does not feel right, to not ask enough questions to know why we should continue to subsidize a potentially fraudulent entity while that fraud investigation is still happening.”
Elicker: Saying No To Greer’s Companies Could Have Led To Lawsuit
Mayor Elicker: City’s hands are tied, for now.
In a Thursday afternoon phone interview with the Independent, Elicker pushed back on DuBois-Walton’s critique — and on her legal take on the matter.
“This is another instance of the other candidate acting like we can do things that we just can’t under the law,” he said.
“Our attorneys have assessed the state statute. Our staff has reached out to the state to notify them of our concerns about the applicants. But we can’t just decide to reject an application or we will expose ourselves to liability.”
He said that his administration will be having conversations with the city’s state delegation about potentially amending the state statute that governs the NAA program.
“But for the other candidate to just stand on the sidelines and every day have a negative press conference and criticize these things without doing the work to help resolve them is not helpful to our city.”
Taxes Debated
Riverside teacher Steve Mikolike outside his Annex home with DuBois-Walton: PILOT meant for tax relief.
For most of the rest of Thursday’s press conference, DuBois-Walton called on City Hall to reduce local property taxes.
She noted that the city has recently gotten a windfall in increased municipal aid through the Payment in Lieu of Taxes (PILOT) program.
This roughly $50 million PILOT bump plus a likely increase in voluntary payments to the city from Yale University to come from the city’s ongoing negotiations with the university should be used to reduce the city’s property tax rate, she said.
“New Haven taxpayers deserve property tax relief,” DuBois-Walton said. “We need to make it easier to afford to live here for the tens of thousands of people paying too high taxes. We need a property tax cut.”
She stood alongside Riverside Academy teacher Stephen Mikolike. Pointing back at his and his wife’s single-family house, Mikolike said that they currently pay $6,127 every year in local property taxes. That number would be significantly less across the town border in East Haven or in nearby Branford, he said, and is so high that it might soon drive him and his wife out of New Haven.
But the entirety of the current PILOT bump was already budgeted for in the Fiscal Year 2021 – 2022 (FY22) budget proposed by the mayor and recently approved by the Board of Alders. That budget also keeps taxes flat at the current mill rate of 43.88.
Lower property taxes would mean that the city would have to cut funds, and services, from other areas of the budget. DuBois-Walton was asked what cuts she would recommend.
That’s the plan we need to see from the mayor, DuBois-Walton said. “With the increase in state aid and a significant increase in university funding, how is he going to ensure property tax relief? Every time that we are not taking every effort to make this community affordable, we risk losing residents to a town over, a couple of towns over, where they can find a comparable home at a significantly lower tax burden.”
In a separate phone interview, Elicker again pushed back on DuBois-Walton’s critique.
“If she’s calling for a cut in taxes, she’s calling for a cut in services,” he said. “I think it’s important to underscore what she’s going to cut. It doesn’t surprise me that there’s this type of press conference. Daily, there are press conferences that insinuate that the other candidate can magically solve all the city’s problems.”
Furthermore, Elicker said, the FY22 budget that he proposed and that the alders adopted is part of a longer-term plan for local tax relief. It works towards that goal by dramatically increasing the city’s pension fund contributions.
More money paid into pensions now means reduced pension payments in the long term, he said. Same goes for higher short-term debt service payments: the more paid now, the less to pay later on.
“That is the reason we worked so hard in partnership with the state delegation to increase funding to cities,” Elicker said, “so that we can reduce the pension payments in the long term, reduce the amount we pay in debt service, and [ultimately] reduce taxes.”
“To say we’re going to all of a sudden cut taxes,” he concluded, “is naïve and irresponsible.”
Click on the video below to watch the DuBois-Walton’s full press conference.