“Labor” Agenda Takes Shape In 1st Year

First of three parts.

Let us borrow another $900,000, City Hall’s emissaries asked.

The answer: Not so fast. Tell us first how you plan to plug a growing city budget deficit.

That exchange took place in October at hearing of a committee of the Board of Aldermen, 10 months into the first term of a new pro-labor majority in the city’s legislative body. It was a remarkable moment for two reasons.

One reason: In the past, minor City Hall requests like this one, to borrow $900,000 to pay off lawsuit settlements, sailed to approval with few if any questions from aldermen. At this Oct. 25 meeting of the Board of Aldermen’s Finance Committee, lawmakers not only demanded more answers before approving it. They demanded a plan for closing the broader budget gap projected for later in the fiscal year — rather than have to wrestle with a last-minute plan presented at the end of the fiscal year with few options, as happened in the past. (Click here to read more about the Oct. 25 meeting.)

Reason Number Two: The exchange went against script. Aldermen saying ​“not so fast” to more borrowing were part of a new labor majority that critics feared would bust the government bank.

That was one defining moment in a watershed year in New Haven politics, in which labor took the reins of the city’s legislative branch with a mission to make laws as well as to make broader grassroots change. A year-end look at how they fared both inside and outside of City Hall reveals a work in progress, with some concrete results as well as first steps taken that will be better judged in 2013.

In January, 20 candidates supported by Yale’s labor unions took office as part of a coordinated sweep of the city’s traditionally subservient 30-member Board of Aldermen. (The actual number of aldermen in the new majority group fluctuates, sometimes well above 20, depending on the issue.) As labor was taking a political beating across the country in states like Michigan and Wisconsin, it now had control of a local legislature. It had a chance to prove that it can craft a viable governing agenda different from laws shaped by corporate-funded politicians.

Local critics immediately accused labor of hijacking the Board of Aldermen in order to promote big-spending pro-union policies with no regard to the plight of New Haven taxpayers. That criticism continued throughout 2012 as the newcomers grew into their new roles as lawmakers.

They didn’t always play the part that critics predicted. Or that anyone predicted.

They started their term in February by doing something unprecedented in New Haven’s legislative branch: crafting a unanimously-passed document spelling out what they promised to accomplish, focused first on community policing, job creation, and helping ​“youth.” (Click here to read that agenda, which includes nods to fiscal responsibility and constituent service.)

Halfway through their first term, members of the new labor-backed majority are still honing the script. After extensive public discussion, they’re still working out some key details of how to get there — and how to tackle other important parts of their jobs. They’ve asked more questions than they’ve answeredThey have yet to present a unified or detailed position on one of the city’s central challenges: improving the schools.

They delivered some votes to try get more people liveable-wage jobs and steer more money to youth programs, as promised. They also used their newfound political might outside the halls of government to help strike a favorable union contract with New Haven’s largest employer, Yale, and to extract the promise of some union jobs (with union wages) and payments for community youth programs from a deal to build a new charter high school in Newhallville.

Overall, the day-to-day business of governing proved less adaptable to ideological categories or detailed ​“agendas.” For starters, 19 first-term aldermen — including some not in the coalition — had to learn the job. They tended to look to the veterans on their team, most notably board President Jorge Perez and President Pro Tempore Jackie James, for guidance on issues and the mechanics of running meetings. Perez has served on the board for 23 years, James for 11. (At the Oct. 25 meeting, Perez and non-union-aligned Alderman Justin Elicker initially pressed the fiscal responsibility question; but the others at the table joined in and signaled that they planned to vote to delay approval of new borrowing.) They immersed themselves in the nuts-and-bolts constituent work so crucial to politicians’ long-term survival, such as getting neighbors information during Superstorm Sandy. They continued door-to-door organizing in their wards, which helped produce state-leading turnouts in the November federal elections.

And they came through on one overriding promise: to create a legislature that would work with the mayor’s office on issues, not as a rubber-stamp or reflexive naysayer, but as an independent partner in governing. City Hall no longer controls the Board of Aldermen.

Gearing Up

To the extent the union-backed aldermen identified an agenda in last fall’s campaigns, it centered on three main issues: Creating jobs. Creating opportunities for young people. Bringing back community policing.

On two of those signature issues — jobs and youth — the majority spent more of the year talking, inviting public comment, and planning than producing many results yet. The jury’s still out on results. Rather than having a secret detailed agenda to spring on New Haven government, they if anything went at times to a different extreme: months- or year-long wide-ranging public discussions preceding taking action.

They spent the year beginning to write a youth plan that they hope will eventually lead to a network of after-school centers in neighborhoods throughout the city, to replace bygone outposts like Dixwell’s Q House and Trowbridge Square’s Hill Cooperative Youth Services.

The plan’s not done yet.

“The first year you lay a foundation,” remarked Alderwoman James. ​“You try to get the funding.”

“The city’s been doing a [youth] plan for 20 years. In the last year we’ve made more headway than in the last 20 years,” Alderman Perez argued..

They succeeded in obtaining two grants to get the youth plan moving in 2013. One, a $250,000 state grant secured by New Haven’s ​“Two Tonis,” state Sen. Toni Harp and state Rep. Toni Walker, will filter to community organizations through mini-grants to carry out ideas for reducing violence through mentorship, job-training and other programs; a joint administration-aldermanic panel is scheduled to present recommendations in January. The other, a $200,000 grant from the city’s capital bonding budget, will pay for a study of existing buildings and facilities in town that could house after-school youth programs; as well as a look at how best to revive the old Dixwell ​“Q” House.

“We’re putting it on paper,” said first-term West River Alderwoman Tyisha Walker, vice-chair of the Youth Committee overseeing the plan. ​“People are going to expect us to make good on it.”

Similarly, the aldermen came to office promising a ​“pipeline” to good jobs for unemployed or underemployed New Haveners. They spent 2012 coming up with a plan for that pipeline.

Rather than make demands on the corporate sector, the aldermen’s representatives and union backers rolled up their sleeves with business leaders at the Chamber of Commerce’s conference room to organize a new entity called New Haven Works. The idea is to shepherd job-seekers through the process of getting ready for jobs, link applicants to local employers with job openings, then follow up on why they did or didn’t get the jobs. The new organization — with backing from Yale, Yale-New Haven Hospital, United Way and the Community Foundation — has moved into temporary space and hired an interim director, from Yale’s unions.

Among the as-yet unsettled questions: Will this plan merely create a new bureaucracy and spend millions of dollars that could have gone instead to improving existing job-training and placement efforts? Proponents argue that testimony at public hearings proved that existing agencies haven’t been doing the job, and that the new organization will be uniquely placed to focus on the city of New Haven, rather than the region, while following people through all steps of the process.

Click here to read a fuller story about the new agency and here for a directory of ​“jobs pipeline” stories from throughout 2012. Early in the year the DeStefano administration sought to take the lead on the job-creation issue. The mayor personally enlisted employers to come to a jobs fair and to meet with 200 job-seekers prepared by City Hall staff. But that effort dissipated. City Hall did no follow-up to evaluate the results of the first effort or continue the campaign. It hired a ​“consultant” to start doing a report on the first fair’s outcome; she ended up campaigning for the mayor’s 2013 reelection during work hours (allegedly ​“lunch”) and completing her contract without producing a report.

Community Policing Redux

The mayoral administration did take the lead on the third main demand of the labor-backed aldermanic candidates. Even before the new aldermen took office.

After most of them won their seats in a September primary, Mayor John DeStefano pushed the existing police chief out of his job. He brought in a new chief with a history of promoting community policing (including in New Haven). Since then, that chief, Dean Esserman, has launched a dizzying array of community-policing initiatives, from bringing back walking cops all over town to holding large open-to-the-community weekly ​“Compstat” crime-strategy sessions to helping launch a joint federal-state-local-community stop-the-shooting effort called ​“Project Longevity.”

So to some extent aldermen could claim victory on that issue before they took their oaths of office Jan. 1. Their job after that has been to monitor community policing’s progress and vote on requests from the cops.

“I’m not going to say we’re totally there,” said West River’s Walker. But she and Dixwell and Newhallville alderwomen noted the steep decline in violent crime this year from last year. They heap praise on their neighborhood cops. Weeks go by with one or zero major crimes in Dixwell, according to statistics presented at weekly data-sharing Compstat meetings.

The new alderwomen need to keep playing an important oversight role, Walker said. For instance: She wants more ​“answers” on ​“Project Longevity.” Walker and the aldermen are planning an upcoming briefing with the cops. She wants to know, for instance, how the police are identifying ​“associates” of gang members whom they promise to sweep into jail in the event of further shootings. ​“I could be a friend of somebody. That doesn’t mean nothing,” she said. She also promised to seek clarification about what kind of associate-sweeps can be done by law.

While supporting the reintroduction of community policing, the aldermen have also said no to the cops. The chief requested the creation of a second public-information position to handle social media. The board turned it down. The reasoning: They would support putting more cops on the street. They didn’t feel they could afford to create any other positions.

Fiscal Conservatives?

That vote, like the Oct. 25 borrowing debate and follow-up sessions, fit into a pattern: scrutinizing all new spending and borrowing. Not necessarily saying yes or no. Not necessarily voting for or against the city administration. But asking the questions and showing a willingness to support a tighter rein on spending, at least sometimes.

In that quest, they’ve lined up with two aldermen considered independent of the labor majority as well as of City Hall: East Rock’s Elicker and Downtown’s Doug Hausladen.

Other examples of votes that didn’t match the free-spending-labor narrative:

• Aldermen approved two new union contracts — with city government clerical workers and with school custodians — that are each projected to save millions of dollars through changes in health and pension benefits. The custodial contract included privatization of many jobs as well. (Read about those contracts here and here.)

• Aldermen voted down accepting a federal $780,000 grant to plan a new trolley system. Advocates of the plan were withering in their criticism of the aldermen: They called the vote a short-sighted decision that blew the chance of getting a needed new mass-transit project with possible millions in future federal support. Perez and other no-voting aldermen argued that no guarantee of future money existed; that taking the grant would probably lead to spending more money the city can’t afford to, in some people’s view, replicate the existing Yale Shuttle route for people who least need it. Proponents argued that the initial planned route for the trolley, which indeed mirrored the Yale Shuttle’s, could be changed.

• In this spring’s budget deliberations, aldermen said no to city bonding for a new school: a proposed new campus for Hyde Leadership Academy.

• They also advanced a Plan B for making long-needed repairs for Bowen Field, reducing the amount the city would end up borrowing from over $10 million to $3.6 million. They got help from two of their powerful allies in the state legislature, Sen. Toni Harp and Rep. Toni Walker, on that. Read about that here and here.

• East Rock Alderwoman Jessica Holmes and Westville Alderman Adam Marchand successfully pushed the city to put out for bid the contract for servicing the city’s health insurance plans. Holmes argued that a competitive bid could cut the cost. (We’ll find out in 2013.)

Close observers of last fall’s elections would have found signs of the labor-backed candidates’ fiscally conservative streak: They tended to oppose a city proposal to start charging a stormwater handling fee. They insisted their constituents couldn’t afford another ​“tax.” (Their position contained an irony: Their unions have long demanded that Yale pay more of its ​“fair share” to the city. The point behind the stormwater fee was to shift millions of dollars a year in costs to Yale and other large not-for-profits, which otherwise can’t be conventionally taxed for the service.)

“We’re doing the opposite of what people envisioned,” Alderwoman James argued. ​“We’re looking at police and fire overtime … It’s about being efficient.”

Fiscal watchdog David Cameron cautioned against jumping to conclusions yet about the new aldermen’s willingness to ride herd on an emerging budget crisis. Yes, they demanded that the city administration produce an early plan for erasing a potential deficit this year. But when the administration officials reported back at a Finance Committee meeting earlier this month, they offered skimpy details on their emerging plans, Cameron noted.

The aldermen shouldn’t just wait for the administration to fix the problem, he said.

“They ought to be trying to do it themselves. It’s their budget. They approved it,” said Cameron, who teaches political science at Yale and heads the independent Financial Review and Audit Commission. Past Boards of Aldermen have allowed the mayor’s administration to write the entire budget. Asking more questions and pushing for earlier deficit-reduction plans aren’t enough, he argued.

“They’ve been following whatever the mayor puts on the board,” agreed Ken Joyner, a citizen budget watchdog from Newhallville who regularly attends and speaks at aldermanic finance meetings..

Aldermen did not mess with much of the administration’s plan when they passed the most recent $486.4 million budget this past May. The true test comes this coming spring, because last year’s proposal was already well in the works when the rookie aldermen took office.

The city budget the aldermen passed in May already has an $11 million potential hole in it, with practically no money left in the rainy-day fund to cover another deficit. (Hence the aldermen’s push for a deficit-closing plan before they approve more bonding.)

New aldermen spoke in interviews of how they’ve been working hard this year at learning the budget. They’ve relied heavily on their more experienced colleagues, notably Perez and James. Dixwell’s Morrison, who sits on the Finance Committee, spoke of how they helped her figure out how to find existing money to stop a new $20 Lighthouse Park admission fee from taking effect without requiring a tax hike.

The labor-backed majority will have two chances in 2013 to prove they can shape the budget: When and if they follow through on plugging the current year’s deficit and when and if they take the initiative to craft new spending and revenue plans for the fiscal year beginning on July 1, rather than simply following the mayor’s lead.

Crossing Downtown

Some critics remain wary of the labor group’s agenda.

Those concerns arose when labor-backed Westville rookie Alderman Marchand tackled one of the year’s biggest issues: whether to approve Downtown Crossing, a new plan to gradually fill in the Route 34 Connector mini-highway-to-nowhere to make way for new 11-story medical-related office building and new downtown streets.

Marchand was appointed to represent the aldermen on the City Plan Commission, which held some of the key hearings and initial approval votes on the plan.

“Safe-streets” advocates as well as new urbanists detest the design for the new street grid. They complain that it will create a new highway made for speeding cars and pollution, crowding out cyclists and pedestrians. They criticized Marchand for casting his first votes without having read the plan in full; and for praising the developer Carter Winstanley for agreeing to give $150,000 to a training program at Gateway to prepare workers for jobs in the new businesses that will move into his building, rather than pressing him and other officials for pedestrian- and cyclist-friendlier streets.

Consider these two comments posted to New Haven Independent news stories about that process:

From commenter David Streever: ​“CCNE [the Connecticut Center for a New Economy, which is closely tied to Yale’s unions and the labor-backed candidates] is using their political appointments to get cash from developers, which, I applaud on one level. Unfortunately, they are doing it at the expense of long-term planning and strategic investment in neighborhoods. With Route 34, they let the city widen the roads, increase the design speeds, and reduce the curb radii, all which contribute to faster speeds and more vehicles. They also let the city move forward without full sidewalks. In exchange for cash for their jobs program. … CCNE, and by extension the alders who support them, do have an agenda. While they may have great intentions and be noble in thought, what they are doing is perpetuating a pay to play system where the wealthy can circumvent rules and restrictions by giving opaque money to an opaque agency, which spends it without restriction, however they care to.”

And this from a well-known commenter who goes by ​“Anonymous”: ​“the Unions clearly want to tear down buildings and widen local highways so that their suburban members can have free parking — the new Board Leadership hasn’t said anything critical about the Administration’s efforts to do that, and in fact, probably wants to accelerate them. Another example is that the new Board Leadership will most likely want to keep taxes at unsustainable levels, cut programs for the needy, and stifle economic development projects (like streetcars, Yale expansions, and investments in infrastructure), if they have to do that in order to prop up their own union constituents’ salary and benefit levels.”

Marchand and other proponents of the project called Winstanley’s job-training commitment not a payoff to unions, but rather a response to an important public political demand: that New Haveners share in the prosperity created by new development projects.

Marchand noted that he asked many questions over the course of an hour in that City Plan hearing with Winstanley. He said in the end he was convinced the plan, which included a $100 million investment from the developer, is a good one. Click on the play arrow to the above video and on this story for Marchand’s fuller response.

Come this fall, Marchand and his 19 fellow union-backed aldermen will answer questions like those from the voters if they run for reelection. This time the overall question won’t be: What has to change? It’ll be: What changed?