Thomas MacMillan File Photo.
High Street.
In the battle over Wall and High streets, the Board of Aldermen gained new ammunition — a legal opinion that says it has full authority to negotiate a new deal with Yale if the university wants to keep control of the roads.
The legal opinion comes from lawyers Oliver Dickins and Robert Ricketts. The Board of Aldermen hired them to parse a 1990 agreement between the city and Yale that allowed the university to take over Wall and High streets.
Yale closed High Street to traffic, incorporating it as a flagstone-paved portion of Cross Campus featuring Maya Lin’s iconic Women’s Table fountain. The university theoretically closed Wall Street to traffic as well, though it’s still widely used as a pass-through and for street parking.
In exchange, Yale gave the city $1.1 million and agreed to a package of other concessions, including yearly voluntary payments for fire services, the addition of the Yale golf course to the Grand List, and an investment of $50 million over 10 years in economic development.
The agreement required a review after 20 years. Just what that review entails has been the center of contretemps between Yale and the Board of Aldermen. In the spring, when the administration submitted the deal for a simple renewal without modification, some aldermen pushed for new concessions from Yale.
Yale pushed back. Lauren Zucker, the university’s director of New Haven affairs, said that if the city tried to re-negotiate the deal, Yale might reconsider the millions of dollars in voluntary payments it gives to New Haven every year.
At an aldermanic committee hearing in April, Zucker said aldermen don’t have the authority to place new financial terms on the agreement, that their purview is limited to traffic considerations only.
See full background here.
Aldermen called for an outside legal opinion on several aspects of the agreement, including what the legal ramifications would be if aldermen ended the agreement and reopened the streets.
Contrary to Zucker’s interpretation, Dickins and Ricketts said aldermen do have the authority to renegotiate the agreement. “There will be no adverse legal impact to the City if it decides to exercise this power,” the lawyers wrote.
The Board of Aldermen “has the complete authority to address the street reopenings currently at issue,” the statement reads. Read the full opinion here.
Dickins and Ricketts will appear Wednesday evening in City Hall to answer questions from the Board of Aldermen’s City Services and Environmental Policy Committee.
Zucker couldn’t be reached for comment. Yale’s Michael Morand had this to say: “As one of the majority 19 aldermen who voted for the agreement, I remember well the 1990 agreement’s intent beyond technicalities. It’s about promoting the New Haven-Yale partnership, an intent vastly exceeded over the past 20 years.
“Yale volunteered to make a payment that would equal just over $2 million a year, while in reality it voluntarily pays over $8 million a year. Yale’s voluntary payments of more than $65 million since 1991 far surpass anything conceived then.”
Morand also touted Yale’s homebuyer program and its support of New Haven Promise among evidence that “the partnership has been a great deal.”
Thomas MacMillan File Photo.
Wall Street.
“I think it supports our argument that this wasn’t just a continuation of the agreement Yale had in place,” West Rock Alderman Darnell Goldson said of the legal opinion. Goldson has been pushing for concessions from Yale. “Somebody needs to draft a new agreement for the board to approve.”
“Obvuously I would like to see an additional payment put in place,” Goldson said. Yale has argued that it has and continues to make contributions to the city in a variety of ways. Goldson said that he might be convinced to approve a new agreement if Yale lists all of those various contributions in writing.
“I will not approve anything that does not have a solid written agreement in place,” Goldson said.
East Rock Alderman Justin Elicker, chair of the committee that’s taking up the matter again at a meeting Wednesday night, said the new legal opinion clarified for him the power that the board has. He said he wasn’t sure previously if Yale could simply prevent the city from reopening the streets if aldermen and the university couldn’t come to an agreement.
“The idea that we have authority over the streets of New Haven … is very clear in the opinion,” Elicker said.
But that idea was always clear, said city spokeswoman Elizabeth Benton. She said the legal opinion offers very little new information and is silent on a couple of key questions: If aldermen were to decide to reopen the streets, who pays for the transformation of High Street? And what will happen to the voluntary payments from the university?
“That’s really the issue,” Benton said. “What is the economic impact if the board were to decide” to end the agreement and re-open the streets?
The DeStefano administration had lobbied aldermen not to reopen negotiations.
Benton said it would cost an estimated $1 million to transform High Street back into a regular city roadway. “How much of the capital budget for streets do you want to spend on redoing a successful pedestrian walkway?”
The closure of High and Wall has been a clear success in terms of safety and economic benefit to the city, Benton said. “Yale has been a willing partner with the city,” she said. “I’m not sure that there’s real value … to holding up this issue.”
“I’m really torn on the decision,” Alderman Elicker said. “I like that area. I think it’s nice that it’s walkable, it’s open, it feels safe.”
“I don’t want to potentially lose Yale’s fire payments,” Elicker said. He said he also doesn’t want the city to pay to re-open the streets. On the other hand, “I can see wanting to have Yale contribute more.”