Paul Bass Photos
Upper Westville candidates Van Hoesen and Brackeen this week at WNHH FM: Both are vaxxed.
One candidate handed out assignments to dozens of neighbors: Here’s your street. Here are the doors to knock on. Here are flyers to hand out. Let us know who’s voting.
At another end of the ward, the other candidate set out to meet voters as well. Alone.
That, in a nutshell, describes two different campaigns for the alder seat in Ward 26, which covers the Upper Westville and Beverly Hills neighborhoods.
Two millennials are vying for the seat in Tuesday’s election.
The four-term incumbent Darryl Brackeen, Jr., a 33-year-old director of a state education nonprofit, is running as a proud Democrat, part of a large team. He served as a Joe Biden delegate to the Democratic National Convention. This past Sunday he gathered with 40 members of the Ward 26 Democratic Ward Committee and other active citywide Democrats on the back porch of the Upper Westville home of Edward Joyner, the Democratic candidate for an open Board of Education seat. “The Republican Party is trying to get a foothold in cities like ours,” Brackeen told the gathering. “If we lose [the election], we lose” progress Democrats have made in the city as a team. Then volunteers received their street-by-street assignments.
The challenger, Joshua Van Hoesen, a 31-year-old director of an engineering at a firm that produces accounting software for nonprofits, is running as a proud Republican — but not proud of the current state of his national or state party. Or even as part of a local team. Unlike other Republicans seeking municipal offices in this election, he has his own campaign structure and is not coordinating with the citywide party operation. Van Hoesen calls himself an “old-school Republican” who wants to be judged on his own positions and ideas for improving life in the ward and the city.
Both candidates are deeply involved in civic work beyond politics. Van Hoesen chairs the Westville/West Hills Community Management Team and volunteers at the polls when he’s not the candidate in an election. Brackeen founded a statewide voting rights advocacy group called Generation Change CT and serves as president of the Urban League of Southern Connecticut Young Professionals (ULSCYP).
In knocking on doors in this campaign, and in two separate interviews this week on WNHH FM’s “Dateline New Haven” program (videos of which appear below), Brackeen and Van Hoesen have made clear that politics remains local in New Haven, even as in other communities they’re becoming more and more national (i.e. everything is about Donald Trump). Sidewalks, crime, city pensions, how best to spend Covid-relief dollars … those issues are front and center. But even in Ward 26’s election, the question of national politics and identity float to the surface.
Including the question: why is Van Hoesen running as a Republican?
“Old-School” Quest
Easy, Van Hoesen responded. Because he’s a true Republican.
Yes, he voted for Joe Biden for president. He resigned from the Republican state central committee over the party’s positions on race and policing, on the 2020 election and Jan. 6 riot, on the state police-accountability law, on science and Covid. (He’s currently marveling at how “screwed up” the criminal justice system is as he reads The Justice Imperative.) He resigned from the local Republican town committee after disagreeing with positions on taxation. (He supported Mayor Elicker’s first-term 3 percent increase as necessary and preferable to dishonest budgeting that creates unpredictable double-digit hikes in subsequent years.) Unlike other Republican candidates, he supports Covid-19 vaccination mandates. Unlike several of them (but like Brackeen), he got vaccinated. He created his own candidate committee and opted out of running with the other local Republican candidates as a unified slate. Even if that means sacrificing the bits of citywide organizational help the party offers against the powerful Democratic Party.
He called some of his fellow Republican candidates “great individuals.” But “I’m very mindful of how I present things and policy. They can do it with the best intentions, but if someone says something controversial or a policy point I don’t agree with … I found it’s most productive for me to be the face knocking on the door, the individual,” he said.
So why not run as an unaffiliated candidate untethered to a party?
“I hope to show individuals that you can get elected without demagoguery and unfit policy,” he responded.
And Van Hoesen remains a steadfast Republican, he said. He believes in fighting for the party’s traditional values. He called himself “an old-school Republican” who supports “small government,” a belief that “the smallest unit of organization is best able to resolve an issue,” that government is better at “creating environments for individuals to thrive” rather than taking the lead to solve problems.
“I still have these Republican ideals that I was raised with. So that’s what I’m running as,” he said. He argued that it’s worth fighting for the party’s soul: “I don’t think the statewide Republican Party is doing a good job of sharing the Republican ideals I was raised on.”
That said, as an engineer and IT professional, Van Hoesen is first and foremost a “systems” person. He loves to geek out on policy challenges and fixes. He puts those ideas at the front of his campaign.
Van Hoesen: Systems guy.
For instance, if elected, he said he wants to focus the city’s attention back on its announced but often delayed effort to tackle underfunded pension obligations. He proposed switching from defined-benefit to defined-contribution plans so the government avoids “making promises we can’t keep” in the future.
He’d also recommend borrowing money to eliminate some of the pension system’s underfunding — but not through local bonding. Rather he recommended that the city save money by taking advantage of the state’s A+ bond rating (compared to the city’s BBB rating) by participating in the state municipal pension solvency loan fund.
He proposed having the public testify before city departments heads do, rather than after, in annual budget hearings held by the Board of Alders Finance Committee, so that the department heads can respond to concerns raised by citizens. He recommended that the city create a multi-year budget plan so homeowners can plan for tax increases rather than face uncertainty.
He also promised to serve as a conduit with constituents for information about city services. He promised to send out regular ward email newsletters along the lines of the one done by Alder Marchand in next-door Ward 25.
Lessons From A Park Bench
Brackeen at the Ward 26 gathering this past Sunday.
A bench in Goffe Street Park symbolizes why Darryl Brackeen is more inclined to group politics and team organizing.
Brackeen’s parents slept on that bench one night when they came to New Haven in the late 1980s from Georgia, seeking economic opportunity. They had no place else to go.
Then his dad landed a union job, at the Atrium Plaza nursing home, Brackeen said. It offered good pay and benefits. Along with his mother’s work in the food industry and then as a New Haven Savings Bank teller, they achieved financial stability.
Brackeen said he visits that bench from time to time. It reminds him that “the collective is always the power behind the working middle class.”
Similarly, while the Democratic Party has its factions and ideological disagreements like any other group (he said he identifies with the progressive wing on policy), Brackeen sees it as a vehicle for action as a coalition of people from different backgrounds to pursue common goals. He cited the Ward 26 Democratic committee as an example. It represents the ward’s racial diversity. It has had consistent leadership, in the form of Co-Chairs Amy Marx and Sharon Jones. They work together well even when they, say, support different candidates in mayoral primaries. The committee produces some of the city’s highest ward voter turnouts.
“It’s a family,” said Brackeen (who is also “exploring” a run for secretary of the state in 2022).
The committee enlists dozens of people hitting all 50 streets in the ward to hear voters’ concerns. That street-level intelligence keeps him accountable and helps him represent the ward well, Brackeen argued.
As a result, he said, he has worked to help get 43 of those 50 streets repaved or see other improvements over his eight years as alder. Now the cycle is repeating itself: Streets that got the first improvements like Vista Terrace, are due for repaving again. He promised to focus on that.
He also spoke of continuing his work as chair of the Board of Alders Health and Human Services Committee. That position ended up in the spotlight of two top city challenges over the past two years: Fixing government’s broken lead-paint monitoring and eradication program. And tackling the Covid-19 pandemic.
Brackeen said he took the mission seriously. He helped to craft a new lead paint task force and review and weigh in on plans by new health officials to update policies. His committee reviewed all the grants that the city sought to tackle Covid-19 before approving them.
In the process, Brackeen said, he learned how to navigate sometimes-competing imperatives: To ensure the legislative branch provides needed independent oversight of city government. And to make sure that oversight doesn’t delay the process of obtaining grants enough that the money could be lost.
In one such case, when his committee needed more information on a pressing Covid application, Brackeen said, he made sure to schedule extra meetings in a short time frame rather than wait another month for each session.
“I have a better grasp after eight years [in office] on how to get things done,” he said.
He spoke as well about working with City Clerk Michael Smart to promote the use of absentee-ballot drop boxes to ensure people could vote during the pandemic.
Looking ahead, Brackeen said he’s focusing on helping direct $12 million of federal pandemic relief to an asthma initiative, as well as boosting community policing.
While voters he visits stress those local issues during this campaign, Brackeen said, he has noticed that national politics has also creeped more into the discussion.
“There’s a lot of anxiety” about 2024, he said.
As for Van Hoesen’s determination to work from within his party, Brackeen argued, “he’s out of touch if he thinks the Republican Party is going to change.”
To which Van Hoesen responded: “Given the Republican party isn’t going away, I sincerely hope for all our sakes he is incorrect.”