Nemerson: I’m Running For Mayor

The latest candidate to decide to enter this year’s mayoral free-for-all is challenging his opponents to 15 neighborhood-based debates.

The candidate, Matthew Nemerson (pictured), said he plans to file official papers Friday to launch his candidacy for the Democratic mayoral nomination, adding yet another prominent local name to the list of people jumping into the most hotly contested New Haven race in decades.

“I want to run for mayor because the next mayor has got to be able to forge a partnership between the unions, between the existing government apparatus, has to be able to explain why New Haven is going to be the next great global small city,” Nemerson, who’s 57, said in an interview Tuesday.

He argued that his background — current president and CEO of the Connecticut Technology Council trade group, former president of New Haven’s Chamber of Commerce (where he was one of the state’s first business leaders to support a progressive income tax), founding vice-president of Science Park, as well as co-chair of the 19th Ward Democratic Committee since 1994 — gives him the ability to play that role. He laid out a campaign platform that includes building concentrated new communities downtown and by the harbor to lure 10,000 new people to live in New Haven (by constructing mixed-income high-rises surrounded by three-story townhouses and storefronts closer to the street); developing manufacturing-oriented industrial parks in Fair Haven and along Ella Grasso Boulevard in the quest to create 10,000 new jobs; and luring Yale or Harvard or Columbia to help the city launch a Bronx Science-style competitive-admissions public high school that would be ​“the best in state.”

“I am especially qualified,” Nemerson claimed. ​“The Board of Aldermen is a unique situation now. An active union that has an interest in our largest industry [Yale] has a majority of the members of the board. They have a unique opportunity to participate in making this city successful, where a lot of other medium and small-sized post-industrial cities are showing they can’t be successful. Cities are going bankrupt. Services are being cut. They want to figure out solutions. The best partner they [the Yale-affiliated unions] can actually have is not someone who simply agrees with the assumptions and the problems which they have very articulately identified, in terms of some of the failures of business, the American system. What I think they need is a partnership with a progressive business person who together with them will jointly will be sharing the very difficult decisions that have to be made to move forward.”

Eschewing The Democracy Fund

Like another candidate in the race, Henry Fernandez, Nemerson said he will not participate in the city’s public-financing system run by the Democracy Fund.

Three other Democrats in the race — state Rep. Gary Holder-Winfield, Alderman Justin Elicker, and Newhallville plumber Sundiata Keitazulu — have signed up to participate in the system, under which candidates agree to limit individual contributions to $370 (rather than the $1,000 legal limit) and forswear special-interest committee money in return for matching public dollars. Hillhouse Principal Kermit Carolina, who is also exploring a Democratic mayoral run, said he, too, will participate in the system. Proponents argue that the system promotes ​“cleaner” and more democratic elections by limiting the influence of wealthy donors and enabling more candidates with different ideas to compete for public office. Critics argue that Supreme Court decisions like Citizens United have neutered public-financing campaigns in America.

Nemerson said he likes the concept behind the Democracy Fund. But he said he needs to raise big money to convince people to support him.

“My weakness now is not as a person who could run the city or could be mayor,” he said. ​“My weakness is as a credible political candidate. I’ve been part of the civic leadership of the community for the long time. I haven’t been part of the political life in the way some people have. The currency of credibility is the ability to raise money.”

He was asked whether he could demonstrate that credibility by luring just as many contributors, but merely limiting them to giving $370 rather than $1,000 in order to participate in the public-financing program.

“I think it’s a good idea if everybody is in it. Clearly Henry [Fernandez] is not in it,” Nemerson responded. ​“Henry and I are going to end up as two very credible candidates. You can’t show up to frame a house with a violin. You have to have the right tool for the job.

“Right now I’ve got people across the city saying two things. [One:] Am I actually going to run? That’s why I’m talking to you now. Two: ​‘Show me some indication you’re going to be the leading candidate.’ Right now money tends to be leading currency.

“I’m not happy about that. I want to be able to show people that I’m serious. I know people are going to disagree with that. Which is why having come to the framing with a hammer, which I hope to do, a big hammer, I still think the main way we educate people is through debates.”

Hence Nemerson’s campaign-opening challenge to his opponents: that they should all agree as a group to conduct 15 debates across the city’s 30 wards. Besides promoting debate on issues, that will lessen the influence of money in the race, Nemerson argued.

Two of his opponents, Fernandez and Elicker, declined to sign on to Nemerson’s specific challenge. (Carolina couldn’t be reached for comment.) Both said they welcome debates. They said they plan to participate in many of them; a slew of forums and debates have already been scheduled. That said, Fernandez declared that he won’t ​“engage in other candidates’ strategies” and react to challenges and pledges in this campaign. (Here’s another example where that was the case.)

The Keyes Effect

Nemerson began discussing a possible run with potential supporters after Mayor John DeStefano announced on Jan. 29 that he will retire at the end of the year after two decades in office. Then Nemerson put a campaign on hold when Probate Judge Jack Keyes told people he would run for mayor.

Call it the ​“Keyes” effect: The announcement last week that Keyes, a campaign front-runner, won’t run for mayor after all has caused other potential candidates to reconsider a run. It also led some movers and shakers to lobby two other potential prominent candidates — housing authority chief Karen DuBois-Walton and state Sen. Martin Looney — to enter the race. DuBois-Walton said in a conversation with the Independent that has not changed her mind: ​“I’m not running.” Looney, who’s currently consumed with his duties as state Senate majority leader as the legislative session nears a close, was more circumspect. ​“We’re going to go into a reset period with Jack not running,” Looney said when asked if he will heed the deluge of requests from supporters over the weekend that he consider a mayoral run. (He ran for mayor in 2001.) ​“That’s all I want to say right now.”

Nemerson’s candidacy will likely not be the last one to join the already crowded dance card in this year’s election. It doesn’t appear that another Democrat would enter the race who has the potential to attract either significant money and/or a sizable vote-pulling organization. But other people active in civic life are seriously considering filing papers to run, if not in the Sept. 10 Democratic primary, then in the November general election as independents or as a Republican.

That’s because DeStefano’s exit has opened the door to decades of suppressed individual ambitions and created the opportunity for new ideas in a political system that has been dominated by one figure for 20 years.

“When John DeStefano shocked us all by announcing he was not going to run — I thought we’d all be going to nursing homes together and he’d be running the city from a wheelchair — I like probably 100 people said, ​‘I should do this,’” Nemerson said. ​“Then the word got out that Jack [Keyes] would run.

“One of the attributes the next mayor has to have is the ability to deal with what will be some very difficult decisions and bring people together and make people understand that the political community is not going to be about who gets the next piece of the pie. The next two to six years are going to be about making painfully difficult decisions, forging new kinds of alliances with people who have been friends but haven’t been friends enough. This is going to be about difficult decision. I thought that Jack, because of his personality, his people skills, his Lincolnesque ability to make a joke about difficult things, and the passion he built up dealing with the tragic situations in a probate court … I was comfortable with Jack [as mayor].” After Keyes reversed course last Friday and dropped out, Nemerson said, he ​“looked at what I thought he could bring [to the job] and what I could bring, and I thought, ​‘Why not the best?’”

So far Nemerson has lined up veteran community activist Angel Fernandez (who helped organize St. Rose of Lima immigrant-parishioners to challenge harassment by East Haven police) to serve as campaign treasurer. Wade Gibson of the liberal public-policy group Voices of Children will serve as deputy treasurer. Veteran New Haven public-relations person and former Annex Alderman Chuck Mascola is helping out with marketing.

Already working to line up support for the campaign in the trenches is Sal Brancati (pictured), who served as Henry Fernandez’s predecessor as New Haven government’s economic development chief in the 1990s (until the mayor cleaned house in the wake of corruption scandals).

“Sal is somebody who’s an old friend,” Nemerson said. ​“Sal’s giving me a lot of advice. Sal’s role is adviser, fundraiser. Sal is a person who loves New Haven. I think Sal is a person who understands how to leverage land and money to create value and to create good projects. He has a great sense of economic development. Everything I worked on with him at the Chamber, everything he touched as far as projects, was very positive.”

Brancati, who has a government-lobbying and consulting business (read about some of his efforts here, here and here), failed to return repeated calls for comment for this story.

Smarter Government

Central to Nemerson’s platform is the notion of ​“smarter” 21st century government that learns from private-sector management advances.

Advances like ​“just-in time” manufacturing: Processes that respond to day-to-day demands and market realities rather than fixed long-term schedules.

Government can do that with street-sweeping, Nemerson said. Rather than adhere to an annual cycle dictating when each street gets swept — or which neighborhood gets sidewalks fixed or public spaces get cleaned — government should bring all agencies together to respond immediately to where problems develop. From internal data-gathering systems to outside monitors like SeeClickFix, government has the tools to use real-time information to do better work more efficiently, he argued.

He was asked his opinion of a new effort developed by aldermen and City Hall to update how decisions get made about when and where to fix sidewalks or make other neighborhood-level improvements. Read about that here. Neighborhood-level political leaders (aldermen) participate in the decisions of which sidewalks get fixed when.

“The impetus for that was to have a more equal distribution of spending across the wards,” Nemerson responded. ​“That’s what you end up with the way I’m suggesting it. But it’s a different mindset of how we structure government. If we look at the governments across the developed world that are still delivering services, they tend to be central Europe and Scandinavia and parts of the [American] South where they have non-political management of cities and counties. It’s still government. They have city managers. They have county managers. They have very different systems. As resources decline, and needs increase, we [in New Haven] have sort of outlived some of the ways we’ve structured things.

“Street sweeping is a great example. You set up a schedule at the beginning of the year. Then you roll through it. It doesn’t really matter what’s happened.

“This isn’t just New Haven. It’s what cities throughout the North and Midwest do. Mayor [William Donald] Schaefer of Baltimore was famous for driving around he city at 6 a.m. and seeing things and calling in problems. I’m a great believer in the broken windows theory of how you create a neighborhood or a city where people have a commitment not just to their neighborhood, but to the general body politic.”

Similarly, Nemerson called himself a ​“great believer” in community policing based on that same ​“broken windows” approach, of keeping up to date on small problems that if left unattended could fester into bigger problems.

He was asked if he believes the current leadership of the police department has succeeded in reviving community policing over the past year. Mayor John DeStefano brought in Chief Dean Esserman with that mission; Esserman had helped create the original community policing program in town in the early 1990s under then-Chief Nick Pastore.

Nemerson said he ​“honestly [doesn’t] know yet.”

“I was a big fan of Nick Pastore,” Nemerson said. ​“I thought he got it. He was obviously a larger than life character in the way he did it. In a city of New Haven, that works, [but] sometimes people resent that. We’re a small city.

“Esserman trained under Pastore. He is rebuilding some of the systems that were taken away during this interregnum when we had three police chiefs. Dean is another person who I think people … he’s a big personality. I’ve talked to people about Dean. I haven’t talked to Dean. I talk to people in the neighborhoods. People are still concerned. People still want safer streets. What is the level of accountability we’re going to hold police and neighborhood organizations accountable for?

“I would go to reintroduce block watches. I don’t think this is just about police. This is a city where we should have a police leadership but also a public works leadership and a chief operating officer who are familiar with every street, every streetcorner. You could probably predict, if you did this properly, where the lights have been out, where a house has been vandalized, you can pretty much predict where there’s going to be a crime or a murder.”

Nemerson was asked if he felt the recently expanded weekly police CompStat meetings—in which city housing, neighborhood-blight, health, education, and other officials participate — are performing that function. He said he doesn’t know yet. The campaign is just beginning. He’s starting out with a lot of ideas — and he plans to develop more along the way.