Westville Candidates Run On Resumes

One said his experience as a tech entrepreneur will help him cut the fat from the city budget and put more city services online. The other said his experience as a union negotiator will help him crack the worker-benefits budget problem and work effectively with Yale on town-gown issues.

Those self-assessments came from Michael Slattery and Adam Marchand, two candidates vying for the Westville aldermanic seat soon to be vacated by Ward 25 Alderman Greg Dildine, who will step down at the end of this term.

Slattery, the co-owner of a tech business called Angel Networks, and Adam Marchand, a union leader in Yale’s Local 34, shared their views in advance of Wednesday evening’s meeting of the Ward 25 Democratic committee. The candidates will pitch their candidacies to the group Wednesday night, looking for the committee’s endorsement ahead of a Sept. 13 Democratic primary.

The two men seek to represent a ward that has had among the highest voter-turnout rates over the years. It’s a politically active and engaged neighborhood that’s relatively well-off compared to other areas of the city. For decades the ward’s alderman has played an active role in citywide issues in addition to concentrating on ward-level concerns.

The ward includes the western half of Edgewood Park and is bounded in the north by Whalley Avenue and Fountain Street. It includes the Yale bowl to the south and ends at Forest Road on the west.

Slattery and Marchand are each the married fathers of two young kids. When interviewed about their credentials for the job of alderman, they both cited the professional experiences that they said will help them to be effective lawmakers and neighborhood representatives. And both spoke highly of departing Alderman Dildine as a model alderman.

Marchand is the latest candidate to join a group of union-affiliated aldermanic hopefuls seeking seats this year. He stressed that his campaign is that of a Westville resident who cares about his neighborhood, not of a member of a citywide union slate. He highlighted his Westville bona fides as a member of the Westville-West Hills Community Management Team, a supporter of the Westville Village Renaissance Alliance, and an Edgewood school father.

Slattery Seeks Efficiencies

One afternoon this week, Slattery, who’s 42 and originally from Boston, sat at a stone-top table in his Barnett Street backyard sipping ice water as a gurgling fountain trickled nearby. His distinctive green Carpenter Gothic home — a former cooperage, he said — is characterized not only by carved ornamentation under the eaves, but also by the extensive flower gardening of his wife, Jessica Feinleib, a teaching anesthesiologist at Yale. The couple share the home with their kids, 4‑year-old Finn and 6‑year-old Ingrid, who just started at the private Cold Spring School.

Slattery and Feinleib moved into the house in 2003, when they came to the area from New York City. Slattery made the home the new base for his technology business, which he started in 1996. Angel Networks creates applications for company intranets. Slattery runs it with a partner in New York City.

Working from home means he’s always in the ward, and would therefore be as available to constituents as Dildine, a stay-at-home dad has been, the soft-spoken Slattery said.

Dildine inspired him to run, Slattery said. He said he alderman has done a great job of communicating with and being responsive to constituents through regular office hours, emails, and blog posts.

“I said, ​‘Wow, that’s something I could do,’” Slattery said. He said he’s looking forward especially to constituent services, the unglamorous work of getting irksome potholes fixed. ​“I like problem-solving.”

He said he’d also focus on keeping taxes down. As a business owner, Slattery said he’s learned to read budgets closely and ​“look for efficiencies.”

As a techie, he’d try to find efficiencies through better use of the internet, he said. ​“That’s the first place I’d look.” The city should put whatever information it can online, anything that now requires and appointment and an in-person visit that could be replaced by a web application. He said he’d have to examine what those specifically could be.

“My expertise is making things efficient,” Slattery said. That means that when analyzing the budget, he would examine all line items, including union concessions. He said he doesn’t have a ​“particular answer” or ​“magic bullet” when it comes to negotiating the new union deals that Mayor John DeStefano has said are crucial to the city’s fiscal future health.

As for Mayor DeStefano, Slattery said he’s doing a good job. He said he has high hopes for the kind of downtown development DeStefano has championed in recent years, including the upcoming makeover of the Rt. 34 Corridor.

Slattery said he’s also a fan of DeStefano’s $1.5 billion citywide school construction program. He said he remembers the power of a school’s architecture from when he was a kid. Walking into an impressive building built for learning is inspiring, he said. ​“It makes you want to work. Bad physical plant is distracting.”

Since Moody’s recently signaled that New Haven bonds have a declining ​“outlook,” mayoral candidate Clifton Graves called for a halt on bond sales to pay for school construction. Slattery said he doesn’t support that call since the horse has already left the barn on school construction. As an alderman, he would focus on ​“what’s on my plate” going forward specifically as it relates to keeping taxes as low as possible, he said.

Marchand Knows Negotiation

In the air-conditioned refuge of Deja Brew, the retro-themed coffee shop near the Edgewood School, Marchand spoke about his candidacy.

The 39-year-old said he originally came to New Haven from Minnesota in 1995 on a fellowship to study African history at Yale. He stayed on in 1999, having grown attached to the city, and worked at the Yale library. He moved to West Elm Street in Westville five years ago with his family, now comprising a wife and two boys of five years and 11 months old.

These days, Marchand works as a union leader in Local 34, a UNITE HERE unit that represents Yale’s pink-collar workers. ​“I lead the union in a union/management collaboration around health care,” he said. His job stems from a 2009 contract between Yale and the union in which both sides agreed to work together to bring down health care costs while maintaining a high level of care. It’s his job to negotiate for the union on how to do that, he said.

The city’s negotiations with its unions are often presented as a choice between cutting benefits and breaking the budget on expensive health care packages. ​“I know for a fact that’s not true.” There are ways to meet both ends of the problem, he said. ​“That’s what I do.”

At Yale, Marchand has been part of a process that defies the standard us vs. them playbook that can often drive union negotiations, he said. Instead, the union works with university management in a collaborative fashion, through a process known as ​“interest-based problem solving.” Marchand said there are ways that the city and municipal unions can both get what they want in on health care and pension benefits, using a similar negotiating approach.

One part of the solution, as he said he found at Yale, is to find ways to save money on generic drugs, Marchand offered as an example. Management and labor can also come together around the importance of preventative care, which is not controversial, he said.

Both sides need to sit down and find their common ground, he said. ​“I’m certain we could find better solutions than what’s happening now.”

Marchand said that he was ​“really disappointed” by the way DeStefano framed this spring’s budget debate as an either/or question of union concessions.

But asked his opinion of the mayor’s tenure in general, Marchand said he’s seen the city improve under DeStefano: Downtown is nicer than it was when he moved here in ​‘95, and relationships with Yale are better. He said he approves of the mayor’s efforts to develop tech industry in town.

While Westville is relatively better off than other neighborhoods, Marchand said he still sees room for improvement. When news broke that Dildine was stepping down, people began asking him to run, he said.

One of the ward’s main concerns is traffic-calming and pedestrian safety, Marchand said. He mentioned the blinking traffic light at Willard Street and Central Avenue, which seems to have little impact on driver speed, he said. ​“We need some other solution.”

One of Marchand’s sons just completed kindergarten at Edgewood. While he’s really happy with that school, he said, he’s concerned about New Haven schools in general.

During a year off in graduate school, he went home to work as a behavior interventionist in a middle school in Minnesota, he said. That experience, as well as that of his brother and mother who work in schools, made him appreciate the extra resources that some kids need to perform well.

He said he’s concerned that the student-teacher ratio in New Haven’s public schools is not sufficient to address the needs of kids with greater needs. Changing that would cost money, Marchand acknowledged. He said it’s an area that he has experience ​“and passion” in and one that he’d like to look into as an alderman.

Asked about the stormwater authority proposal that caused controversy earlier this year, Marchand said the ​“bigger issue” is the question of how to work with not-for-profits that are not paying municipal taxes. The biggest of those not-for-profits is obviously Yale. The university needs the town and vice versa, and that’s the basis for successful negotiations on issues like stormwater and the closure of High and Wall Streets, Marchand said. It’s his job to be involved in similar negotiations with Yale, Marchand said. ​“I have direct experience in that.”

Union Believer, Westville Lover

Marchand sought to address what he described as a perception thata slate of union candidates is running with an organized agenda this year. He said the influx of union-affiliated office-seekers is a natural outgrowth of leadership development within unions, and a desire among union members to improve their neighborhoods.

The Yale union has done a good job of creating working conditions that have allowed its members to have a decent quality of life, Marchand said. For some time, members have been coming to union leadership and saying that while their households are doing well, their neighborhoods are suffering around them, he said. The union has begun to encourage members to address that by taking leadership roles in their community, he said. Hence the increase in aldermanic candidates.

“What we decided we could do is say we’ve got great people who are leaders in the union, let’s encourage them to step up to the plate and become leaders in the community,” Marchand said. ​“Let’s encourage people to run”

“I’m in the leadership of the union at Yale,” Marchand. There are ​“reasonable questions” to ask about that. As a part of the labor movement, Marchand said, he obviously supports worker rights to form unions and negotiate with management, and he’s ​“disgusted” to see what’s happened recently in Wisconsin and New Jersey, where workers have been hammered unfairly for an economic crisis that’s not of their making. ​“Let’s just be clear, that’s something I believe in.”

“But part of being a leader is being practical and solving problems,” Marchand went on. As an elected officer in his union, Marchand recognizes the obligation to represent the people who elected him, he said. If elected to an aldermanic seat, therefore, his responsibility would be to the neighbors who live in the ward, with whom he shares neighborhood concerns, he said.

Marchand said his next step is to recruit volunteers to work for his campaign. While some of those will be union members, the majority will be regular Ward 25 residents, he said.

“The main thing is I’m committed to Westville,” Marchand said. Like most of his neighbors, he has a 30-year mortgage on his house on West Elm, he said. He said he’s running for alderman ​“because I love Westville.”