Laura Glesby Photo
Ellen Cupo and Andrea Zola debate.
Two Wooster Square residents running for alder convened for a debate — and sketched out diverging visions for policing, addiction treatment, and the legitimacy of the Republican Party.
Incumbent two-term Alder Ellen Cupo faced off against first-time challenger Andrea Zola in a debate at Conte West Hills Magnet School on Wednesday evening.
The event was New Haven’s only public forum of alder candidates ahead of the November election, aside from a debate between Westville’s Ward 25 candidates prior to the primary.
About fifty adults (along with numerous kids and babies) filled the school cafeteria to hear from the candidates, forming a significantly larger crowd than the one attending last week’s mayoral debate.
Cupo is a Democrat, Yale union organizer, and the senior administrative assistant of the university’s Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies department. Zola is a Republican who up until recently identified as a “Blue Dog,” conservative Democrat; she’s run a bridal beauty business in Wooster Square and is soon opening a vegan and vegetarian cafe in the neighborhood.
In some ways, Cupo and Zola have quite a lot in common.
Both candidates live in Wooster Square, though the ward also encompasses Mill River and Jocelyn Square neighborhoods, as well as slivers of Fair Haven and the Annex.
They’re both lifelong New Haveners whose families have deep civic roots in the city: Cupo has staunch Yale union organizers as parents, while Zola’s great uncle was former mayor Biagio DiLieto. Both candidates are parents to young kids and caretakers of dogs.
Over the course of the debate, however, the candidates had a chance to showcase their differences in a back-and-forth that at times turned acrimonious.
Competing Views On Policing & Addiction
One of the largest chasms between the candidates emerged when moderator (and Independent founding editor) Paul Bass asked the candidates to assess the status of policing in the ward and in New Haven.
Cupo responded first. “I think that Ward 8 is a really safe place,” she said. “I think it’s a place where we have an incredible neighborhood. We rely on each other. And I think that yes, everyone knows Ralphie Consiglio… We have a relationship with him. That is community policing.”
Zola had the opposite take. “Yesterday in the news, [FBI Director] Christopher Wray openly said we are in a ‘dangerous period,’ ” she said. (Wray had been referring to ideology and hate-driven violence from extremist groups and radicalized individuals.)
“We have to question that and we have to make sure that we are policing and we are policing correctly,” Zola said.
Both candidates said they support the city’s installation of 500 police surveillance cameras around the city, a measure funded by federal pandemic relief funding and passed by the Board of Alders in late 2021. (Cupo added that “it is incredibly important that there is oversight” and that the cameras are “not being used to target” people.)
Zola and Cupo also disagreed on how the city should address the opioid crisis — and specifically on the question of whether the city should open a “safe-use” supervised injection site, a place where people would be allowed to use illegal substances in the presence of trained professionals so as to prevent overdoses and infections.
Downtown Evening Soup Kitchen (DESK), a local homeless services non-profit, is currently researching the implications of potentially opening a safe-use site in New Haven.
“I have down hours of reading online to educate myself on safe injection sites,” said Zola. “As of right now, there are only two functioning safe injection sites. Those two sites are in New York City and they are called an ‘experimental project.’ ”
Though the two safe-use sites in New York are the only sanctioned sites in the United States, there are at least 100 safe-injection sites operating outside of the United States.
Zola argued that the idea of a safe-use site has not been sufficiently tested. “Do I agree with experimenting with our people in our city who are the most in need?” she added. “Absolutely not.”
Meanwhile, while stopping short of explicitly supporting safe-use sites, Cupo expressed more openness to the idea.
She said she backs DESK’s yearlong inquiry into the matter. “I have a lot of faith that they will move through this yearlong process and figure out the best way to approach it,” she said.
In general, she said she supports “doing whatever it takes, with science,” to tackle the opioid crisis. “Part of my responsibility is to help people have a better life, a life with dignity,” she said.
What Does It Mean To Be A Republican?
The audience at Conte-West Hills.
Tension between the candidates bubbled to the surface after a question about how they interpret their own party affiliations.
Zola has previously described herself as a “Blue Dog Democrat,” or a “more conservative Democrat,” and attempted to run in September’s Democratic Primary, yet did not gather enough signatures to make it onto the ballot.
Since then, Zola shared, she changed her party affiliation after New Haven’s Republican Party reached out to endorse her.
“I am a proud Republican,” she stated. She added that some Republican-endorsed candidates, like mayoral candidate Tom Goldenberg, have tried to distance themselves from Republicans while simultaneously accepting the endorsement. “To be one of the only people who’s endorsed to say that they’re proud takes a very brave person,” Zola said.
Cupo said she’s a “progressive Democrat” because “I want to advocate for the rights of marginalized folks” and “working people.”
She proceeded to challenge Zola on her affiliation with Republicans at a time when the party has grown more extreme on a national level, with election denialism, anti-LGBTQ+ hate, and abortion criminalization fueling a near-implosion of the party on Capitol Hill.
“It is not a moral choice to choose the Republican Party right now,” Cupo argued. “The Republican Party is the party that denies trans kids healthcare, it is the party that is denying climate change. It held an insurrection. None of that is moral.”
Though the Democratic party is not perfect, Cupo said, “We are the party that uplifts women. We are progressive about racial justice, economic justice, and climate change.”
Zola responded: “As someone who says they’re very, very open minded, why are you not accepting and more open minded to people becoming Republican who do have similar thoughts as you? Wouldn’t you want our party to become more progressive?”
She began to yell. “I’m 100% for women’s rights. I have always been. I have a six-year-old daughter. I would never want to take away her rights.”
(Later, Zola would post in an Instagram comment that Cupo had issued “hate speech towards the republican party” and that she is “nothing more than a modern day terrorist.”)
“Andrea, I do not understand why you’re making this about yourself —” Cupo said before she was interrupted. She attempted to respond several times as Zola interjected with phrases like “This is America” and “Are you saying all Republicans are the same?”
“The Republican Party is the party that endorses taking women’s rights away from them —” Cupo began.
“I’m a Republican and I did not take away women’s rights,” Zola interjected.
“The Republican Party is also the party of, again, denying climate change, taking away trans kids’ healthcare, of being pro-life… there is an effort to ban abortion nation-wide that is being led by Republicans,” Cupo continued.
“So why wouldn’t you want a Republican who would not do that?” asked Zola.
At that, Bass cut the dialogue short and moved on.
Soon, at Bass’ prompting, the candidates chose kind things to say about one another — or at least, they said they were choosing something kind.
Zola went first: “Ellen is a great mother,” she said — moving on to “praise” Cupo for missing a number of full Board of Alders meetings in part due to raising two young kids.
Zola referenced an Independent article on alder attendance published in April of this year, which indicated that from January 2022 through early April, Cupo attended 55 percent of full Board of Alders meetings.
At the time, Cupo had attributed her absences to four weeks of maternity leave in early 2022 and “bouts of sickness” in her family in the winter. She reiterated this explanation in response to Zola’s so-called compliment, and noted that she’s also been serving as the chair of the Legislation Committee.
Since the article’s publication, Cupo hasn’t missed a full Board of Alders meeting.
The Independent’s latest tally shows that she has attended 76 percent of meetings so far in 2023 and 59 percent of meetings in all of 2022.
When it was her turn to compliment Zola, Cupo said, “I respect the fact that Andrea is making something beautiful happen on Wooster Street” with her soon-to-open cafe.
Next, the candidates turned to their closing statements.
To start off, Zola said, “I agreed to this debate because I was under the impression that Ellen would be mature enough to respect me.”
She continued by noting that many of Cupo’s supporters that evening were members of the Unite Here Yale unions.
“Our ward needs more than her union,” Zola said. “I want to create change and I would like to break the bonds of the Local 34. New Haven is not the Local 34. There are people who are living in this city who are destitute. They are not being offered jobs at Yale.”
In her closing statement, Cupo largely focused on a commitment to creating affordable housing.
“I am the mom of two kids and I want to raise them in New Haven,” she said. “I’m rapidly getting priced out of this neighborhood. I want to make sure that folks who are from New Haven can live in New Haven.”
She took a moment to laud Unite Here for negotiating to get Yale to hire more New Haven residents — a statement that prompted another interruption from Zola, which was in turn met with heckling from the audience.
As Cupo wrapped up her closing statement, the city’s sole multi-party alder debate ended on a note of discord.