Sam Gurwitt photo
Jay Kaye: From Republican to Independent.
• 3rd-party mayor, council ticket.
• Centrist platform.
• 2019 GOP mayor candidate found George Floyd response “disappointing.”
Kaye is one of three independent candidates who have filed papers in hopes of making it onto November’s ballot on the Independent Party line, according to the Hamden Town Clerk’s office.
Kaye, who lost to Mayor Curt Leng two years ago, and Dave Bretko are hoping to secure at-large seats on Hamden’s Legislative Council. Albert Lotto will complete their three-person team, as the Independent Party candidate for mayor.
All three are members of the state’s Independent Party. It’s unclear at this point whether their names will appear on the November ballot officially as “Independent Party” or unaffiliated candidates. The party has until Sept. 1 to decide whether to formally endorse the trio. Michael Telesca, the state party’s chair, said that he plans to endorse the candidates, but will wait to do so until the petitioning process is officially completed.
Connecticut’s Independent Party’s in 2020 became affiliated with a national group called The Alliance Party, which promotes candidates who lean not “Left or Right, but Forward” on a Bloomberg-ian platform embracing gun control, school choice, term limits, action against man-made climate change, and a simpler tax code that taxes “individuals and corporations equitably.”
The New Haven Independent (which is unrelated to the Independent Party) spoke to Lotto and Kaye on Tuesday. Bretko was not available for comment.
Kaye said that he left the GOP in April because of concerns over how the party was handling national issues. He said that he realized his views are more aligned with the Independent Party.
“When George Floyd died, I was just really disappointed with the way that the Republican Party nationally responded to that,” he said.
He also stated that he was “disappointed with the lack of response to [the] Jan. 6” Capitol insurrection by Republican leaders, though he referred to those as “big national issues that were rubbing me the wrong way personally,” and did not comment on the perspectives of local Republicans. The Hamden GOP endorsed a district representative in July who attended the Stop the Steal rally, publicly questioned the legitimacy of the election, and has promoted Covid-19 anti-vaccination theories.
Facebook photo
Al Lotto: Looking to spread “positivity” and “unity” across a politically divided town.
“I’m running because it’s important for Hamden residents to know that they have a moderate party with a positive outlook,” Lotto said. “We need somebody who can bring the two sides together to unite the community. I don’t want to represent a party.”
“It seems like every vote is against something as opposed to being for something,” Kaye observed. He said he wants to influence a greater sense of compromise across the council and encourage folks to support hopeful projects rather than finding the bad in everything.
Both Lotto and Kaye switched from the Republican to the Independent Party this year. Lotto said he had originally registered as a Republican because he was apolitical at the time and registered “how his friends did.” When he started tuning in more intently to council meetings and local politics this past year, he realized that he stood in the center of perspectives and issues discussed by Republicans and Democrats.
Kaye, who works professionally as a production manager at Ferraro’s Painting & Restoration in Hamden, has lived in Hamden since 1994. He became involved in Hamden politics back in 2019 when he decided to run for mayor as a Republican against incumbent Democrat Leng, who is now running for a fourth full term. After that loss, Kaye joined the School Building Committee and the Charter Revision Commission.
He said he chose to run for an at-large rather than a district seat because he wants to be a representative for the whole of town and because he may move out of his home in District 6 this year, though he said he will “definitely stay in Hamden.”
Lotto works three jobs as a Hamden school bus driver, a retail worker at a Branford music store, and a day aide to an autistic child. Last year, he started a Facebook page called “Hamden Crime Watchers,” which has 5,000 members. Running that forum, he said, has connected him to a wide array of people living in Hamden and informed his desire to act as a representative for “every resident.”
Lotto said that while he and Kaye originally filed to run for office separately, they ultimately joined forces after discussions regarding their shared stance on the top issues facing Hamden and how to go about solving them.
Kaye and Lotto, like every other candidate interviewed in town this campaign season, stated that fiscal issues must be treated as Hamden’s number one priority.
Kaye said that he wants to promote equitable strategies to address wealth disparities between southern and northern Hamden. He stated that he believes Lotto is more “socially moderate” than Republican candidates — a characteristic that Kaye also uses to describe himself.
He said that he wants to counter an “us versus them” narrative that he thinks holds up from partisan aggression to policing issues. For example, he said, “I want to support the police, but I want to treat the residents fairly.”
He added that he has become increasingly engaged at a public level in Hamden over the past few years because “if you want to talk about these issues and make a difference, you gotta be willing to put yourself out there.” That is why, he said, another priority is filling the roughly “70 vacancies” on Hamden’s boards and commissions, encouraging individuals to volunteer their time to their town.
Lotto, meanwhile, said that he will be putting out a platform within the next two weeks that details his stances on relevant issues and outlines his strategic plans to confront them. He listed crime and economic growth as two of his top concerns.
“We have to work hand in hand with the police department to curb crime in Hamden so that eventually we can build the economy back up and get stores that want to move in,” he said. He added that he wants to bring marijuana dispensaries to Hamden. “I want to know how much money they can bring to Hamden,” he said.
Lotto is entering a crowded mayoral race that currently includes four Democrats and one Republican. Read about Incumbent Mayor Curt Leng here, the DTC-endorsed candidate Lauren Garrett here, and Peter Cyr and Brad Macdowall here. Learn more about GOP candidate Ron Gambardella here.
If no other individuals petition to join the race, Kaye and Bretko will run against eight at-large candidates put forward by the Democratic and Republican Town Committees for a total of six available seats.
Read about the four DTC-endorsed candidates here and the four RTC-endorsed candidates here. Incumbent Mayor Curt Leng has also compiled a slate of “Row B” runners that includes four other Democratic folks seeking at-large spots through the petitioning process. They will compete with the DTC’s chosen candidates in a Sept. 14 primary.
One third of the at-large seats are reserved for candidates representing minority parties. That means that new Independent candidates will pose greater competition for Republican at-large hopefuls, who were previously certain that at least two of their candidates (those with the greatest number of votes) would make it into office.
The deadline for Independents to submit their petitions is Wednesday, Aug. 4. Lotto said that over the past two weeks, he, Kaye, and Bretko have already accrued the necessary amount of signatures to make it onto the ballot. He plans to turn those papers into the town office Wednesday.
While at-large Democrats — the only party that has individuals petitioning for seats — are currently searching for 946 individuals to sign their papers, Lotto, Kaye, and Bretko needed to collectively gather only 124 signatures (or 1 percent of the 12,376 people who voted in the town’s general election two years ago).
Lotto invited other interested candidates to contact him by a Wednesday 4 p.m. to join his slate. He noted that Independents interested in running for district seats only have to get signatures from 1 percent of those who voted within that district in 2019.