Thomas Breen photo
Management team Chair Caroline Smith.
Who should have a say on how a $20,000 neighborhood improvement grant is spent on sprucing up downtown and Wooster Square?
That question was at the center of the last portion of the Downtown-Wooster Square Community Management Team’s regular monthly meeting the second floor of City Hall.
The subject of discussion was this year’s Neighborhood Public Improvement Program (NPIP) grant, which provides each of New Haven’s 12 community management teams with a modest lump sum of money to be used however neighbors see fit.
Tuesday night’s management team meeting.
The grant, which is administered by the city’s anti-blight Livable City Initiative (LCI), has been used in the past to fund various neighborhoods projects ranging from a mobile, radar speed sign to an underpass graffiti mural project to yet-to-be-installed public ping pong tables to buying poles for hanging banner advertisements above highly-trafficked thoroughfares.
Management team chair Caroline Smith told the nearly 40 people assembled at this past Tuesday night’s meeting that Downtown-Wooster Square has $20,000 in participatory budgeting money to work with this fiscal year.
She said the management team’s executive board will be accepting applications between now and Nov. 1 for ideas on how to spend that money. The team will then make all of the applications public in November, and vote in December on which project to select. LCI Neighborhood Specialist Carmen Mendez said the money has to be spent before the end of the current fiscal year on June 30, 2020.
Tuesday night’s conversation broached not how the money should be spent, but who should have a say in that decision.
Smith explained that the management team’s bylaws currently define voting members as anyone who lives, works, or owns property in the two neighborhoods who has attended three of the last six management team meetings. Police and LCI employees are not eligible to vote.
The question Smith posed to the group was: Is the three-out-of-last-six-meetings requirement an appropriate limitation when deciding who should weigh in on how to spend such a relatively large amount of money to improve the neighborhood? After all, only around 20 or 30 people meet that by-law-set threshold.
Should we open this vote up to more than just currently eligible voters? she asked. “How do we feel about possibly voting up membership?”
Well, one attendee asked, what would opening the NPIP vote up look like?
“That’s something we could collectively determine,” Smith said.
As far as she sees it, the team has a few different routes it could take: It could limit voting membership to what the by-laws currently define; it could open up the vote to anyone who lives in the neighborhoods, regardless of how many meetings they have attended; it could open up the vote to anyone who lives and works in the neighborhoods; it could open up the vote to anyone in the entire city; or it could open up the vote to anyone. Period.
Management team e‑board member Anstress Farwell said that broadening the vote would give more say to a larger swath of people connected to the neighborhoods. But it could also lead to a small group of interested partisans stacking the vote with their friends and colleagues otherwise uninterested in the management team and the neighborhood’s welfare.
“I don’t think there’s any kind of perfect way of doing this,” she said.
Downtown landlord Elaine Piraino-Holevoet proposed reducing the three-meeting-attendance requirement to two meetings. She cautioned against allowing people to show up just on the day of the vote in order to pack the meeting with their friends and supporters.
Mona Berman (center).
Wooster Square resident Mona Berman suggested that the solution might lie not with changing voter membership, but rather with a renewed outreach effort by the management team leadership.
“I think just better publicity and outreach,” she said, “not just on social media, but in interpersonal ways” would increase meeting attendance, and subsequently the number of eligible voters.
Elizabeth Bickley, a project manager with the Town Green Special Services District, advised the management team to bring some of their meetings out of City Hall and to regular neighborhood events, like the weekly Wooster Square farmers’ market.
Elizabeth Bickley (second from right).
Applicants could give their pitches on how to spend the $20,000 in these public settings, she said, and interested passerby can put a sticker on a poster board next to which idea they like the best.
Smith said that she is not too worried about strangers packing the vote. In fact, she said, if a group feels so invested in this neighborhood public improvement grant that they flood the meetings and advocate strongly for a particular proposal, then that would only serve to increase the number of people who care about and are engaged in the neighborhood’s welfare. Which is exactly what the management team is meant to foster.
“Downtown belongs to so many people,” she added, “more than just the people who live here.”
Aaron Goode (center).
Aaron Goode, also a member of the management team’s e‑board, added his support to the idea that stacking the vote would not necessarily be a bad thing. If the e‑board does its job, he said, and solicits proposals genuinely geared towards the betterment of downtown and Wooster Square, then anything that could be selected would be a worthwhile project to fund.
Click here to submit an idea for how the downtown management team should spend its $20,000 neighborhood improvement grant.