Primary Message: The City Is Failing Kids

In the Democratic Party primary elections Tuesday, candidates for alderman across town heard, and repeated, a near-universal message: New Haven government is failing kids, especially when it comes to after-school rec programs and summer jobs. And it’s not just City Hall opponents saying it.

Whoever wins November’s general election and the upcoming contest for presidency of the Board of Aldermen will face demands to improve — ​“or create — ​“a citywide youth policy.

The same refrain has played like a soundtrack to aldermanic primary races from the northernmost border of the city through neighborhoods like Dwight and the Hill. Whatever other issues divide candidates, opponents agree city government needs to find a way to reopen or expand existing youth programs, start new ones, and do a better job at finding jobs for young people.

A summer of shootings and mayhem by kids on bikes, a shortage of summer jobs, plus the closing of the Dixwell Q House and cutbacks to programs like LEAP (Leadership, Education & Athletics in Partnership) have all combined to growing frustration. The public reads about Mayor John DeStefano’s success in raising millions of dollars for his gubernatorial campaign, then hears about how his administration can’t find money for the cash-strapped Boys & Girls Club or new after-school programs. Lots of attention has focused on the city’s $1.4 billion school rebuilding effort; little attention has focused on how to put sports or tutoring programs inside those beautiful new buildings after the dismissal bell rings.

City Hall’s impressive (though apparently wasted) effort to help 100 Hurricane Katrina victims further inflamed critics in town. Suddenly a city administration that seemed helpless to cut a two-year backlog for poor families seeking public housing found a way instantly to house 100 poor families arriving from the Gulf Coast. Suddenly a city administration that insisted it had no extra money for youth programs during the last budget pushed through an emergency $500,000 for the refugees. Just about everybody praised the humanitarian impulse, but wondered why such ​“emergency” action hadn’t materialized during the recent years of crisis for poor and working-class families. (See ​“Humane? Or Hypocritical?“)

Candidates running with the pro-City Hall team Tuesday were careful not to criticize the mayor. They praised his overall performance in office. But they volunteered the need to do more for kids as a top priority if they win office. And they struggled to cite examples of what City Hall is doing right for kids.

“Honestly?” responded Melvin Counsel, a candidate in the Third Ward running with the help of the mayor’s reelection campaign manager. ​“There could be more. He may be doing something, but there could be more.”

Counsel lamented the closing of the neighborhood’s main longtime center for kids, Hill Cooperative Youth Services. He said he heard often on the campaign trail from voters looking for productive things for kids in the Hill to do.

The mayor’s candidate in Ward 2, Gina Calder, looks at the Dwight School’s new community room and wonders why, during a rough summer of teen violence in the neighborhood, nothing much went on inside the building. (She makes sure to blame her opponent, Alderwoman Joyce Chen, rather than the mayor.)

Over in Ward 12, pro-City Hall Alderwoman Shirley Ellis-West wonders the same thing about the newly rebuilt Ross School on Barnes Avenue. It had an after-hours rec program before the city rebuilt it. Now it doesn’t.

The candidates running against City Hall Tuesday remarked on the same problem. They didn’t hesitate to point the finger of blame; they spoke of how they tried unsuccessfully to push for more money for youth programs this past term only to be thwarted by the mayor’s supporters on the Board of Aldermen.

“It’s the entire city. It’s not just the Hill. There’s nothing in Dixwell. There’s nothing in Brookside” for kids, said Third Ward Alderwoman Jackie James, a member of the minority faction on the Board of Aldermen at odds with City Hall. She spoke bitterly of how the city kept finding money for downtown projects, or for the Pilot Pen tennis tournament and Market New Haven, but not for young people or the poor.

“I have 155 kids who live on Stevens Street, and that’s the smallest street in the ward. And they have nothing to do. No summer jobs; everything is political. Some things should not be political. The kids have the right to summer jobs or a youth center without political ties, without my selling out my soul to the mayor” in return.

Mayor DeStefano, for his part, rejects the notion of a legitimate critique of his administration’s youth policy. He says his administration has a great record on youth. Click here to hear what he had to say on the subject in an Independent interview; click here to read excerpts from the interview.