Thomas Breen photo
Independent mayoral candidate Seth Poole.
• At budget forum, mayoral candidate Seth Poole calls for leaving prison reentry to nonprofits.
• Backs gov’t tree-trimming, street repair, fines for litterbugs, 25 year-old minimum for cops.
• Elicker: Ban towing for parking tix.
Poole, a native New Havener and longtime labor and community health care advocate, got his first chance on stage as a mayoral candidate Thursday at a city finance-focused forum held at the downtown branch of the public library. Poole has filed papers to run in November’s general election as an unaffiliated mayoral candidate.
The audience at Thursday night’s candidate forum at the library.
Roughly 30 people turned out for the two-hour forum, which was organized and moderated by budget watchdog and Our New Haven founder Dennis Serfilippi. Democratic challengers Justin Elicker, Urn Pendragon, and Wendy Hamilton also participated in the forum. Mayor Toni Harp did not. (She attended an event organized by the New Haven Firebirds.)
All of the challengers on stage criticized the current administration for raising taxes and refinancing debt. Poole argued further that City Hall should cut departments and rely on local nonprofits to fill those service needs, keep its eyes focused on core services benefiting public safety, public health, and public education.
Mayoral challengers Poole, Urn Pendragon, Wendy Hamilton, and Elicker.
“We have to bear down,” he said. “We have to save money. We have to be more conservative.”
The city government’s responsibilities, he said, should include cleaning and paving the streets, ensuring that water isn’t poisoned, and providing access to safe schools and a quality education.
Outside of its role in supporting public safety and “community connections,” he said, municipal government should step out of the way and let nonprofits, individuals, and private entities do the rest.
Over the course of his lifetime, the 43-year-old candidate said, New Haven city government has been defined by two parallel phenomena: “political patronage” and “mission creep.”
“This will end immediately” under a Poole administration, he said. That would mean cutting specific departments.
To start with, he singled out the prison reentry services Project Fresh Start and the Warren Kimbro Reentry Project, both of which are based out of City Hall’s Community Services Administration (CSA). These services, he said, can be better provided by private nonprofits like the Community Foundation for Greater New Haven.
“There’s a wealth of know how and experience in our city that’s been ignored by City Hall,” he said.
When asked which other existing departments he would cut, Poole said he would need to do an “audit” of city finances and services before identifying anything else. The current city budget does not break out the reentry services operational expenses as their own line items.
Forum moderator Dennis Serfilippi and Pendragon.
Serfillippi asked if Poole would have supported Downtown Alder Abby Roth, East Rock Alder Anna Festa, and Newhallville/Prospect Hill Alder Steve Winter’s various proposed, and failed, amendments this most recent budget cycle to block the creation of 10 new local government staff positions and use that money instead towards paying down debt service and the city’s underfunded pensions. Serfillippi described the positions, which include a new tree trimmer, a police body camera specialist, and a librarian, as “political patronage jobs.”
Actually, Poole said, he would have supported the new tree trimmer position. Poole said he owns two homes in the Edgewood neighborhood; he has personally cut down three trees by himself. Dead trees and collapsing limbs “should be a priority” for city government, he said. “Certain jobs like that are necessary and should have been approved.”
Poole also doubled down on his previous policy proposal to raise the eligibility age for police officers from 21 to 25 years old, saying that the city shouldn’t be giving guns to people not old enough to rent a car.
And as for littering? “Our streets are disgusting, people,” Poole said. Not just from people throwing bottles or cans on the sidewalk, but from people going to McDonald’s, getting takeout, and then throwing a whole bag of trash out the car window.
Poole proposed fining litterbugs $1,000 each. And if they can’t pay, then force them to do 1,000 hours of community service, he said.
How would you encourage homeownership and mitigate individual tax burdens? Serfillippi asked
Poole, who sits on the Livable City Initiative’s (LCI) Board of Directors, said the city should divest itself of the many vacant lots and sliver lots it owns by speeding up their sale to adjacent property owners or developers.
“Put these properties back on the tax rolls,” he said. The city should then provide some kind of financial assistance to city employees to buy and live in New Haven, much like the Yale Homebuyer program.
But despite that concession that city government can and should help its own employees live in New Haven, Poole made sure to issue the promise par excellence for convervatives of all stripes: That if elected, he would not raise taxes.
“The mill rate,” he said, “it must be frozen.”
“A Values Perspective And A Financial Perspective”
Elicker.
Elicker, a former East Rock/Cedar Hill alder and former director of the New Haven Land Trust who came in second place behind Harp in the 2013 mayoral election, promoted a more traditional Democratic political worldview in his own comprehensive list of government forms offered Thursday night.
Local government need not suffer sharp cuts to services in order to achieve a balanced budget alongside a reasonable tax burden, he argued. While some savings can be realized through looking at where different departments have overlapping services, like all of the youth programs managed by both the Parks Department and the Youth Services department, he said, good government is best realized through responsible planning and strategic partnerships.
Yale University should not only increase its annual voluntary financial contributions to the city, he said. It should also commit to partnering with the city to lobby the state government to fund the Payment in Lieu of Taxes (PILOT) program at a higher rate. PILOT is a state program that compensates municipalities for tax revenue lost through the presence of tax-exempt nonprofits.
The state should allow the city to leverage a hospital bed tax, and a beverage tax, and to get a share of speeding ticket revenue. The city, meanwhile, should consider increasing building permit fees, to capitalize on the many different construction projects that the university and the hospital engage in on an annual basis.
And the city should also raise the cost of tickets for not moving one’s car to accommodate street sweeping to above $50, but then eliminate the threat of towing, so that car owners have an incentive to move their vehicles from the road but don’t have to go through the hellish nightmare of finding their car at a tow lot and then paying a private company an arm and a leg to get their property back.
On a larger and more long-term scale, he said, echoing one of the key issues of Wednesday and Thursday’s Democratic presidential candidate debate, Elicker said that New Haven’s budget would benefit tremendously from a universal healthcare system at the federal level. Whatever the city can do to help bring about something like Medicare for All would only benefit city finances in the long run, since it would no longer have to provide separate medical benefits for its employees.
Meanwhile, he said, there are some areas of city government that are in desperate need of bulking up. The city needs more lead inspectors in its Health Department, he said, citing the city’s recent decision to increase its standard for “lead poisoning” in order to focus limited resources on the most endangered populations. The city also needs more LCI housing code inspectors, he said, to ward off the threat of slumlords who cram too many people into buildings-turned-fire traps. The housing code inspectors, he said, can pay for themselves if they adequately enforce the $100 daily fines the city is allowed to levy on property owners who violate city ordinances.
“There are some new positions that we need,” he said, “from both a values perspective and a financial perspective.”
Ed Corey, the head of the mayor’s reelection campaign, told the Independent that Harp “was unable to attend the event [Thursday night] due to a scheduling conflict that could not be changed. She’s looking forward to appearing at as many forums and debates as she is able to.
“As far as budget priorities, the Mayor has been proud to say time and again that the budget was balanced this year and will be balanced for next year, all while holding the line on taxes. The City will soon be releasing a five year plan to further map out stable finances, and all of this while avoiding kicking the can down the road with constant pension refinancing.”
Click on the Facebook Live video below to watch part of Thursday night’s candidate forum.