Paul Bass Photo
Toni Harp wants you to pull out your smartphone and give her advice on how to run city government when she becomes mayor on Jan. 1.
If you don’t have a smartphone, you can send in your ideas from a computer, once her transition team finishes putting up a website.
In the meantime, you can can get started now funneling some feedback. (Read on for details.)
Harp (pictured) plans later this week to include a feature on her transition website asking people to offer ideas for her transition team as it prepares her for taking the reins of a city government run by the same man, John DeStefano, for the previous 20 years. (The site wasn’t ready to go live with content beyond a home-page photo as this story went to press. “I’m hopeful for later this week” to have it fully operational and accepting citizen ideas, said transition team spokesman Laurence Grotheer said Tuesday.)
“I ran on collaboration and consensus,” Harp (pictured above) said in an interview in her Whalley Avenue transition headquarters. “I want to hear what everybody has to say. There are people in this town” who bring ideas and knowledge that can add to what her transition team appointees bring to the process.
“We want to use everybody’s intelligence to move the city forward,” she said.
The transition team for New York’s mayor-elect, Bill de Blasio, has already set up a website for citizens to contribute ideas. It also has set up a “talking transition” tent, open daily from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m., for people to show up in person.
While the Harp team works on its website, Independent readers can jump in with feedback and ideas today.
One way to do that: Cast a “True Vote” (at left) on two of the questions Harp has posed to her transition team:
• Should she eliminate the city’s neighborhoods anti-blight agency and merge its inspectors with other city inspection crews (such as health and fire code)? She suggested the city might save money that way, and she raised questions about the agency’s performance. Others argue that LCI is playing a crucial role in chasing slumlords, caring for abandoned properties, supporting affordable housing, and licensing landlords.
• Should she merge the maintenance crews from the public works and parks departments? She said she has a hunch that might save money and promote efficiency. She also said she knows from experience at the state Capitol that money-saving ideas that sound good on the surface sometimes turn out to be more complex, that sometimes different agencies exist for a good reason.
A second way you can start weighing in: By offering concrete advice about how to proceed with four ideas Harp floated as a candidate in this fall’s mayoral election.
In a campaign interview, Harp said she’d like to explore turning the following ideas (among others) into reality upon taking office. Check them out; if you have any constructive ideas — how to make them happen; what obstacles need to be overcome; what people or agencies or locations or potential partnering institutions might make a good fit; where money might be found; how to tweak/improve/develop the policy; what models in other cities to look at — please post them in the comments section at the bottom of this story.
• An Indoor Local Food Market & Business Incubator: New Haven already has outdoor neighborhood CitySeed local-produce markets much of the year. Harp now wants to add a year-round indoor market to the mix — stationing it perhaps in an old unused factory, with space for local people to grow food, share kitchen, and develop, with professional assistance, new businesses. She got the idea from Phyllis W. Haynes, a local woman who had to quit her job when her husband got sick; from home Haynes developed a new line of Southern-style cabbage-based “Chow Chow” relish. She told Harp about her difficulties in growing the business and bringing it to market. The new indoor center would both help entrepreneurs like her create jobs and bring more healthful food to New Haven, Harp said. (A similar concept is contained in the recent consultants’ report for developing the Mill River Industrial District.)
• Tenant Co-Ops: New Haven, with federal help, spawned tenant housing cooperatives in neighborhoods all over town in the 1960s and 1970s. For a generation they provided safe, attractive homes for working families. In recent years they’ve all failed one by one, plagued by mismanagement and tenant board infighting. The most recent failed co-op to go to private hands, and then fail again, is the old Dwight Co-Op Homes at 99 Edgewood Ave. Harp sat on the board of one co-op, Florence Virtue Homes, as an alderwoman. She remembers how “these old ladies brought the tenants in who were acting up. They said, ‘If you want to stay here, you have to behave!’ People stopped drinking and smoking on their porches.” With troubled complexes like Dwight Gardens at 99 Edgewood (which the city plans to sell to another private developer), and in new spots, Harp proposes reviving tenant co-ops — but this time adding a layer of city government management oversight and accountability to ensure they last longer.
• The “6 – 6” School In Newhallville: Some parents are desperate to get their kids coveted slots in magnet schools because they dislike their neighborhood schools. Other families find their kids sent to separate schools because of lotteries for magnet-school slots. Harp sees a way to start reviving the neighborhood school: Keeping it open from 6 a.m. to 6 p.m., filled with recreation and educational-enrichment programs (plus additional snacks and dinner). She proposes trying out the idea at Newhallville’s Lincoln/Bassett School. She’d tap foundation and possibly state money for child care or early education or youth programs. She’d also enlist community groups in running programs at the school. In Lincoln/Bassett’s case, she’d tap music-oriented donors like the school’s generous Class of ‘54 (or perhaps Yale’s Class of ‘57?) to pony up for music lessons for the kids; Lincoln/Bassett already has a tradition of emphasizing music and inviting adult volunteers into the school. The 6 – 6 school would attract families to the area and start stabilizing the neighborhood, where homes are still affordable, Harp said. She would then bring the idea to Hill Central and Dixwell’s Wexler/Grant.
• Neighborhood Grocery Buying Co-Ops: Some of New Haven’s poorest families pay the highest prices for food by shopping at corner stores. Harp proposes organizing a buying co-op for those groceries so they can purchase products at lower wholesale prices and pass along savings. That would build on work of a public-health coalition called CARE that has been trying, with mixed success, to bring more healthful food (including fresh fruits and veggies) into neighborhood stores.
