Thomas MacMIllan Photo
In two years, New Haveners will fly to Florida, Washington, and Chicago and ride “more and better” buses around town.
And the city will be able to demonstrate those advancements with hard numbers.
Mayor Toni Harp laid those goals out in her first “State of The City” address, delivered to the Board of Alders and dozens of audience members Monday night in City Hall.
The speech offered Harp her first public opportunity to present her full mayoral agenda, just one month into her tenure.
The state of the city, Harp said, is “poised” — poised for continued policing success, poised for better fire service, poised to “knit” the city together with new developments, poised to attract new entrepreneurs, and poised to be “the great small city between Manhattan and Boston.”
Click here to read the speech.
Among the list of goals laid out in the speech, Harp took a firm stand on two transportation issues — bus service within New Haven, and air service to and from it. She also promised a turn toward data-driven governance.
Bus service is not just about transportation; it’s a matter of civil rights, she said.
“I will make it clear that without more and better buses of all types running more appropriate routes we cannot fulfill our promise of jobs and opportunity,” Harp said. “Adequate transportation is an economic and civil rights issue — I will not let busses and those who ride them be left behind.”
That line drew a round of applause from the chamber.
Improved bus service is also at the top of the list for Harp’s new transportation chief, former Downtown Alder Doug Hausladen. He has called for extensions of service and the installation of GPS devices on all buses — two ideas that the governor subsequently promised to look into.
In order to be a the great small city between New York and Boston, she said, Tweed Airport needs to offer flights to more locations, she said. Right now, air passengers can only fly to Philadelphia.
“We must improve the ability people have to get here and go elsewhere,” she said. “I will do whatever it takes to work with the neighbors around Tweed Airport to make it possible for us to support them and have planes fly to Florida and Washington and Chicago – not next century but in two years.”
In her address, Mayor Harp also embraced quantitative analysis as a governance method. She promised to implement the management tool “Results-Based Accountability” in all city departments.
“Within just a few months each department head will have conducted an inventory and prepared answers to the following questions: ‘how much did we do?’, ‘how well did we do it?’, and, ‘is anyone better off?’ The answers will be quantifiable, to address my strong support for this system. My mantra for city government is this: if we can’t measure it, we can’t manage it.”
