Paul Bass Photo
John DeStefano borrowed a page from a former president as he formally launched his quest for a record tenth term as mayor of a sunny city called New Haven.
A crowd of city officials, contractors and union workers gathered Tuesday afternoon inside a well of crumbling factory buildings undergoing transformation into new offices to cheer on DeStefano as he made his declaration.
Sun bathed the interior of the shuttered former Winchester rifle complex at Winchester Avenue and Munson Street, where developers have begun a five-year $45 million renovation for a headquarters for the growing Higher One company as well as other new offices and stores and apartments.
Addressing the crowd assembled there Tuesday, DeStefano never used the term “morning in New Haven.” But like Ronald Reagan, who ran a classic reelection campaign for president on theme that the sun had risen on “morning in America,” DeStefano unveiled a campaign theme aimed at convincing voters that a bright new day has dawned thanks to his stewardship.
“Think about it. We live in a community that in the worst of times is growing jobs, starting businesses and not raising taxes,” DeStefano declared. “We live in a community that people from around the world, and from around the region, are clamoring to get into.”
DeStefano with Rev. Boise Kimber and Community Baptist’s Rev. Jason Turner, a representative of Al Sharpton’s National Action Network.
He noted that the city’s grand list grew more than any other Connecticut city’s last year. That New Haven’s population grew more than that of any New England city with more than 100,000 people according to the latest census figures. That employers like HigherOne and Yale-New Haven Hospital have created new jobs in a recession. That parents of 8,000 suburban kids applied to get their kids into New Haven public schools next year.
“Point to [another] city in America where the flight is from the the suburbs to the city.”
Click here to read the prepared text of the speech. (DeStefano deviated at times from the written text when he spoke.)
The mayor alleged that his nascent school reform drive is already “working.” He got a shout-out from teachers union president Dave Cicarella, who introduced him at the event and cited the city’s groundbreaking contract that makes it easier to replace failing teachers and grade schools’ and administrators’ performance.
“We’ve been making good choices,” DeStefano said of the city. With the clear message: Reelecting him in November would be another one of those good choices.
If that happens, DeStefano will win his second title as longest-serving New Haven mayor. He captured the record of winning the most popular elections for mayor in city history in 2009 when he won his ninth two-year term, surpassing former Mayor Dick Lee, the urban renewal captain who won eight terms. That first title had an asterisk: another mayor served longer, but wasn’t popular elected. That would be Elijah Goodrich. Goodrich was elected 206 years ago (in the sense that you could call such restricted electorates “popular” bodies). But in those days, mayors didn’t have to face local voters after their first election. The state General Assembly merely kept “re-electing” them. Goodrich served 18 years and two months. Then he died. A reelected DeStefano would top his record in March 2012.
First DeStefano has to win a probable Sept. 13 Democratic primary (usually tantamount to a general election; New Haven last elected a Republican mayor in 1951), then the November general election. Two Democrats have begun organizing challenges to him: civil-rights activist Clifton Graves and former Hill Alderman Tony Dawson.
“I was taking a stroll in the neighborhood. I thought I’d come by,” Graves said at Tuesday’s event. He’s pictured greeting DeStefano.
Graves got a firsthand look at the kind of entrenched forces facing a challenger to a nine-term incumbent. Among the DeStefano supporters present were carpenters union organizer Tim Sullivan and Science Park/ Downtown Crossing/ 300 George St. developer Carter Winstanley (left and right above, respectively) …
… Yale’s Michael Morand …
… Science Park Development Corporation President David Silverstone and Oprah pal Mubarakah Ibrahim, who has started a company hiring neighborhood-based laborers for construction projects …
… housing authority Executive Director Karen DuBois-Walton …
… and Board of Ed Chief Operating Officer Will Clark (at center in photo) and Newhallville powerbroker Rev. Boise Kimber (at left). Kimber has faithfully rounded up DeStefano black-community votes when he has most needed them for over 20 years, most notably in the 1989 Democratic primary against John Daniels (who became New Haven’s first black mayor) and in the 9/11 2001 primary against State Sen. Martin Looney, DeStefano’s last serious challenge.
While DeStefano’s challenge will be to convince voters that it’s morning in New Haven, his opponents will need to convince voters that the city has run aground under his watch.
“He said what he had to say in terms of rallying the troops,” opponent Graves remarked after the mayor’s speech. “What I’m hearing across the city is that people want a new voice and a new direction. The mayor is offering the same old voice and misdirection.”
A key battleground for those competing views of the city’s state will be crime — particularly the shootings that continue to plague the black community.
In his remarks, DeStefano offered a positive spin as he acknowledged the existence of “too much violence in the city.”
“No neighborhood, no family ought to have to deal with that,” he said. He spoke of more good choices the city will make in tackling the narcotics trade, illegal guns, and prison “reentry” population at the heart of much of the violence. George Cunningham, an ex-con who built a successful painting company with the help of city programs, was one of the speakers introducing DeStefano.
New Haven has made the good choice of not trying just to “arrest our way out” of the crime problem, DeStefano said. Rather it is tackling the roots, most of all with school reform, which he called “the best antiviolence strategy.”