Paul Bass Photo
Smith, at right, with Knia Matthis, Richard Gay, & Shawn Matthis.
City Clerk candidate Ron Smith accused his opponent of insulting black women — and revealed that he might endorse the independent mayoral candidacy of Justin Elicker.
“You know what Al Sharpton said: No Justin, no peace!” Smith quipped as he stood at the busy intersection of Bassett Street and Dixwell Avenue in Newhallville during rush hour Monday afternoon.
Smith and some supporters showed up at the corner, outside Visel’s Pharmacy, to announce that, yes, Smith is still running for reelection as city/town clerk.
You can forgive some people for needing to be reminded.
For starters, most people don’t give much thought to the city/town clerk. Yes, it’s the city’s second-highest elected office. Yes, the office has crucial responsibilities, like maintaining land records and administering dog licenses, campaign filings, and absentee ballots. But the $46,597-a-year clerk position itself is part-time; a full-time deputy, Sally Brown, runs the office day to day. Most years the clerk position is filled quietly, without a competitive or high-profile election.
Another reason for Monday’s reminder: Even though Smith, a Democrat, has held the job for the past 10 years, his party ditched him this year. Party leaders supported a different candidate, Michael Smart (who’s currently a Wooster Square alderman). Smart won the Sept. 10 Democratic primary on a ticket with Democratic mayoral primary winner Toni Harp, whose campaign did the heavy lifting collecting 2,406 signatures on joint petitions to place Smart’s name on the primary ballot.
Smith didn’t even make that primary ballot. He’s running as an independent in the Nov. 5 general election — against his former party allies — to try to keep his position. He said he has 20 volunteers helping him in his uphill fight.
“We’re back on the ballot. We never went away,” Smith proclaimed Monday outside Visel’s, where he originally announced his reelection campaign back on April 15. That’s his home base; Smith represented the neighborhood for 10 years on the Board of Aldermen before becoming city clerk a decade ago. He received a steady stream of hugs Monday from old friends like 74-year-old Nathaniel James (pictured).
“This is a heavyweight fight — Muhammad Ali versus Joe Frazier!” he said. “We’re out here. We’re not going nowhere. You beat me, God bless you. They got the machine. All we got is each other. We’ve got to keep fighting.”
Asked about how it feels to run as an independent, Smith summoned the example of retired U.S. Sen. Joe Lieberman. The Democratic Party ditched Lieberman, too, back in 2006, when it chose someone else in a primary, Smith noted; Lieberman kept his seat by running in November as an independent. “They said Joe Lieberman didn’t have a shot, and he won. I don’t believe in quitting. We still have a shot like anybody else.”
He and Smart do have different positions on some issues facing the office.
Paul Bass Photo
Smart (pictured filing his campaign papers in May) has called for changing how the office works. He promised to institute some night-time hours for people who can’t make it to the 200 Orange St. clerk’s office to file papers during the work day. He called for more “diversity” in the office, where all four current full-time employees are African-American. He also called for a technological upgrade to make more forms and records available online. (Read about all that here and here.)
Smith is running on his record. The office works well, he said; it doesn’t need fixing. He called it “the number-one office in the state of Connecticut.”
He said the office has upgraded its technological systems and put lots of information online. He said he has never heard complaints about that. Nor has he heard requests from the public for night hours.
“You have to consider the women [working there] have families at home. People want to go home at 5 o’clock. They don’t want to go home at 9 at night,” he said.
In conversations with voters, Smith kept returning to the promise Smart made in May to “diversify” the clerk’s office.
“All of a sudden my office is not diverse enough because it has too many African-American women? We don’t discriminate against anybody. We bend over backwards to help people,” Smith insisted. He said his employees have civil-service jobs; they passed tests to earn the jobs. He noted that city government has lots of white, black, and brown employees. He argued against dwelling on the racial makeup of one four-person office in a city government with close to 5,000 employees.
“He owes an apology to the African-American women in this town!” Smith declared.
Reached afterwards, Smart said he recognizes that the employees have civil-service protection. He said that if a position becomes vacant, that’s when he would “look at” trying to add more racial diversity to the office. (Both Smith and Smart are African-American.)
He argued that “you can always improve services” in a government office. He said right now people can’t always immediately obtain certain forms during different parts of the work day, or else they have to make email requests for the forms. He said he’d want to change that. And he said he’d like to cross-train members of the office to cover different duties in the office. That would allow scheduling flexibility to expand the office’s hours to accommodate people who can’t get to 200 Orange between a.m. to 5 p.m.
“If a person works from 5 to 8 on a Thursday, they can leave at 2 o’clock on a Friday,” he said. Then they can start earlier on “enjoying the weekend with their family.”
Meanwhile, Smith said he plans to meet later this week with fellow Democrat candidate-turned-independent candidate Justin Elicker. He said he’s considering endorsing Elicker’s mayoral candidacy. Elicker and Smith will appear on the same line of the Nov. 5 general election ballot.
“Ron and I have been talking,” Elicker confirmed Tuesday. He declined comment on whether he might endorse Smith’s candidacy.