New Haven Register (Sunday) (New Haven, CT)
‘We had so many plans’
Elicker gets high marks for pandemic; mixed reviews on other city issues
NEW HAVEN — For Mayor Justin Elicker, it’s been a first year unlike that of any New Haven mayor, at least over the last century.
For the city — and everyone in it — that first year has been a maelstrom dominated by one ferocious, all-encompassing thing: the coronavirus pandemic.
Many agree that Elicker, who took office Jan. 1, 2020, and the team he put in place, led by Director of Health Maritza Bond, has done a good overall job of dealing with and responding to the pandemic.
But given the way it hijacked Elicker’s agenda — if he had known what he would be facing before he took office, would he still have run? The answer is yes. Elicker, a Democrat who defeated former Democratic incumbent Mayor Toni Harp in September and November 2019 — and now is expected to face a primary challenge from Elm City Communities-New Haven Housing Authority President Karen DuBois Walton — said in an interview that if he had it all to do over, knowing what he knows now, he would run again.
He said, however, that things haven’t gone quite as he originally expected.
“There’s a lot of things that I think I wanted to accomplish
and still very much am working to do so, but the pandemic and everything we’ve gone through has slowed the progress on those issues,” he said in an interview.
Beyond the pandemic, with the city facing a surge in gun violence, a $66 million shortfall in the coming year’s budget and depending on hoped-for increased state Payments in Lieu of Taxes funding and a hoped-for increased contribution from Yale to avoid a possible tax increase, painful layoffs and facility closures his proposed budget, people’s opinions are more diverse.
Even some of Elicker’s fans recognize problems.
“I think New Haven has a problem walking and chewing gum at the same time,” said Jayuan Carter, a local landlord, owner of a landscaping business and a member of Elicker’s transition team who also serves on the city’s Civilian Review Board.
Generally speaking, “I felt that he’s moved in the right direction for representing the entire city,” Carter said, although that doesn’t mean Carter is fully satisfied with the job the mayor has done.
“From the start, Justin created the narratives that in order for New Haven to thrive, New Haven has to have the resources” it needs — the basis for his effort to get the General Assembly to create a threetiered PILOT program that would pay more to communities with smaller percapita grand lists, Carter said.
Tiered PILOT could add up to $49 million in additional annual state aid for New Haven, which has the largest roster of tax-exempt property in the state.
And “as you can see right now, PILOT is a huge discussion in the statehouse ... and ... both the House and the Senate have approved it,” Carter said. “That’s huge. Many mayors have tried to do that.”
Even if it ends up not being for the full amount, “The fact of the matter is, some change was able to shake loose,” Carter said.
But at the same time, “New Haven has a problem with the pensions,” and hasn’t been able to do anything about that during Elicker’s first year in office, he said.
One of of the key campaign promises made by Elicker, who lives in the East Rock section, was to be mayor for all of New Haven.
How far he’s gone to achieve that is a matter of some debate.
“I really think that he is becoming the mayor for all of New Haven,” said the Rev. Kelcy G.L. Steele, pastor of Varick AME Zion Church on Dixwell Avenue, an Elicker supporter who also served on his transition team — speaking the day when Elicker went door-to-door on Winchester Avenue with then-Assistant Chief of Police Renee Dominguez, who became the interim police chief Saturday.
“He’s at functions both big and small, and I really think he has reached out” to all of the city’s constituencies, Steel said. “He was there last week for a popup vaccination center at my church ... He’s out in the community, doing coffee and meeting people in the park. He’s pretty much a hands-on, reachable mayor.”
Steele also recognizes some things have gotten left behind so far.
Coming into office, “We had so many plans, but nobody could predict the pandemic,” Steele said. “As you know, he has been a mayor in difficult circumstances ... I think that he is really working toward making his campaign promises a reality.”
But just a little farther out Dixwell, the Rev. Boise Kimber, pastor of First Calvary Baptist Church, isn’t at all convinced by Elicker so far.
“I don’t think he has shown leadership to this entire city,” Kimber said. “He’s paid attention to COVID, but anything else, I don’t see what he’s done. I mean, people are homeless in this city, people have got health issues in this city ... and he’s more interested in the budget than he is about the people of this city.
“...What he’s done is, he’s alienated the communities,” Kimber said. “Just ask people who were with him before. Ask them if they’re with him today.”
Westville resident Dennis Serfilippi, a CPA who supported Elicker in 2019 but isn’t sure he’ll support him in the next election, said, “”I think it’s been a tough year for everybody and I think COVID makes it difficult to assess someone’s performance. So I think it’s kind of hard to tell. But I think one of the challenges for any executive is when something came up, you still have to run your enterprise.
But Elicker, former executive director for what at the time was called the New Haven Land Trust, “ran on a promise of transparency and I don’t think we’ve seen that” said Serfilippi, who said he has submitted a lot of Freedom of Information requests “that have just been ignored.”
About specifics where he thinks transparency has fallen short, Serfilippi said, “I think his attempt to negotiate with Yale without telling people who’s negotiating” or what’s being negotiated.
“I supported him during the election. I thought he was the better candidate compared to Mayor Harp,” Serfilippi said. But now, “I think the verdict is out,” he said. “... Would I support the mayor? Probably not ... He’s a nice guy. He’s got a good family. He’s a good person. I just don’t know if he’s got the management experience.”
Pandemic work
Elicker said that both with regard to the pandemic, and when looking beyond it, he has worked hard to reach out to the entire city.
“The thing that I’m most proud of” over the past year “is how the New Haven community as a whole has responded to the pandemic,” Elicker said. “That includes our team in City Hall. It also includes many people with partner organizations and in the community ... that have worked to provide services to historically underserved ... communities.”
He’s also proud of popup testing sites — and more recently, pop-up vaccination sites — the city brought into underserved neighborhoods to make testing and treatment more accessible, as well as the shelter the city set up at Career High School “when we thought people experiencing homeless might not have anyplace to stay.”
During the pandemic, New Haven has delivered food to people in their neighborhoods, provided support for housing and helped people in many other ways, he said. “...We have re-housed permanently over 350 people who were experiencing homelessness.
“Our team has focused most of our energy on ensuring the Black and brown communities have resources that are needed at this time,” Elicker said.
“Our team has spent an incredible amount of resources” to do that.
Crossroads
When he talks about the need for additional support from the state and Yale, there’s a reason for that, Elicker said.
“Our city is at a crossroads,” he said. “There’s part of our city that is growing and successful and there’s another part of the city that’s struggling to have access to that growth.
“It’s important to understand that the budget goes back to everything: homeless, supporting people when they get out of prison,’ he said.
“The work that we are doing to increase the revenues of this city ... will help us support everyone in the city,” Elicker said. “I mean it when I say this is a crossroads, especially with regard to the state and Yale University. We’ve experienced decades and decades of underfunding.”
What New Haven needs is “inclusive growth,” Elicker said — including affordable housing, which he described as “people’s ability to have housing that doesn’t use so much of their income that they don’t have money for anything else.”
Among the things the Elicker administration has worked to provide are construction classes to give city dwellers, including racial and ethnic minorities, access to jobs at a time when “there’s lots of construction going on in New Haven,” he said.
The classes the city has gotten up and running in the midst of the pandemic has graduated 13 individuals so far — a number that was suppressed by delays related to the pandemic, Elicker said.
Regarding Serfilippi’s comments about transparency in the Yale negotiations, “My focus is on results there,” Elicker said, “and undeniably we have been very transparent — more transparent than past administrations.
In addition to giving out his cell phone number, Elicker said he did many “Meet the Mayor events,” meeting early in his administration, meeting people in bars early on, and outdoors later.
He said of the Yale negotiations, “we are making meaningful progress.”
Yale “wants to be in a city that helps it attract people to the city ... and it’s in Yale’s interest to help us do that,” he said. “I’m having constructive conversations with the (Yale) community and am cautiously optimistic” that they’ll reach an agreement, he said.
Yale officials, through spokeswoman Karen Peart, were invited to comment on Elicker’s first year in office and the state of Yale’s relationship with the administration. The university did not immediately respond.
DuBois-Walton, who is expected to announce her plans to set up an exploratory committee to challenge Elicker on Monday, also did not immediately respond to New Haven Register calls for comment.
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Crisis management
Elicker said in an interview that, looking forward, “I think that the rebound from the pandemic presents a real opportunity for our city. That means an opportunity, “to underscore what values we have, to take advantage of some additional funding that’s coming into the city, to reconnect with each other — not on Zoom.”
He said he would continue to work to bring affordable housing to the city, use the recently opened reentry center for formerly incarcerated residents to provide additional public services and institute a previously-discussed pilot program for a “crisis response team” that would bring social service workers to bear alongside or instead of police when problems break out.
Among those supporting Elicker are David Budries, chairman of the East Rock Community Management Team. Budries, who teaches at Yale School of Drama, said that “any reasonable person is going to understand that promises made before the pandemic are going to be difficult to fulfill.”
But “what’s really most important from my perspective is that he has stayed in touch. He’s been very transparent. Some people would say that he even communicates too much ... You can write to the mayor and he’ll actually write back. I fought for so many years to get some attention from the last mayor.
“I think he is more balanced with respect to looking at the entirety of the city of New Haven ... and being aware of so many of the variations that exist culturally and economically,” Budries said. “I’ve been pleased from the perspective of the community management teams, he has done some things that have allowed us to be more visible.
While East Rock might not generally be considered “underserved,” Budries pointed out that he has seen Elicker reach out to the Cedar Hill and Prospect Hill neighborhoods within it, which traditionally have been.
Democratic Town Chairman Vincent Mauro said that Elicker is in a unique position among New Haven mayors.
“If you look at it just from a governmental point of view, you get sworn in in January and by March the whole world is a very different place,” he said. “This is crisis management — this entire year, every elected official is doing crisis management.”
But even in the midst of that, “the continuity of government in this city didn’t flinch,” Mauro said. “The Board of Alders met in Zooms and ... the continuity is a real success story in how this worked. They managed to govern. They managed to be responsive ... and now, to get people vaccinated. Those are important functions of government.”
For any mayor, “you come in with an aggressive agenda and you think the world is going to be the same,” Mauro said. “...No one anticipated this ... But managing that, they all get credit for that ... You get credit for when you perform, and they performed.”
Anstress Farwell of the New Haven Urban Design League said Elicker and his staff “worked very, very closely with all of the advocacy groups and neighbors to resist the expansion of the trash transfer station on the Quinnipiac River ... The city hired a good technical consultant to go over the application ... It was a very, very excellent report.”
City staff “The staff did careful work ... and the applicant withdrew,” Farwell said.
Farwell was disappointed, however, in “two other situations that are important environmental justice issues” — a small park in the Dwight neighborhood that neighbors are fighting to save and a plan for expansion of Yale New Haven Hospitals St. Raphael campus that includes “a gigantic new parking garage.”
Both of those issues predated his administration, and, in contrast to the transfer station, the Elicker administration said “that they started with Toni (Harp) and he couldn’t do anything about it,” Farwell said.
“Those are two big disappointments,” she said.