New Haven Independent

The state last Thursday passed a law allowing for publicly financed statewide elections. The strongest such law in the country, it aims to allow more candidates to run for office, especially those not beholden to fatcat contributors or party bosses.

The 120-page bill included a little-noticed half-page provision that New Haven had been fighting for for three years. It allows three cities or towns to experiment with publicly financed elections for mayor and city council/board of aldermen. The earliest the experiment can begin will be the 2007 municipal elections.

Under the provision, interested cities will need to apply to the state Elections Enforcement Commission to become one of the three test communities. The Commission won’t have the rules ready for a while, but a staff lawyer told the Independent that interested cities can write letters right away asking to be considered.

Jorge Perez introduced a resolution Monday night to have the city write such a letter. (Download this file to read the rest of Monday night’s agenda.) The resolution passed unanimously.

“I think it was great that that part of the legislation passed,” Perez said. “The concept, I support.”

Local cities seeking to participate in the experiment will have to pass a more complete local law spelling out how the publicly financed campaigns would work.

A group of aldermen and local activists, including Alderman Goldfield, have been crafting such a local law for years. But first they needed the state to pass “enabling legislation” allowing local cities to pass such laws. Goldfield and other members of a clean-elections group have been traveling to Hartford for three years to lobby for that legislation.

Now that such state legislation has passed, Goldfield vowed to return to that proposal and prepare it for a vote. The proposal as currently envisioned would cost about $200,000 every two years. It would cover only mayoral elections, not aldermanic elections. Mayoral candidates wishing to participate in the system (it’s not mandatory) would agree not to accept contributions over $300. To show their candidacies are serious, they’d have to collect a minimum number of small private contributions in order to qualify for public funds. They would also agree to a spending cap and would refuse contributions from political action committees.

“Whatever is required, I’m going to be pushing the city of New Haven along as fast as possible” on this proposal, Goldfield said.

Supporting a clean-elections law like this one fits into the campaigns that both Goldfield and Perez are running to become the new Board of Aldermen president this January. It’s a heated contest. Perez has positioned himself as the independent candidate who can keep government honest and accountable, an effort that a clean-elections law would help by making it easier for independent-minded people to run for office. Goldfield has presented himself as the candidate who will usher in a new era of progressive, activist legislation, like this.