New Haven Independent

Sean Matteson, 37, leaned back in his chair at his seventh day in City Hall Friday, visibly exhausted from pulling 18-hour days crunching crime stats for the mayor’s major gun violence speech.

Matteson started as mayoral chief of staff just after Christmas, replacing Karen Dubois-Walton, who moved to the Housing Authority as part of a progressive shake-up at City Hall after DeStefano returned from a crisscrossing the state on a three-year gubernatorial campaign, which he lost to Gov. Rell in November.

With LEAP’s Che Dawson and JUNTA’s Kica Matos, Matteson represents a new progressive front of community organizers atypical to City Hall. And like several other new hires, Matteson poured many long hours into DeStefano’s campaign. A self-described “political hack” with experience in D.C., he ran DeStefano’s statewide field operation.

Unlike his chief of staff predecessor “” a polished Ivy Leaguer with a carefully managed professional front “” Matteson appears raw, direct.

“I’m not a policy wonk. I’m not a Yalie. I’m kinda different from the people that come out of here.”

He smokes Marlboros, up to a pack a day. He sighs a lot and swivels in his desk chair, where he spends up to 18 hours per day, arriving at the office at 6:30 a.m. He drives a Saturn “” union-made, in America “” down from West Harford, where he lives with his wife, who’s a union organizer, and their 10 month-old son. (They’ll move to the city in February, he said.) In his free time, he reads newspapers.

He presents himself as a loyal workhorse with high expectations for all. “I know how to manage people. I get a lot out of people.”

Hailing from Youngstown, Ohio, Matteson speaks with a relaxed Midwestern cadence. He got interested in labor when a job in a grocery store in high school led him to become a union member.

Asked who his hero is, he declined to pick “some larger-than-life figure” from the labor movement, as others might. Instead, “it’s people that go to work every day and bust their ass to pay the bills.”

Matteson moved east five years ago to work as a political lobbyist for the union now known as UNITE HERE. He has worked with Locals 34 and 35 at Yale, as well as GESO, Yale’s union-seeking graduate students. He took a leave from that career to join DeStefano’s gubernatorial campaign “because I thought universal health care was a long time coming.”

When it was all over, DeStefano asked him to be chief of staff. “I was a little surprised when he asked me to do the job “¦ I thought about it, I talked to my wife and I said yes “” where he chooses to lead me, I will follow.”

Crowded Plate

DeStefano returned from the gubernatorial campaign trail to a city rocked by youth gun violence and with more than a few angry constituents accrued over his 13 years as mayor. How will Matteson deal with that?

He responds like a campaigner. Now that City Hall has come up with a slew of proposed solutions to gun violence “” including a truancy clampdown and aggressive community outreach “” the next step, he says, is “to go out and sell it to the public.”

“We’re going to take it to the community, into the neighborhoods. “¦ and [tell] people who come out, that we want you to take part, to buy into this,” by participating in block watches, helping identify at-risk youth and volunteering as mentors.

Who’ll be in the churches, the neighborhood meetings, doing the outreach “” the field staff, so to speak? “All of City Hall,” said Matteson. “And when I say all of City Hall I mean all of City Hall.”

Including Matteson?

“You’re damn right.”

The most difficult challenge in implementing the wide-sweeping initiatives? Money. The city will be lobbying Hartford to fund outreach programs, he said.

What does he see as the city’s role in the Yale-New Haven labor standoff? Besides supporting card-check neutrality, he doesn’t know what “the fix” will be. But for the time being, “our role has basically been to encourage both sides to cool off.”

To run a tight ship, he vowed “to make sure everybody’s who’s supposed to be doing what they’re doing is doing it, including in City Hall.”

Does that include the Board of Zoning Appeals? “We’ll look into it,” he said.

As the mayor leaps up from his desk and pours out a fountain of new ideas, Matteson’s job will be to pick out feasible ones and implement them. “He comes up with the good ideas, and you have to go out and sell the ideas.”

Immigration Campaign

This year, the mayor’s agenda includes a pledge to make municipal ID cards available to undocumented workers.

The program would enable the city’s burgeoning illegal immigrant population to show ID to police and open bank accounts. Last year, the program was announced, but folded after drawing political heat. Will the program succeed this time?

“Are we going to do it? I don’t know “” we’re going to look at it again. If it makes sense, we’ll work on it.”

Matteson was optimistic he’d soon be joined by Matos in that effort, to overcome the “public perception of immigrants.”

“If it requires us to move an agenda forward by running a campaign on those items, we’re sure as hell going to run a campaign on those items.”

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