New Haven Independent

Perhaps it was this kind of attention to constituents’ concerns that accounted for the more than 125 people who came to the annual meeting at the Edgewood School from the highest voting ward in the entire city, Ward 25 in the Westville flats.

“Of the 2,000 voters in the ward,” she said, “I have a newsletter and list serve that go out to some 600. They express to me the issues that matter to them, and I bring to this annual meeting the city officials who can best answer their questions. ” Since the chief issues her voters seemed concerned with were the budget and policing, Silverman was joined at the meeting by a range of city officials led by Police Chief Cisco Ortiz, who was followed by an extensive budget seminar given by Chief Administrator Officer Rob Smuts.

On a day when a man hanged himself in nearby beautiful Edgewood Park, which incident he mentioned, the questions put to Chief Ortiz appeared to be less about life and death than quality of life: pothole fixing, traffic calming, why the non-emergency police line is so slow in responding.

And this man, Harvey Feinberg, asked Ortiz the best way for a citizen to report a school bus that idles too long. “Call your local officer or call me, Harvey,” was the answer. “We have good relationships with the bus companies and we’ll work together. In all these matters,” he said. “What we increasingly are trying to be about is better customer service. You have a right to that. And more information about what goes on.”

To that end, Ortiz said a formal announcement would come in the next week or two that the 911 center for police and fire service would be merging: “one room, in one building, to the tune of about $7 million. And even when you call the non-emergency number, we want the person on the other end to say, ‘Good morning, this is officer xyz, badge #123, how can I help you?’ The 13 new civilian employees that my boss Rob Smuts and the city will be providing will help create a much better triage system. We receive between 1.5 and 2 million calls a year, and very few of them actually result in a policeman being sent out.”

This man, David Schatz, a bicyclist, told Ortiz he was outraged by the drivers talking on their cell phones and the number of cars running red lights in Westville. Ortiz said he was both cognizant of privacy issues but also big on cameras at busy intersections, not to make money through tickets, but for safety. “You’d be surprised, however, the amount of pushback we are getting against this on the state level.”

He later said that “while cell phones are an issue,” he “put in place a policy regarding cell phone use by officers on duty. A larger issue is distractions in general to the driving public — not exclusively officers … A driver reading the paper, drinking coffee or tuning the radio is as dangerous, if not more dangerous, as a driver on a cell phone.”

Ortiz reminded his neighbors (the chief lives in Westville; his children have attended Edgewood School) that 30,000 cars a day traverse the city’s main arteries. “We have a new head of traffic in place, and I think it’s time for us to evaluate traffic flow in the whole neighborhood, and throughout the city.”

Smuts’ turn to speak was occasioned by patient listening — while challenging and occasionally angry questions were silently forming among the Westvillians. In full command of the budget in all its detail, Smuts performed a version of the mayor’s budget road show, updating it with reference to the cuts in the budget recently suggested by the Board of Aldermen’s Finance Committee. “Delaying the seating of the fire class by six month does concern us,” he said. “We don’t want the current officers to be burned out — absolutely no pun intended.”

Smuts called the 4.4% budget increase over last year modest, about the size of inflation. The biggest bites in the budget come from personnel; yet overall, from 2001 to this day, if you remove police, firefighters, and teachers, the number of full-time positions in city government has decreased by more than 300. So the size of city government is being reduced, he said.

And millions in costs are being avoided by New Haven’s aggressive energy-saving policies, exceeding even those in the cities of greenest Vermont, Smuts said. The timing and method of controversial residential property reevaluations are state-mandated, Smuts said, as are the levels of PILOT reimbursements for non-profit properties. To affect these issues profoundly and in the long term, Smuts said, the State Sen. Toni Harp and State Rep. Dillon need Westville’s support.

Smuts also addressed the $57 million in debt service in the budget, the lion’s share owing to the school construction program. Smuts said that factoring in all the school construction projected over the next decade, debt service not only peaks in about 2009 and begins to decline, but there’s additional relief from the sale of “swing spaces” the Board of Education is using to house school populations temporarily during construction. Those funds are earmarked for reduction in debt service.

Then came the questions, both about manholes and budget holes. This man, Gabriel DaSilva, said he recently came across a blown manhole cover at Yale and Edgewood. “It was dangerous. Cars, and certainly people on bicycles could have fallen right into it. I called the police non-emergency number, while I stood there — it was for about two and a half hours — directing people around it. When I finally got through and explained, the operator said, ‘Look, maybe someone with a hole in their head is more important that this.’”

Smuts concurred that this was not the right answer at all. “You should expect more, and will get more from your city.”

“That’s right, ” DaSilva said, “because I try to be a good citizen and the next time it happens I won’t.”

“I’m in charge of public works,” Smuts said. He gave his contact information out for all to copy down.

John Kerinsky, in the blue shirt, said he had a question he’s been asking for 25 years: “How come the pothole we have at West Rock and Central never gets properly fixed? A sewer was dug up, and then it’s been patched over in three places so it’s like a speed bump now. It’s a main thoroughfare, heavy trucks go over it, and we perpetually have a hole seven feet by four feet and four inches deep.”

“I’ll look into it,” Smuts said.

“I’ve heard that for 25 years.”

The man behind him, Michael Newton, challenged Smuts as to why all the development seemed to be downtown, “when between Westville and downtown, there’s a section of town that most of us don’t want to drive through and find it too dangerous to walk through. If the city,” he said, “is serious about linking neighborhoods, what’s being done about that?”

“As to areas like Dwight-Kensington,” Smuts answered, “yes, we feel that concentrations of poverty are not good for anyone. And yet do you know that 30 percent of the housing stock in the city is either Section 8 or other-deed restricted? We want to be embracing; we don’t want to kick out low income people. That’s why downtown development is important, and mixed use, increasing the tax base so that we have more money to provide services to all.”

Was Alderwoman Silverman pleased with the meeting? “Absolutely,” she said. “Look, the budget is difficult. But we have made choices in this city, and it’s important to be clear about this. The choices we have all made are that we want to live in a city where, for example, when this school, Edgewood School, got rebuilt, and it was among the first, it should not be the only one. The other areas of the city deserve these wonderful schools too. And that goes across the board, and it entails certain financial realities. I think the vast majority of the people in this ward feel this way.”

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