New Haven Independent

One of the Sept. 11 Democratic aldermanic primaries involving pro- and anti-City Hall candidates takes place in Ward 26 in Upper Westville, where Mayor John DeStefano lives.

And no issue divides the two candidates more starkly than DeStefano’s nationally watched policy of embracing rather than harassing New Haven’s estimated 12,000 undocumented immigrants.

Alan Felder (pictured at left) said he decided to challenge Alderman Sergio Rodriguez (pictured at the top of this story) the night that the Board of Aldermen passed DeStefano’s plan to issue municipal ID cards to all people in the city, including undocumented immigrants. Felder was at the meeting.

“I feel like we were betrayed,” Felder said. “I’m totally 100 percent against [the IDs]. It’s the way the administration pushed it on us as if it was actually an initiative for the U.S. citizens, when all along it was the Latino groups that were pushing it. We were deceived and lied to.” Watching the policy pass, Felder said, convinced him “to get out of the frying pan and into the fire.”

Man Up

Felder had been inching closer to that fire all year, as he dived into political activism in town. While his activism has hit on a number of issues that put him at odds with Sergio Rodriguez, those issues have inevitably come back in some form to Felder’s opposition to immigrants here without legal permission.

A 44-year-old plumber, Felder formed a group called “Man-Up” to protest the lack of government-related contracts going to black companies like his. He led a demonstration outside a Westville housing development in March (pictured; click here for the story). The rally focused in part on the presence of Mexican workers on the job.

Felder became a regular citizen presence at public meetings on topics ranging from the city budget to city equal-opportunity policy to the future of West Rock.

He saw his alderman, Sergio Rodriguez, agreeing with City Hall — and disagreeing with Felder’s views.

For instance, Felder said he would have voted against selling downtown land to a private developer to build a 31-story tower on the old Shartenberg site at Chapel and State streets. “We have covered up corporate welfare in the name of economic development,” he said.

Rodriguez’s view: “I’m in favor of it,” he said, especially now that the city renegotiated the deal to get permit fees paid up front.

Felder said he would have voted against the new $43 million city budget. He said it could have been cut more to avoid tax hikes.

Rodriguez, who works as a community services manager for the housing authority, chairs the aldermanic Finance Committee that produced the budget. He said he’s proud of cuts he helped find in the final budget.

“The answer” to keeping taxes in check long-term “lies more with the state than with us,” Rodriguez said. “We need to work very diligently with the state delegation” to push property tax reform and universal health care. He also proposes that the state pass a 1/2 percent increase to the sales tax for five years to funnel $230 million a year to distressed cities like New Haven.

Arrest Them?

On crime, too, Felder takes a more critical view. Neither candidate blasts the cops or the chief. But Felder said he considers the decision to hire dozens of new cops a “military build-up” that fails to address the roots of crime.

And to Felder, “it all comes back … to illegal immigrants.”

The mayor and the police chief in December instructed the department’s officers not to inquire into the immigration status of New Haveners, because immigrants afraid of approaching cops had become easy prey for muggers.

Felder blasted that new policy.

“Community policing is a good idea. Trying to relate to the community is a good thing. But how can you truly say you are policing when you are putting out orders not to arrest illegal immigrants?” Felder asked.

Felder said he knows that federal immigration law are involved here, not local laws which city police are charged to enforce. “But we do have laws in this land. If you can’t enforce the laws of this land, you’re not governed by law.”

Rodriguez said he didn’t “remember” the new policing policy on immigrants. But he applauded the municipal ID plan as well as the DeStefano administration’s overall policy of welcoming immigrants.

“We need to know where people are in the city,” Rodriguez said. “John [DeStefano] and Kica [Matos, the mayor’s point person on immigration] were pretty bold in taking a step forward. I’m OK with the city coming up with a plan for dealing with 12,000 people who are in our city and we don’t know who they are.”

Congress, Rodriguez said, needs to pass “immigration reform that provides a pathway to citizenship, protects our borders, and doesn’t tear families apart.”

Related stories on the Sept. 11 aldermanic primaries:

Dixwell Primary Puts Plantation Politics To A Vote

Unions Back A Challenger In Dwight

Dwight Candidates Differ On Hospital