In Westville, A 21st Century Campaign

Darryl Brackeen, Jr. screwed a camcorder onto a tripod, set it up in his front yard, and unveiled his latest campaign proposal — handing out numerical grades to city workers and departments.

Brackeen, who’s running for alderman Westville’s Ward 26, floated the idea in a five-minute speech outside his home at 300 Ray Rd. Wednesday afternoon.

After filming the speech in a makeshift TV studio underneath a Japanese maple, he declared he would ​“bring Westville into the 21st century” with a new brand of tech-savvy campaign — one more familiar on the terrain of presidential and U.S. Senate contests than local aldermanic contests.

The 22-year-old plans to challenge Alderman Sergio Rodriguez in a Sept. 13 Democratic primary.

Brackeen, who has a long-running interest in audio-visual communications, uploaded the video to Youtube and Facebook for voters to see. He said he hopes the videos will give Westvillians a new point of access to politics — and will serve to hold him accountable for his campaign promises.

To that end, he hauled a host of equipment onto the cinderblock front steps of his home Wednesday: one American flag on an upright stand; seven floodlights; a Dell Inspiron 1501 laptop; a Sony camcorder on a tripod; a Behringer mixing board and power amplifier; two 1,000-watt Peavey speakers; a microphone; and a flat screen Panasonic television.

Brackeen said it took him only five minutes to put it all in place, which meant clamping a floodlight to a maple branch, connecting the camcorder to the laptop, the audio to the microphone, and propping up the television on five slats of plyboard from a broken bookshelf.

“This is what I do,” he explained.

Brackeen said he got his start at age 8 when he started helping out with audio feeds at the Faith Temple Revival Center just over the Hamden line. He later developed into the church’s assistant communications director. At Fairfield University he launched a TV show called ​“Finding Our Way.” He’s now involved with ​“motivational media,” which involves frequent on-camera monologues. (Check them out on his Youtube channel.)

Wednesday’s taping hit a glitch around 2:30 p.m., when the skies opened up for a sudden bout of rain. Brackeen brought out two blue bed sheets to cover the equipment.

At 3:30 p.m. the camcorder rolled. He stood, face illuminated by the bright lights, facing the camcorder. The laptop, where a copy of prepared remarks lay open, served as a teleprompter if need be (Brackeen said he didn’t use it). The TV showed a live broadcast of the event.

The topic of the address was ​“Steps to a Balanced Budget Plan.”

In it, Brackeen gave some general guidelines to how he’d improve the budgeting process.

One idea is to ​“seriously evaluate” city departments to see where they can be made more efficient. He proposed that all city departments be ​“graded” by aldermen on a scale of 1 to 10 on how they performed in the last year. Just as teachers and principals are now being graded at the Board of Education, Brackeen said all city workers should be ​“graded,” too, based on annual performance reviews.

“It’s time the city should be run as a business,” Brackeen said.

In an interview later Wednesday, Alderman Rodriguez (pictured) said the city already does performance evaluations for city employees . He knows, because he worked for the city for six years.

“Performance evaluations can’t balance the budget,” he said.

At aldermen’s urging, the mayor this year piloted a ​“performance-based budgeting” method with a few city departments. Those departments now list numerical performance goals in the city budget. For example, the youth department aims for 50 percent of kids involved in the Street Outreach Worker program to get jobs next year.

Rodriguez said it’s the mayor’s job, not aldermen’s, to determine whether city departments meet their goals. Aldermen oversee whether departments spend money in the way they said they would, but ​“we wouldn’t be micro-managing the department.”

Brackeen also called for more oversight of the Board of Education budget. As it stands, aldermen can control only the total dollar figure of the school system’s $173 million general fund budget. They don’t have line-item control.

Brackeen suggested adding an alderman to the city school board or changing the rules so that aldermen have more line-item control.

“I’m not comfortable with the idea that the whole [schools] budget just gets passed as a whole,” Brackeen said. ​“Everything needs to be looked at.”

Rodriguez said he has already made a suggestion along those lines. His proposal was to have the aldermanic Finance Committee chair meet more regularly with the Board of Education during the budget process and join the school board’s Administration and Finance Committee.

Rodriguez said he made that suggestion when he was finance chair because of a frustration with the lack of control over the school system’s budget. ​“That was one of the issues. We had no way of knowing how the Board of Education was spending its money on line item,” he said.

Brackeen also suggested ​“modernizing” city processes to make more documents, such as building permits, accessible online.

The city is now offering building permit applications online, but applicants still have to present the paperwork in person. Other permits remain unavailable on the web.

Rodriguez defended the city’s technological advancement. People can now pay parking tickets and taxes online. The city has plans to bring more processes online.

“We’re moving in a direction of more technology,” Rodriguez said, ​“but it’s unclear how much money that will save.”

Rodriguez said the city has done a good job ​“tightening its belt” around spending, and that the real problems are much larger in scale than what Brackeen focused on. The city is hamstrung by its reliance on the property tax, as well as by not knowing how much how much money will come from the state, given Connecticut’s fiscal crisis.

Rodriguez said he came forward this year with specific ideas for cuts, complete with dollar figures. That included furlough days, a four-day workweek, and not filling a vacant assistant chief position.

He has also lobbied the state for new ways to generate municipal revenue and against threatened cuts to the Community Development Block Grant program, which funds city services and not-for-profits around town.

“This Is The Future”

After shooting the video, Brackeen encountered some technical problems, and didn’t post it until Thursday morning.

Click the play arrow to watch. He also posted a plan on his website outlining some more proposals, including holding financial forums for citizens to learn about the budget.

Brackeen said as alderman, he would turn that campaign website into a space to inform his constituents on what’s going on around town. He said he’d post weekly video addresses, as President Obama currently does.

The point of the videos isn’t to go viral on the web, Brackeen said: ​“If you look at the Youtube views, it’s not that for me.” His last video, a June 7 campaign announcement, earned 144 views as of Wednesday evening.

He said the purpose, rather, is to ​“hold myself accountable” and to give Ward 26-ers another way to reach him. He said he hopes people view his policy speeches and post counter-videos with their own thoughts.

“The ward is becoming younger,” Brackeen said. ​“More people are willing to go to the Internet to access information,” rather than spending the time to go out to a community meeting.

“I really believe this kind of technology is the future,” Brackeen said.

The candidate was quick to add that the new technology could never be a replacement for face-to-face contact.

“I’m not trying to base my campaign online,” he said. ​“Nothing beats door-to-door.”

Brackeen, who’s been issuing his own neighborhood newsletter for the last year and a half, said he has a list of 200 emails of voters in the ward. He vowed to do a better job at communicating than the incumbent. When he knocks on doors, he said, a lot of people ​“aren’t well-versed” in what city services are available to them, and sometimes in who the alderman is.

“I think I’m pretty actively involved,” countered Rodriguez. He said he holds monthly meet-your-alderman nights at the Davis Street School and attends two or three blockwatch groups each month. He said he used to print a newsletter, but he stopped when people told him they didn’t read it.

“People are more into the personal contact. They want to know you’re there, they want to see your face,” he concluded.

Rodriguez said he is making moves to improve how he communicates with the people he represents: He is in the process of launching a website and is exploring the idea of starting a monthly cable access television show about the neighborhood.

“I see the importance of technology,” Rodriguez said, but ​“part of the joy [of the job] is meeting folks in person.”

“It’s much more important to knock on that door,” than to have voters ​“see you on a computer, or a website, or on a Youtube video.”