We’ll Take The Million, But …

The city inched closer to accepting a $1 million grant from the feds to make Newhallville a safer neighborhood — after the neighborhood’s representatives grilled the Harp administration’s point person and attached conditions.

After nearly four hours of asking questions, listening to public testimony and deliberating, the Board of Alders Joint Human Services-Public Safety Committee Tuesday night voted in favor of allowing Mayor Toni Harp to accept the Byrne Criminal Justice Innovation Grant from the U.S. Department of Justice.

But members made it plain to Youth Services Chief Jason Bartlett that they want more community input in how the money will be spent, and they want more of it spent on neighborhood improvements than on salaries.

The feds announced in October that New Haven had won the $1 million competitive grant. (Read all about that here.) The Harp administration applied for the money to help the police, street outreach workers, schools, youth and health-care workers, anti-blight officials, small businesses, and grassroots activists (like a new ​“resiliency team” and ​“Community Matters” team as well as the community management team) collaborate on ways to stem violence in one of the city’s poorest and most violence-plagued neighborhoods. (Click here to read the city’s full application describing the plan.)

Displeased about the tentative budget for the project, alders told Bartlett Tuesday night, that by the time the full Board of Alders votes up or down in January on whether the city will accept the grant, they want Bartlett to meet with Newhallville’s community management team at least twice.

They want to know where a projected $868,000 in cash and in-kind matching funds are coming from. And they want details on the process for hiring a project coordinator.

Bartlett presented a budget summary that reflected how the three-year grant could be used to meet four objectives of what is being called the Newhallville Safe Neighborhood Initiative.

Those four goals include:
• Reducing the high rate of crime through community-oriented policing and eliminating identified crime hot spots.
• Cutting the number of youth caught in the cycle of violence, fear and retribution that causes the majority of violent crime.
• Building community leadership and social cohesion to transform the neighborhood.
• Addressing the neighborhood’s physical deterioration ,

Bartlett said the summary was just a draft that was submitted as part of the grant package. The only items that must remain fixed are $80,000 that would be allocated to the University of New Haven for program evaluation and research, and money to cover a salary of a full-time project coordinator, he said. The project coordinator’s salary was estimated at about $60,000; he offered to reduce it to about $55,000 after alders balked. He said the rest is negotiable, as long as it passed muster with the feds.

Alders were wary of signing off without a full accounting for what the actual budget might be. They were especially wary that the grant would fund mostly personnel costs and consultants with just a small amount leftover for actual programs, if they allowed the mayor to accept the grant without some additional stipulations.

Bartlett tried to reassure alders that they were not signing off on the budget summary. They responded that it isn’t uncommon for them to be presented with budget numbers that they rarely get to see again.

As it stands, the budget summary would allocate about $550,000 to salaries and fringe benefits.

Newhallville Alders Delphine Clyburn, Brenda Foskey-Cyrus and Alfreda Edwards were united in their concern that $1 million would come to the city to address problems in the neighborhood without the neighborhood seeing anything actually change. Of particular concern to the trio of alders deteriorating properties and the need for jobs. Clyburn has also stressed the need to cut back trees that now block streetlights and offer haven for criminal activity.

Clyburn said after the meeting that she has mixed feelings about the decision to move forward, even with the caveats in place. ​“People are using Newhallville to get something, and we’re getting nothing,” she said. ​“I want to make sure people get something.”

Newhallville Was Here

Newhallville residents like Latoya Agnew (pictured) didn’t leave it to elected leaders to ask all the tough questions or suggest what should be done with the grant.

Agnew told the committee that of the organizations listed as potential recipients of some of the money, none of them, in her opinion actually does anything about the problems on the ground, including the police.

“Newhallville cops are walking around talking to each other,” she said, ​“not to the community.” She said the grant money might be better spent teaching cops how to interact with neighbors and training the community to interact with the cops. She also said that the community coordinator should be someone from Newhallville.

Agnew said any efforts to address blight in the neighborhood should also include strategies that connect people with jobs to do the work. ​“People come to Newhallville, but don’t improve the community.”

Newhallville activist Barbara Vereen said she wants to see measurable benchmarks, because so often money comes in for ​“fluff,” not ​“for the on-the-ground day-to-day stuff.”

Several people testified about their concern that the grant’s emphasis on ​“crime hotspots” was just another fancy way of providing more funding to the police department for its surge activities. New Haven public school teacher Eric Maroney cautioned the alders to be sure that federal dollars would not be used as a means to fund ideas that ordinarily wouldn’t be palatable, particularly around the undefined idea of community policing.

“When the money dries up, the policy stays,” he said.

Annex Alder Al Paolillo said he would have expected that a lot of the leg work of talking to the community would have been a part of the lead up to the application process. He called not having someone from the police department at the meeting to address community concerns and mistrust about their role in the grant ​“a mistake.”

Bartlett said the grant isn’t designed to create programs, but to develop a more coordinated effort in the city to tackle issues specific to Newhallville. He called the concerns raised at the meeting valid and said he welcomed the input.

“This is a community collaborative grant,” he said. ​“We understand the frustration, and it is why we wrote the grant for Newhallville — to bring people together to solve problems and break down those silos. That is what the grant is meant to do.”