nothin Harp Swings Back | New Haven Independent

Harp Swings Back

Paul Bass Photo

Markeshia Ricks photo

Paolillo: “We’re not saying no.”

A day after alders voted to shoot down a $45 million new school and to deny her six new positions, Mayor Toni Harp accused them of speaking out of both sides of their mouths when it comes to creating jobs.

You can’t then come to me and say, We’re going to march for jobs,’” and then cast votes like the ones cast Wednesday night, a visibly vexed Harp (pictured above) declared in an interview Thursday. Either you want jobs or you don’t. You can’t have it both ways.”

Harp was reacting to votes by the Board of Alders Finance Committee. The committee voted against including $10.5 million in the coming year’s capital projects budget to support construction of a new Strong School as a 455-student, K‑4 early learning lab on the Southern Connecticut State University campus. The committee also voted to eliminate six of the 25 new positions in the mayor’s proposed budget to insure that the city could contribute more to pensions and health care. In addition, the committee voted unanimously to hold back budgeted funds from the fire services, youth services and education departments in reserve and to release that money only when department heads come back with information that alders have requested. (Read about that here.)

It all added up to the strongest challenge to Harp to date from the board, whose labor-backed majority supported her election and which recently went through a change of leadership.

Harp said her administration will lobby all 30 alders if need be to seek to reverse those decisions when the full board meets May 26 for a final vote on the new budget.

She made a point of citing the majority’s signature issue — jobs.

The Strong School vote would kill 50 to 60 construction jobs, she estimated. It would kill $34.4 million in state money to build the new school. And if the new school doesn’t get built, the city will probably end up spending around as much money fixing the crumbling building that currently houses Strong School on Legion Ave., Harp argued.

You can’t speak with authority with Yale and Yale-New Haven if you’re not willing to do some” job creation, Harp said.

We’re going to do all we can to get them to see they made a mistake. …

What this did was cede to me the whole jobs policy question. You can’t ask the employers in the area to give jobs to people in the New Haven area if you’re not willing to” create jobs.

Superintendent of Schools Garth Harries, too, said Thursday that his staff will lobby the full Board of Alders to put the money back into the budget at its upcoming final vote. He said that Strong’s students are in dire need of moving from a crumbling old building to a state-of-the-art school similar to what other students attend.

We are far from the end of this process,” Harries said. We think the merits are pretty plain: This is a largely minority, significantly ELL [English-language learner] school that was created because of the success in the school system and our growing enrollment. Those kids absolutely deserve the same kind of facility that exists at Worthington Hooker and Nathan Hale and around the district.”

The Board of Alders leadership responded to Harp’s remarks through a joint statement issued to the Independent.

Jobs are a priority for everyone. We are proud of the new positions we approved, but given our concerns about meeting our current pensions and healthcare obligations, we stopped short of approving the full 25 positions” requested overall in the mayor’s proposed budget, began the statement, which attributed to board President Tyisha Walker and five others in leadership positions: Jeanette Morrison, Alphonse Paolillo Jr., Delphine Clyburn, Dolores Colon, and Sara Eidelson.

While we also believe the [Strong] School [project] has merit, our concern about the pension, healthcare funding and current debt of the city lead us not to approve it at this time period. We will explore whether the state portion of the funding can be preserved for next year”.

We Love Kids,” Too

Markeshia Ricks Photo

Alders argued at Wednesday night’s committee meeting that they were acting out of fiscal responsibility.

Dixwell Alder Morrison (pictured) Wednesday night said the city can’t afford to set aside more than $10 million now, especially when the city is on the hook for costly repairs to school buildings that have been recently built.

In addition to the cost of building the new school, the mayor’s proposed budget calls for spending more than $4 million in significant repairs to three rebuilt schools, she said.

We don’t ever want people to think that we don’t love the kids, that we don’t care about the kids, that we don’t want the best for the kids, because we do,” Morrison said. But in regards to the $10 million that they’re requesting to build this new school, right now we can’t afford it.”

The committee amended the mayor’s proposed capital budget by voting to leave to withdraw” specifically the funding for Strong School, which Morrison said allows the Board of Education to continue the dialogue on the school.

That’s not to say that next year, or the year after that we won’t be in a position, but again, we have to be fiscally responsible when we make these decisions,” Morrison said.

Annex Alder Paolillo Jr. said the Board of Alders has supported many school projects over the years, but it had to factor in the city’s overall financial well-being, including bond ratings, overall debt service and the percentage of the city’s budget that is debt, and how that might be impacted by building another school and borrowing to do it. He also was critical of the board’s not starting the dialogue on the school back in June when it received funding approval from the state.

So we’re not saying no to the Board of Ed,” Paolillo said. We’re saying that this project, in context needs to be slowed down.”

From Crumbling To Strong”

Aliyya Swaby Photo

According to an April letter submitted by Schools Superintendent Harries (pictured reading Green Eggs and Ham to Strong School first-graders), the project has been a part of the master plan for school facilities since 2013. Harries wrote in the letter that the BOA has had that plan since March 2013. The grant for the school was approved by the Citywide School Building Committee in December 2011, and approved by the Board of Ed February 2015. The project was approved by the state legislature in June 2014 under the condition that the city file required documentation by June 30, 2015.

The idea is to move Strong from its current 130 Orchard St. location (the former Vincent Mauro School) to the campus of Southern Connecticut University. The new school would bring aspiring teachers closer to the classroom, as part of a six-school capital plan unveiled this week. The magnet school’s new K‑4 program would work in partnership with the university’s School of Education, offering education students opportunities to observe experienced teachers.

Right now Strong’s students are attending a crumbling school that, absent the move, will require lots of temporary repair money, Harries said Thursday morning.

This is a facility that is deteriorating and past its life,” Harries said. We’ve been clear with the alders that financially in order to keep it going, it’s going to cost us significant dollars just to keep that roof up and keep that facility heated. Even then with the substandard instructional space, it doesn’t include a lot of things that we want our kids to have access to.”

In addition, the city will lose the $34.4 million approved by the state for the school if it doesn’t approve the city’s share this month, Harries noted.

He said he doesn’t consider Wednesday night’s decision the last word on the matter.

The city budget process is ongoing. This is a vote of the Finance Committee,” Harries said. There has been public discussion. We are open to more public discussion on this.”

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