Paul Bass Photos
Okafor (left); Blue.
The Harp administration is taking an internal look into a second case of a staff dispute breaking into public view and leading to a mixed budget message to lawmakers.
The latest dispute is between city development and policy chief Mendi Blue and social services chief Martha Okafor.
Blue fired off a 11-page letter to city alders ripping Okafor’s performance and urging them to switch money from Okafor’s department to hers — contrary to the official $525 million proposed 2016 – 17 fiscal year city operating budget that the Harp administration submitted to the alders for review.
In the letter, Blue asked Alders President Tyisha Walker and members of the alders’ Finance Committee to fund a grant writer and a policy analyst position that the Harp administration decided not to include in its final budget proposal. Blue suggested the alders fund those positions instead of approving some of the $255,000 worth of line items in the mayor’s budget request for the Community Services Administration (CSA), which Okafor oversees. Blue argued that her own department is supposed to do the work that money would support.
In a separate incident, the city’s small business chief, Jackie James, appealed to alders at a different finance hearing to fund an administrative assistant position that didn’t make it into the mayor’s final proposed budget. A discussion about the issue with her boss, Matthew Nemerson, ended with James filing a workplace complaint against him and demanding that she have a union representative present in any future meeting with him. (The episode and underlying issues are detailed in this article.)
Mayoral Directive
Markeshia Ricks Photo
Jackie James, second from left, testifying before the Finance Committee.
Mayoral Chief of Staff Tomas Reyes Wednesday declined to discuss the Blue-Okafor dispute because it’s a “personnel matter.”
He did say in an interview that Mayor Toni Harp has a clear policy about when and how to advocate for new positions in each year’s budget.
“The time to do that is before the budget is submitted” to the alders, Reyes said.
He said the administration’s coordinators, finance officials, and department heads have a “robust period” of internal discussions about the budget before the submission. Harp made it clear this year that the budget would not include a tax hike, he added. Most departments failed to receive all requested new positions in the final proposed budget.
“The mayor was very clear about everybody speaking with one voice about the budget” once the final version went to the alders for review and approval, Reyes said.
That policy works best for the administration and the alders alike by creating a coherent process, argued Reyes, who is a former president of the Board of Alders (then called the Board of Aldermen). “Imagine if everybody were to attempt to lobby the alders independently for their own programs. It would be utter chaos, not only for the administration, but for the Board of Alders.”
Mendi Blue said Wednesday that she is aware of the policy, but that special circumstances warranted her speaking out in this case.
“The unfortunate reality is that many of us [in city government] were blindsided” by the budget, Blue said. “I literally learned my positions were cut before I had to go testify. There really was no opportunity to have this discussion. I totally concur that had there been opportunity, that would have been the better avenue. But five minutes into” her appearance before the Finance Committee “I learned my positions had been cut. Not until after Martha’s testimony” the next evening did she “learn” that the mayor’s proposed budget instead dedicates grant-related money to Okafor’s office.
The mayor’s proposed budget had been published on the city’s website for weeks before the hearings. Blue said she had had no reason to dig through it before the hearing, and no one alerted her to the situation.
“Theoretically I suppose if I had combed through every department’s budget I would have found it,” she said. “Realistically, nobody does that. There’s not an expectation that someone else’s budget would take from yours. I had no reason to expect that Martha’s budget” would include new money for grant-seeking.”
Morrison: “I Don’t Get It”
Markeshia Ricks Photo
Morrison and Paolillo at finance hearing.
Okafor Wednesday declined to comment on the criticisms Blue made against her in the letter to the alders. She said she wants to avoid personal disputes so she can “focus on the work” of social services that “the mayor brought me here to do.”
Blue said the dispute has been substantive, not personal.
“I wouldn’t characterize that Martha and I have been odds. That’s how it has been unfortunately been characterized. That’s what happens with women” in professional jobs,” she said.
“There are fundamental issues of what her understanding of what her responsibilities are and what my responsibilities are. It’s not a personal battle. But it is a very meaningful battle related to the way in which the city is managed.”
Blue wrote her letter on April 7, responding to a presentation Okafor made of her department’s budget request to the alders’ Finance Committee on March 30.
Okafor told the alders at that hearing that she has spent “sleepless nights” writing some grants and directly obtained permission from the mayor’s office to hire outside help. She said that has succeeded in bringing much-needed outside money to her department to address social challenges, including a $1 million “Second Chance Society” grant to help ex-inmates reintegrate into the community.
At that hearing, Dixwell Alder Jeanette Morrison asked Okafor why she was requesting $50,000 to hire an outside consultant to pursue federal and philanthropic grants when the city created a department — Blue’s Office of Development and Policy — to handle grant requests through the city government.
“Everybody got to sit up at night to get all this money to get all these grants? Why are we investing $200,000 in a position [Mendi Blue’s] that guaranteed us so much money to come into the city? Then I look at not only your budget, but all these budgets, for all this money to seize opportunities to get money, I don’t get it,” Morrison said. (Blue’s salary is $116,000.)
“Maybe this is bigger than you. This just really stood out to me that you need $50,000 for your department to do a job that we already invested in to bring all this money and seize all these opportunities.”
Okafor noted that Blue’s department is “an office of one person.” Blue had previously testified that she spends about 15 percent of her time on grant-writing. Her job description also calls for her to seek grant opportunities, oversee the filing of grants, monitor progress on grants, and craft policies at the mayor’s request. She and Okafor have clashed in private over Okafor’s writing of grants herself, or in a few cases with consultants — over whether Blue has the time and staff to handle the work, and whether Okafor should be using the one-person office established to write grants.
“I am not in a position to explain or justify for another office’s work,” Okafor responded to Morrison at the hearing. “I can justify the work that I do with clear evidence of the impact of that work. I would really ask that we have that opportunity, because I do not know what will happen with the presidential election.”
“We’re not looking for you to say something about a different department … I don’t want to pit” departments against each other, said Annex Alder Alphonse Paolillo, Jr. “We’ll do that work. … But we need to know how the city works in its entirety.” Paolillo asked Okafor to provide the alders with details of all outside grant writing contracts, which Okafor agreed to do.
A Direct Plea
A week later Blue responded to Okafor’s testimony in her 11-page letter, to which she attached 16 appendices.
Read the text of Blue’s letter here.
The letter makes several major accusations and arguments:
• That Okafor improperly wrote grants on her own or, in the case of the Second Chance grant and a bid to become a federal “Promise Zone” city, hired consultant James Farnam (a former city development official) to do it.
• That the city lost out on the Promise Zone grant (it was a finalist, but didn’t land one of the six awards) because of poor performance.
• That Okafor failed to put the consulting contract out to bid, as required by law. “I encourage this Committee not to reward repeated, willful and knowing violations of city policies and questionable consulting services investments with an increased ‘fund development’ contract budget for the Community Services Administration,” Blue wrote.
• That Okafor is taking credit for successfully obtaining grant money for which Blue’s office did the real work.
• That the alders should fund the grant writer and policy analyst positions that Harp’s proposed budget did not include for Blue’s office. “Though these positions were not included in the proposed 2016 – 17 budget, I appeal to this Committee to fund those positions,” Blue wrote in bold typeface.
• That the alders should find that money by not approving some of the $255,000 the Harp administration’s proposed budget calls for giving Okafor’s department for help in obtaining Promise Zone grants, to better monitor grants and contracts, and to pursue other federal government and philanthropic grants. The letter took particular aim at a requested $165,000 to pay a consultant to help Okafor’s department craft a “city transformation plan” (which is described in this article). “I’m not entirely clear on the expected tangible output of this plan or the utility of paying external consultants $165,000 (more than the salary of any individual city employee of which I’m aware) to work on a single project,” Blue wrote.
• That all grant writing-related dollars should go to her office, where a centralized operation would do a better job of obtaining and then monitoring the use of outside dollars. “It would be indefensible and inconsistent with the purpose for which the Office of Development and Policy was created to add grant-specific resources —dollars or staff — to other departments,” Blue wrote. At another point in the letter, she reiterated: “I request that should the Committee approve any increase in grant contract budgets, the increase be allocated to the Office of Development and Policy.”
The letter’s appendices date back to 2014. They include 2015 email exchanges from when Okafor hired James Farnam to oversee the Promise Zone grant application.
“Mendi, we are working with lots of partner[s] to get this work done in 2.5 weeks. The requirements are comprehensive, and we have only this week to finalize it,” Okafor wrote.
“Going forward,” Blue responded, “I would … request that you consult first with my office before entering grant writing agreements with external consultants. As my office was created for the purpose of bringing as much grant writing work as possible, it creates operational issues when this process is not followed.” Blue also argued that “it does not seem that the fee for Jim’s contracted services should come anywhere near $20,000.”
Blue added a personal note toward the end of her letter: “Three generations of my family were born and raised in New Haven and I have well over 100 family members who still live in the city, so I take my role as the Office’s Director and a steward of taxpayer dollars seriously. I would spend any money allocated to the Office of Development and Policy with that personal lens always in mind.”
Blue didn’t write that Martha Okafor, who was born in Nigeria, moved to New Haven from Georgia at Mayor Harp’s request to become city social-services chief. She left that contrast to the reader.
Markeshia Ricks contributed to this story.
I thought we had one mayor, not several.
Letters to the alders are not a professional way to handle a dispute within the city executive branch, and not a sign that the mayor (who I generally support) is handling her top staff in a fully expert way. It is a classic kind of intra-office dispute about shared services (here, grant writing) across departments, but Blue should take the argument to the mayor. Blue can resign if she feels strongly enough about the mayor making a wrong decision, but she should not go to the alders while working for the mayor.