Democracy For Sale?

James Berger, who lives in Westville, is a senior lecturer in American Studies at Yale and a member of New Haven Rising. The views expressed in this opinion article are his own, not the group’s.

What can we learn from the Wall Street/High Street debacle? That it was a debacle is clear.

Whether or not the sale of these streets to Yale this month for $3 million was correct, beneficial to the city, or marginally justifiable by any criteria, it played out in a way that seemed to discredit the democratic process.

This failure was especially galling in being committed by a legislative body that came into office two years ago dedicated to expanding democracy, bringing transparency to an opaque city government, listening to a wider range of voices, and exerting power on behalf of those without power.

Two years ago, when the current Board of Aldermen ran for their positions and was elected, the status of Wall Street and High Street was an issue. It was not a major issue, but it came up in conversation as a matter that would need to be negotiated with the university; an example of something that a new board, less complicit with existing power relations could bargain hard about – look Yale in the eye and reach a new agreement that would help the city while being also acceptable to the university.

The 20-year lease that was not a lease — the ​“agreement,” with its ambiguous wording — had reached its limit, and a new agreement would have to replace it.

The new board, we were to understand, had the strength and commitment to negotiate the best possible deal with the university. The goal was not confrontation for its own sake, but a more equitable partnership. And the city would be in a position of relative strength. Yale needed the streets, and neither the university nor the city was going anywhere.

These conversations took place in the summer of 2011, in the months leading up to the Democratic Party primary elections that astonished New Haven and transformed its political landscape.

Two years later, in May 2013, the streets were sold, transferred from civic to private ownership. The price was $3 million – a sum that was easy for Yale to pay and yet does little to alleviate the city’s financial problems.

Mind you, it’s a nice sum to have; better to have $3 million than not. But it’s easy to understand the outraged responses to the sale. A part of the city, a public good, was now permanently in private hands – indeed in the private hands of an entity that already was the city’s largest landowner. And it all seemed to happen so suddenly.

Of course, there were meetings and hearings – a few. When the new Board of Alders took office in January 2012, there were more pressing items. The board achieved their signature piece of legislation, the creation of New Haven Works, the ​“jobs pipeline” that had been central to their victorious campaigns, and they were hard at work on other initiatives involving youth centers and public safety.

Then, on Jan. 11, 2013, we read in the New Haven Independent, ​“Wall Street Closure Deal Resurfaces,” and the story began to move toward its conclusion.

But the story began in the spring of 2011, and its origins at this point have been largely forgotten. Yale’s use of sections of Wall and High streets entered the news as part of the bitter contract negotiations between the city and its municipal unions. This was the time of the even more bitter conflicts surrounding public workers’ contracts and bargaining rights in Wisconsin, when Governor Scott Walker, in his ​“Budget Repair Act,” sought to deprive public workers of all collective bargaining rights. City workers in New Haven, represented by AFSCME, felt on the defensive as well. Mayor DeStefano had laid off dozens of city employees in February.

On Feb. 17, policemen marched to City Hall, shutting off traffic on Church Street, to protest layoffs of police. On May 5, union members and supporters held a rally at High and Elm streets, right at the place where High Street enters the Yale campus and becomes a pedestrian mall in front of Sterling Library. There, union officials called for a renegotiation of the 1990 agreement. Matthew Brokman of AFSCME called for a lease in which Yale would pay the city $100 million over an unspecified period of time. Elaine Braffman, vice-president of AFSCME, former alderwoman, and longtime staffer with the Living Cities Initiative, described Yale as ​“just another greedy, self-serving, cut-throat, mega-corporation.”

DeStefano called the union demands a ​“distraction” from the need for union concessions on health care and pensions. Yale’s representative Lauren Zucker had already informed the BOA at a meeting a week earlier that it would pay the city ​“not a dime” for any extension of its use of the two streets. DeStefano went on to praise Yale for its many generous contributions to New Haven.

On July 19, 2011, the BOA took up the matter. Alders Justin Elicker, chair of the City Services and Environmental Policy Committee (CSEP) and Greg Dildine agreed with Yale’s position that the conclusion of the 20-year agreement ended all financial obligations on Yale’s part and that no renegotiation was either necessary or legally permissible.

It turned out that a memo distributed to the committee outlining this legal position had been largely composed by the city corporation counsel in collaboration with Yale’s counsel. Several members of the Board of Aldermen, notably Jackie James and Darnell Goldson, astonished at this collusion, demanded that the board seek an outside legal opinion on whether the agreement could be renegotiated. Yale’s Michael Morand repeated the view held by the university and the DeStefano administration that the move to renegotiate was primarily a ploy by city unions.

Following that meeting, BOA President Carl Goldfield did request outside counsel to help the board gloss the agreement and determine its legal options. Acknowledging that the agreement might be open to alternate interpretations, Goldfield remarked, ​“describing the agreement as inartfully drafted is the understatement of the year.” Alderman Elicker, acceding to his colleagues’ request for outside counsel, still warned that ​“there was a lot of risk” in attempting to renegotiate.

In late November, the report from the outside counsel retained by the BOA, Oliver Dickins, and Robert Ricketts, determined that the city had ​“full authority” to negotiate a new agreement with Yale with regard to the use of High and Wall streets.

The BOA, however, was not disposed to use this authority – which, of course, was only a legally plausible authority that would be vigorously contested by Yale. By this time, New Haven’s political landscape had markedly changed.

Fourteen out of 15 insurgent candidates supported by Yale unions, Locals 34 and 35 of UNITE/HERE, were elected to the board. Together with several incumbents already sympathetic to the unions, this new bloc made the new board impervious to mayoral veto. It was an amazing political accomplishment, provoking astonishment across the city’s political spectrum. Not even the most optimistic supporters of the insurgent slate had believed that all but one of the candidates would be victorious and that a progressive, transformed Democratic Party leadership, not accountable to the mayor, had actually taken control of the city legislature! There was a big agenda to be addressed: unemployment, crime, high taxes, revenue shortfalls, a questionable school system, strategies regarding economic development. And standing behind all these, the new board members were determined to keep their supporters – old progressive activists and people new to the political process – engaged and motivated.

The goal was to improve life in the city economically and to improve the state of democracy – to make democracy a verb, something people engage in every day, not just a cynical spectator sport that merely involves voting, or not voting, every couple of years.
 
There were high hopes and high expectations. There was also, on the part of supporters of defeated incumbents and the DeStefano administration, great anxiety as to what would come next. They had campaigned largely with arguments based on fear of unions. What were these new candidates’ ​“real” agendas? Who were they ​“really” working for?

In light of all this, the now-lame duck BOA, in the New Haven Independent’s words, ​“punted” the Wall/High Street question to the new board. At the final 2011 meeting of the Board’s CSEP, both Chairman Elicker and Alder Jackie James expressed a wish for more discussion, now in agreement that the original agreement with Yale was unclear. Neither was certain that the Board would ask Yale for more money as recompense for the use of the streets. Incoming Alder Jeanette Morrison stated her view to a NHI reporter that Yale possessed an enormous picnic basket and should share its sandwiches and chips. Michael Morand, though not taking up this metaphor, responded, in effect, that Yale was passing plenty of goodies around the picnic table, more than any other university on the planet, and that the guests should not be greedy.

Then the issue disappeared, to resurface over a year later in early 2013. CSEP Chair Elicker brought the matter back to the BOA’s attention in January, calling for hearings and workshops. The new board was carefully noncommittal, wanting mostly, as Adam Marchand put it, to ​“look at the facts and hear the arguments.” Even the eager picnic planner, Alderwoman Morrison, was more conciliatory.
 
It is interesting that at this point, the city unions of AFSCME were no longer participating in the discussion. What they had felt so passionate about in Spring 2011 was no longer worthy of comment. Had DeStefano been right that their interest in renegotiating the street agreement was just a negotiating ploy? Or did they feel a rivalry with the Yale unions of UNITE-HERE which now had such power in city government? I don’t know, but it seems to me the municipal unions’ absence is conspicuous.

What happened between January and May of 2013 does not appear to be public knowledge. At least, I can find no account of it in the Independent. Were there workshops and hearings, as Justin Elicker called for? Whatever else they were doing, however, the board and the university were negotiating, and on May 7, we learned the broad outlines of their deal. The old agreement – the lease that was not a lease – would not be continued in any form. Rather, the two sections of Wall and High would be sold outright, for a price to be set by a third-party appraiser. Yale would continue to make financial contributions to the city based on the number of Yale students living on nontaxable property and other criteria and would pay a fee for fire service.

By May 23, the details had been hammered out (which, I gather, is what is done with details in such transactions). The price for the property was $3 million. A special ​“committee of the whole” of the BOA met for a preliminary vote, and voted 17 – 7 in favor of the transaction. As a kind of coda, Matt Smith, the city administration’s liaison to the BOA, chronicled Yale’s contributions to New Haven since the original streets agreement of 1990. With payments for fire, other voluntary payments of $4.3 – 5.5 million per year, and taxes on the golf course (which had been added in 1990 to the grand list of the city’s taxable properties), Yale had paid the city of New Haven $86 million – a number which, of course, is very large, but whose significance is hard to understand without the context of the city’s budgets over that time. To throw in just one number: the Board of Education’s total operating budget for FY 2011-12 was $370,081,749.

And so the deal was made, formalized a week later by the full board in a 21 – 8 vote. Now the recriminations and outrage began. Police had to be summoned to the BOA chamber as angry protesters briefly disrupted the meeting. And yet it could also be said that at this moment, after the negotiations had finished, any real debate over the disposition of the two streets and the larger implications thereof, was only beginning – had never, to that point, taken place.

Was it right to sell public streets?

Or, were there circumstances under which it might be acceptable, and were these such circumstances?

Or was it never acceptable?

Had the city agreed to a sale rather than a lease, or further ​“agreement” because Yale coerced it?

Was this a good deal, or simply the best bad deal that could be bargained for?

How did this deal address the question raised by the Seminarians for a Democratic Society (!) regarding the ​“just distribution of wealth in this city”?

What about the point Tim Holahan made in the petition he circulated between the two BOA votes, that the public should be involved in the decision by means of a referendum?

One thing seems clear: there was no democratic procedure. Back when the issue was raised in 2011, then-BOA President Carl Goldfield said that the problem was essentially a problem of contract law, and that, in the end, is how it played out. The anger that ensued is evidence that this focus was insufficient; that more fundamental political questions needed to be addressed.

One interesting part of the story is how the positions of some BOA members –what is the word I’m seeking? — - evolved?

One might have expected Jeanette Morrison, who had invoked the image of the university with its picnic basket, to have joined the opposition to this deal as vastly insufficient, given the city’s needs and Yale’s resources. But she supported it, saying that her constituents wanted Yale to have the streets.

More striking is the shift in Justin Elicker’s position. In 2011, he had sided with Yale in his interpretation of the 1990 agreement.

When the 20 years were up, the university had no further obligations; to try to renegotiate for more payment would carry significant legal risks for New Haven. Two years later, mayoral candidate Elicker lead the opposition to the sale. It was, he said, ​“wrong for our children” (clearly a candidate’s language there). And the $3 million price represented a ​“fire sale.” First, Yale has no need to pay anything; next, $3 million is far short of enough.

The only commonality in his positions that I can discern is that they oppose positions held by labor unions. When AFSCME wanted to renegotiate, Elicker was against it on legal grounds. When UNITE/HERE sympathizers on the board mostly agreed to a settlement, Elicker opposed it on moral grounds, proposing then precisely the kind of tough negotiating he rejected when a union had proposed it. But the attitudes of many New Haven liberals toward local unions is a discussion for another time. 

In any event, the immediate, practical questions – the value of the property, whether it should be sold or leased, whether a better deal with Yale could have been reached – are difficult. Alder Dolores Colon’s paradoxical statement seems to me perceptive: ​“The streets are priceless and worthless at the same time.” And Colon’s comment brings us to the even more difficult and larger questions regarding public and private urban space and about what political mechanisms should be used to make decisions of this sort. The city does not want the streets: Yale does. And yet, all of us feel that although the sections of High and Wall streets in question pass within the Yale campus, they still should be accessible at all times to public pedestrian use. They have been and should remain a public space within a private place.

Is this oxymoronic site possible? Perhaps that old ​“arrangement” – the lease that was not a lease — best embodied what the city needed: a private space that was genuinely, quasi-contractually, part of the public space. Now that space is contractually gone. Wall/High’s status as public space now depends entirely on the generosity of Yale, its owner, the city’s patron.

Yale has no intention to close the space to the public. I don’t doubt this. But circumstances change. What if a student is assaulted in front of Sterling or WLH? Or might the university want to hold a special university event in that space? Closing the entire area would not be so difficult. And what would we, the residents of New Haven, the polity, be able to do about it?

I’m not sure I agree with my friend Tim Holahan’s idea of a referendum. I believe we elect our city government to make decisions of this sort. The alders are our representatives. But they needed to tell us what they were doing.

My own alder, Adam Marchand, was quite right to want to ​“look at facts and hear the arguments,” but his constituents needed to have the same access to facts and arguments.

Privatization and the preservation of public, common space is one of the crucial political topics of our time. It might, in this case, be the right decision to sell this public space. Those who would oppose such a sale at any price under any circumstances might still have ended up as angry as they are now. But the matter needed to be discussed openly and extensively, and it never was. It was, of course, not a secret that the BOA was considering the fate of Wall/High streets. But what their thinking was, as they were thinking, and what their negotiating goals were when they sat down with Yale; these were never known to anyone but themselves.

This was not a trivial or routine matter, not just a matter of torts, contracts, and zoning. The status of public space is at the heart of our civic integrity. The board dropped the civic ball on this, and the anger at them is justified.

And this brings me to my final point, one which I know is hugely important also to the union group on the board. How is real democracy possible? That is, how can people in a community exert genuine power over the circumstances of their lives – over their work and leisure, the education of their children, the houses they live in, the food they eat and air they breathe, and the uses put to the spaces of their city? We know – and this debacle shows us yet again – that voting is not enough.

Genuine power needs actually to be exerted; otherwise, it is not power. Owning things is one source of power. If you have stuff, and money, you have influence. People come to you; they want to know what you think, if you approve of a course of action or not. If you want something, you have a way of getting it. At this stage of American history, it has become difficult to know what sources of power other than money might exist. Cities around the country are selling themselves and their assets, and finding their market value depressingly low. Recall that in the past year, New Haven has sold not just these two streets, but also a school. In the past, it was thought that groups of people united by a common purpose could exert power – that there could be social movements – and that power could emanate not just from the elites, but from all social levels.

Whether this is possible today is an open question. That is, I hope it’s still open. 

If I find time and energy, I’ll write something about the excitement and difficulties of creating a political movement. For now, we can contemplate another instance of how democratic processes can break down.