After helping an insurgent topple a City Hall-backed candidate in the year of Obama, community organizer Lisa Hopkins is launching a third race of her own.
Hopkins, who’s 41, filed papers this week announcing her candidacy for alderwoman in Dixwell’s Ward 22. For the third time, she plans to face off in a Democratic primary against her across-the-street neighbor, Alderman Greg Morehead. The primary’s set for Sept. 15.
This time around, both candidates are putting a focus on the young people in their ward.
Morehead (pictured), who’s 31, won a seat on the board in an April 2007 special election, filling a vacancy left by former alderman Drew King. He was reelected to the Ward 22 seat after beating off challengers in a September 2007 primary. The diverse ward comprises the Dixwell neighborhood plus four Yale residential colleges.
Hopkins and Morehead are both seeking the Democratic party nomination this year. The two candidates live on opposite sides of a traffic circle on Frances Hunter Drive. Since they moved onto the new street four years ago, the circle has hopped each year with new organizing efforts and political activity.
After two failed attempts to beat Morehead, who was backed by the city’s Democratic machine, Hopkins ran her first victorious campaign last year. As campaign manager for Gary Holder-Winfield’s state representative campaign, she oversaw a grassroots effort that tapped into enthusiasm for Barack Obama and focused on energizing youth and empowering disenfranchised people in Dixwell and Newhallville.
The campaign flourished with the help of teens like Larry Stovall and Paul Hudson, who got involved with politics for the first time. Those vote-pullers are now moving on to college, but Hopkins said she hopes to harness the momentum of other newly empowered youth in this year’s campaign, too. She said she’s already been getting calls from neighborhood teens interested in getting involved.
“Miss Lisa, when do we start?” they ask.
Both candidates said engaging young people is a top priority for the ward.
Morehead drums for the band DangerZone, often playing high-profile gigs behind rapper Ludacris. He also teaches music at a K‑8 school in Bridgeport. Morehead said he’s made a great personal effort to organize positive events for Dixwell kids. He’s brought in speakers like Ludacris and the recently exonerated ex-prisoner James Tillman to talk about “positive choices” in life. He’s put together open mic nights. He organized two bus trips to amusement parks, drumming up neighborhood sponsors to take 50 – 60 kids out of town for the day. The trip took the kids away from the negativity and divisiveness of the streets, he said.
Some of them had never left New Haven. Others had never eaten a buffet dinner before. He said seeing their sense of discovery, and seeing kids from different neighborhoods get along, put a smile on his face.
“Main focus is to try to engage the youth,” said Morehead in an interview Friday morning, before rushing off to class.
In seeking his second full-term in office, he said he hopes to accomplish one main goal: Restoring the Q House, a defunct community center that was once the heart of the neighborhood. The center must be restored, he said, if not in its current, abandoned building on Dixwell Avenue, then elsewhere in the neighborhood.
Hopkins runs her own business consulting on housing and community development. Her company recently started a program giving scholarships to kids to play Pop Warner football. She chose five to eight kids from the ward per year and paid for their equipment and registration fees. She also ended up driving them to games and filling in as a mentor figure. She also organized a free-style Friday night for kids at the Boys & Girls Club.
As a community organizer, she already serves the role that many aldermen play. Hopkins is active in her homeowner association and has helped set up block watches. Before she started her own business, Hopkins worked in public housing projects across the city, including Church Street South, Elm Haven/ Monterey Place and Quinnipiac Terrace, helping people relocate and doing other resident services. The people she met along the way still frequently call her for help, she said, setting up a block watch or applying for Social Security cards.
An Independent Voice
On the board, Morehead has proved a steadfast loyalist to Mayor DeStefano, Jr. DeStefano’s Democratic political machine supported both of his campaigns, sending resources and veteran vote-pullers into the ward.
Morehead said he’s not a rubber stamp for the mayor. “Contrary to what everybody thinks, mayor has people there telling us what to vote, that’s not true.” He said he looks at all sides of an issue before taking a vote. He said he believed there were two issues last year where he diverged with the mayor, though he didn’t cite specifics.
Recently, Morehead joined a majority of his peers in approving a mid-year subsidy for the Tweed airport.
“I got some flak for that,” Morehead said, but he believed it was the right choice, because the alternative would have been for the airport to close, costing the city much more.
Hopkins declined to say which way she would have voted. She said she’d like to see more information justifying the subsidy, including the number of businesses the airport attracts to New Haven.
She declined to give an example of an issue where she would have voted differently from Morehead. She declined to be pinned down on several issues facing the board. She said only that she is willing to work with all sides, has no allegiances, and would vote for whatever makes sense.
“I’m not anti-administration,” she said, though she got painted that way last election cycle. (Click here to read about her platform at the time.)
If not anti-DeStefano, she is independent from the mayor, and wasn’t afraid to sue him when she and her neighbors felt they were shortchanged on a city-aided construction project.
When homeowners discovered shoddy workmanship in their brand new, subsidized homes on Frances Hunter Drive, Hopkins organized her neighbors to fight City Hall over what she calls broken promises by a city-aided developer who built them. She led a legal battle against the developers and the city in November 2007. The suit’s still pending in New Haven Superior Court.
Hopkins said aldermen, the legislative branch, needs to provide checks and balances to the mayor’s power.
“With everything, there should be checks and balances,” replied Morehead. “But I don’t think it’s going to take place with just one person coming in as the lone ranger. It’s not just me. I need 15 other people who’re going to agree with something I’m going to pass it.”
In the past, Hopkins ended up as an outsider candidate, after she picked a prominent DeStefano critic to run her campaign, and as City Hall troops and Yalies swooped in to aide her competitor. Not having secured Yale support, she said she was denied access to the campus, which kept her from reaching voters. The Yale vote ended up being a significant factor, but not the deciding factor, in sealing Morehead’s victory last election. This year, Hopkins said she has learned her lesson and has already reached out to Yale students to support her campaign.
She’s already started knocking on doors in the ward. She said her message is not to attack Morehead. She refrained from criticizing him.
She identified one difference between the candidates. She said she’d bring “a different approach for empowering people,” with more community meetings and more info-sharing.
For his part, Morehead said he gets “75 to 80” phone calls per day from constituents; sends out a quarterly newsletter to people’s doorsteps, answers emails, and runs a website.
“Everyone thinks on this job, we don’t do much,” he said, “but we do.”
He said he’s looking forward to a third rematch with his neighbor.
“I welcome all challengers,” he said. “I’m not a person who says, dag, why is that person running against me?”
In the end, he said, “I know that my hard work and my work ethic and my genuine love for the community will pay off.”
Read Independent coverage of other contested races:
• Ward 10, East Rock: Lone Green Alderman Faces Challenge
• Ward 24, Edgewood: Challenger Takes On Edgewood Veteran
• Ward 26, Westville: New Blood Enters Political Stream
Lisa's got my backing!!!!!!