nothin Elicker, Too, Eyes Mayor’s Job | New Haven Independent

Elicker, Too, Eyes Mayor’s Job

Thomas MacMillan Photo

Make that three people already seriously” working on possible mayoral campaigns for next fall.

And counting?

The latest entrant is East Rock Alderman Justin Elicker.

Elicker (pictured) has been making the rounds of management teams and conducting one-on-one meetings with people around the city as he explores running for mayor against 10-term incumbent John DeStefano, who has also begun campaigning. Elicker confirmed Monday that he is serious” about his exploration of a run. He didn’t provide a timetable for making a formal decision.

New Haven state Rep. Gary Holder-Winfield, too, is pounding the pavement as he seriously” pursues a possible candidacy. He said he plans to form an exploratory committee within a month and make a final decision about a candidacy by the end of January. (Click here to read about that, and his initial campaign themes and DeStefano’s responses.)

And it’s only Nov. 12.

Elicker, Holder-Winfield and DeStefano are all Democrats. As are all elected officials in New Haven (except the Republican registrar of voters, which is a position reserved for Republicans). New Haven last elected a non-Democrat as mayor in 1951. In New Haven the Democratic primary in general unofficially decides who will take office.

Promising To Run Clean”

Elicker promised to participate in New Haven’s public-financing clean elections” system (aka The Democracy Fund”) if he runs for mayor.

That means he’ll limit how much money he raises from individual contributors, and where he raises it from, in return for matching public dollars.

DeStefano, who pushed to create the system, dropped out of it in the 2011 campaign and is not participating in it for this cycle, either. That enabled him to outspend his chief rival 14 – 1 in 2011.

DeStefano blasted the Democracy Fund’s conduct” as baffling,” and consumed with bureaucratic nonsense” after his appointees on the board fined his campaign for a late filing and debated launching an investigation. (It didn’t.)

At this point, the Democracy Fund has become neutered” by the U.S. Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision allowing unlimited outside cash to flow into campaigns, DeStefano argued. He noted labor’s heavy spending in aldermanic races in 2011 as a symbol of a new campaign reality.

He said he can see the Democracy Fund still play a constructive role if you’re a candidate that would have had no money, like [2011 mayoral candidate Jeffrey] Kerekes. This provided you some money to run something.”

Reached Monday, Holder-Winfield said he honestly” hadn’t considered the question yet. At the legislature I was a big proponent of it. I have no reason to switch my position,” he said. Unless the system is completely broken, I don’t know why I wouldn’t” participate.

The Grassroots Argument

Elicker, a 37-year-old environmental consultant (“I help companies become greener”), is in his second term as an alderman. He has taken positions at odds with both the city administration and the Board of Aldermen’s labor-backed majority. That gives him an independent” mantle to run on. It also means he must assemble a base of vote-pullers from scratch with no initial major institutional support.

Like Holder-Winfield, Elicker emphasized a lack of grassroots connection to city policymaking as a major theme when asked about a campaign platform.

I think DeStefano’s been a good mayor. But we have a great city. I think we deserve a mayor that engages people more and has meaningful public dialogue, doesn’t come to the public at the 11th hour asking for approval. The public should be in the driver’s seat moving things forward,” he said in a conversation Monday with the Independent.

An example he cited: The design of the $140 million Downtown Crossing” project filling in part of the Route 34 Connector with a new 10-story biomedically oriented office tower. The city has held dozens of public meetings on the project. But new urbanism and cycling proponents felt officials ignored their input and ended up repeating the mistakes of the 1950s and 60s urban renewal era in designing downtown streets for cars at the expanse of community. (Click here to read about both sides in that debate.)

Elicker championed the critics’ cause as both City Hall and members of the labor-backed aldermanic majority supported the project, which included a developer’s promise to support a jobs pipeline” to help New Haveners work there.

That’s one small example of how we should be engaging the public more in the process,” Elicker argued about the Downtown Crossing planning. There was public dialogue. But a lot of the input that was given very early in the process was never incorporated in the final design.”

DeStefano Monday called Elicker’s critique confusing.”

There were over 50 meetings, very animated discussion, very to-the-point discussion,” DeStefano said. It’s not a criticism of substance, of Geez, does it make sense to eliminate that highway? Does it make sense to bring an employer with hundreds of jobs and millions of dollars in taxes?’ It becomes People weren’t involved,’ when people were incredibly involved. It may not have come out to everyone’s satisfaction. But to suggest there wasn’t plenty of engagement is an unfortunate and disingenuous observation.

What city in Connecticut is removing highways? What city in Connecticut has as aggressive a street smarts [effort]? We have the highest number of non-motorized commuters to work of any city in Connecticut. No one argues the substance of what we’re doing here.”

Elicker has been speaking out against the city’s debt burden too. He joined Alderman Jorge Perez and others at a recent Finance Committee meeting in holding up a new plan to borrow money until aldermen get more answers on a long-term financial strategy. (Read about that here.)

We have a skyrocketing debt. We’re not fully funding our pensions, health care,” he said. We dipped into our fund balance by $8 million last year. The fund balance is like our bank account; we have almost no money left in the fund balance. It’s certainly not something I would do to my children’s future. We have to get the city on the right track for a sustainable future. We have to get beyond every two years and start thinking 10, 15 years” out.

School Reform Vox Populi

Like Holder-Winfield, Elicker also criticized the city’s school-reform drive for failing to include parents more.

Mayor DeStefano noted that hundreds of parents recently attended a Parent University” day at Gateway Community College.

It’s great that hundreds of people showed up at Parent University. But if you ask the parents I’ve been speaking with, they will say that they feel they’re asked, then when they get that input, it’s not often heard,” Elicker said.

You talk with many parents around the city. There’s a deep frustration with the parents’ engagement in our public schools, concerns about the responsiveness of the school administration. For example, how to enroll your child into school in kindergarten. Enrolling your child in school, you have to know Greek to figure out the system.”

Mayor DeStefano touted his school reform drive as the very model of grassroots engagement.

It started with buy-in with the New Haven Federation of Teachers, the most startling level of union cooperation which continues to this day in the operation of [High School in the Community] by the union. (Click here for links to 10 stories in a series about that experiment.)

I think it has continued through very robust participation, everything form school-based climate surveys, where parents now grade their school and central office on school reform. I think it continued through New Haven Promise, where we’ve engaged families directly on the doors in terms of their kids’ futures. There was an extraordinary example of it last Saturday with Parent University.

We have here an outstanding initiative around school reform. I hate to see it being torn up because of people’s political ambitions. Its record speaks incredibly well for itself. It’s acknowledged as such nationally and in this state.”

Like Holder-Winfield, Elicker has relied on social media to communicate with constituents. Click on the play arrow to watch a video he made explaining the property reassessment process when the issue flared earlier this year.

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