Board Prez Confronts Spirited Challenge

As he sought seniors’ votes, Brian Wingate came face to face with the type of problem he’ll confront if he unseats New Haven’s top legislator and becomes Beaver Hill’s alderman: dog poop in the park.

Wingate has never held public office before. While canvassing the upset seniors, he decided to call on skills he honed as a facilitator for Yale’s unions.

The setting was Park Ridge Towers senior center, which sits beside a park. Wingate was in the final phase of his challenge to Board of Aldermen President Carl Goldfield. (Click here to read about Wingate’s campaign’s launch.)

The 41-year-old custodian turned union official is hoping that his expansive personality and energy, combined with neighborhood discontent over violence and unemployment, will propel him to victory Tuesday in the Ward 29 Democratic primary.

Goldfield, a two-decade incumbent known as a knowledgeable and effective legislator, has the backing of City Hall.

It is one of the most competitive of 16 aldermanic primaries taking place this Tuesday; most of the primaries, like this one, pit candidates recruited by or backed by Yale’s unions against candidates supported by the Democratic Party establishment and the DeStefano administration. Since Goldfield holds the most powerful position on the city’s legislative body and is one of the City Hall’s most important allies, the race has one of the day’s highest stakes.

The race is a study in contrasts. Wingate is big and boisterous. Goldfield is trim and reserved. Wingate casts himself as championing change and possibilities. Goldfield casts himself as someone who can make tough choices in difficult times. Wingate speaks generally about issues without the benefit of having dealt with legislation over the years; Goldfield knows the fine print, and has written many of the laws.

The Poop Challenge

The strengths and weaknesses of Wingate’s campaign, his first for public office, were on display during his Park Ridge Towers visit.
 
Wingate didn’t come with an agenda to the apartment complex, which provides federally subsidized apartments to low-income elderly. Instead, he gathered about 30 of the senior citizens in the center’s community room, fed them tuna, chicken and blt wraps, and listened to what was on the their minds.

Their top concern: the poop that thoughtless dog owners leave behind in West Rock playground at the base of the pretty park that sits below the towers’ windows.

“No one cleans up, and then kids and old people come by,” one woman complained.

“Who do you hold responsible?” another woman asked. ​“I stand out there every day and see the same thing.”

Wingate asked a few questions, as several union volunteers bustled about setting up food. After ruling out options that wouldn’t work —it is not possible, for example, to bar certain people and their dogs from a public park — Wingate pulled together some suggestions.

​“So I’m hearing a couple things,” Wingate said. ​“You think it would be a good idea to put up signs that say ​‘don’t leave poop here’ like they have in Wooster Square and have poop bags available for people to use?”

The audience nodded. Problem — at least in theory — solved.

For his part, Goldfield said when he visited the center a few days earlier, he heard nothing about dog poop; instead, he got an earful about the difficulties of pulling out onto busy, nearby Blake Street.

Wingate’s approach, which is long on listening and short on well-developed policies, proved less successful when he was asked about a more serious neighborhood problem.

“What do you think you can do as an alderman about crime?” a woman asked.

“I’d get the Board of Aldermen together,” replied Wingate, who has made stopping violence a centerpiece of his campaign, ​“and ask, ​‘what’s working? What’s really going on in the city of New Haven?’”

“Once we do have a platform we can go in and take it to these gentlemen,” he said about the Board of Aldermen, of which he hoped to be a part.

Wingate obviously loves campaigning. Every time he saw someone he knew, or someone who knew someone he knew, he bubbled over.
At the senior center, he rushed up to an elderly lady: ​“I know you, I know you. I know your granddaughter Tracy.”

Canvassing on Ella Grasso Boulevard a few days later, he spent about 10 minutes talking to Bryant Grimes in front of his elegant white house. Wingate’s neighbor and campaign treasurer, Major Ruth, who was going door to door with him, encouraged the candidate to keep moving.

Wingate started to head down the street. Then Grimes’ mother, Geraldine Grimes, who had worked with Wingate at Yale, appeared at her door. Wingate bounded up the pathway to the house.

“I just want to give you a hug,” he said, engulfing the woman.

“Scratch the plan to move,” Ruth said with a sigh. ​“That’s what he loves. He’s a big Teddy Bear.”

Wingate can be almost as exuberant with strangers.

After several failed entreaties, he finally persuaded two brothers fixing a bicycle on Diamond Street to go into their home and get their mother. ​“Grandmother,” the 14-year-old corrected.

The grandmother came to the top of the stairs inside her home but wouldn’t come down. So Wingate made his pitch halfway up the dark, steep stairwell as the woman sat at the top.

“You got to go out and vote,” he implored. ​“We’ve only got several days left. Come down here. What’s your issues? I’m going to come get you. I will come get you on the 13th so you can vote.”

Mastery Of Detail

By contrast, Goldfield (pictured), a 60-year-old lawyer, described his own campaign in a way that made it sound diligent but not quite so exuberant. It was hard to know for sure: Goldfield declined to let a reporter tag along with him as he went door to door.

Goldfield said he has been walking the ward almost every night, starting at 6:15 and going until it turns dark. ​“Once it gets dark people get freaked out and don’t want to open their doors,” he explained.

Unlike Wingate, who sends a team of a dozen or so volunteers into the field, Goldfield mostly walks the ward himself with a single partner. The partners have included the ward co-chair, Audrey Tyson, neighboring Alderman Marcus Paca of Edgewood, and Mayor John DeStefano’s spokesman Adam Joseph, among others.

​“We’ve had people from the administration help me,” Goldfield said.

Until she returned to McGill University, Goldfield’s 21-year-old daughter Nora campaigned separately for her father. Wingate’s 18-year-old daughter Bryanna, a Southern student, is one of his assistant campaign managers.

“You really have to motivate yourself,” Goldfield said of canvassing, as he sat in his 10th floor Church Street law office. ​“If you’ve never done this you don’t know how much of your ego is on the line. It’s difficult to have people tell you no.”

Goldfield relishes the intricacies of the legislative process. He seemed happiest talking about the recent administration effort that he supported to create a stormwater authority. That authority would charge homeowners, businesses and not-for-profits for the cost of treating the water that runs off their properties. The goal would be to have homeowners pay less overall than they do now by separating out the charge for stormwater from regular property taxes and moving it to a fee that large not-for-profits would have to pay, too.

To Goldfield, the proposed stormwater authority was a clever way to accomplish one of the goals that the Yale unions have long said they wanted — a chance to make non-profits like Yale University and Yale-New Haven Hospital pay for a service that the city provides.

It galls Goldfield that Wingate would cite that effort, which was defeated, as one of the few Goldfield positions he opposes.

Wingate insisted he wouldn’t have supported the stormwater authority because it would be ​“another charge for homeowners.” Wingate became a first-time homeowner when he moved into the ward four years ago and bought a home through Neighborhood Housing Services and the city, with help from the Yale homebuyer’s program.

Although the board president acknowledged the seriousness of Wingate’s challenge, Goldfield didn’t seem overly concerned about the race.

“I’ve been doing this a long time,” he said. ​“I have a relationship with many people in my ward. I’ve done a lot of things for people.”

He cited a recent example of helping a woman rearrange her four children’s school schedules so she wouldn’t have to take them to four different bus stops at 7 a.m.

Homicide Hits Home

That type of constituent service and years of deliberative policy making, however, may not be enough for the incumbent to survive in this year of discontent among the electorate at every level of government.

No issue has created more discontent in New Haven than crime, which Wingate feels personally and is trying to tap into electorally.

On Saturday morning, Wingate addressed the dozen volunteers who had gathered on a porch at 625 Whalley Ave. before heading into the ward for a day of canvassing. ​“On my way over here, I got a terrible phone call,” Wingate told the group that included a mix of neighbors, friends and union members.

Wingate had heard from his friend of 13 years, Lenny Pender, that Pender’s son, TJ Mathis, 25, had been shot. Mathis, a basketball player, was New Haven’s 25th homicide victim.

Later, an obviously shaken Wingate explained, ​“It gets closer and closer. I knew the kid last week but this is like family.”

Wingate described his phone conversation with Pender to his volunteers. ​“I was talking to him on the phone and he was sobbing. He was saying, ​‘If anyone knew how I felt about my son, you do.’ That’s why I stand on the porch today — because we need change.”
 
What form the change would take is harder to pinpoint.

As Wingate’s supporters absorbed the news of yet another murder — ​“every day,” someone muttered, ​“every day” — they pointed to particular problems in Beaver Hill, beginning with the lack of activities for young people.

“I’ve had to take my son, who’s now 18, everywhere else to play basketball, baseball,” said Lynette Morrison, who knows Wingate from his union work with Yale and her union work with Southern Connecticut State University.

Wingate has some ideas for addressing what he described as a dearth of youth programs in the neighborhood. He said public schools should start earlier and end later. The old Beecher School building, which stands empty, should be converted into a community center with arts and crafts and other programs.

“It’s unfair and inaccurate to say we’re not offering a lot of services to youth,” Goldfield replied, saying the city publishes a guide to summer programs for youth that is ​“a half inch thick.” The problem is that the kids who need it most often don’t have the wherewithal in the form of adult assistance to enroll in the programs, he said. 

Goldfield also said that crime, while a serious problem throughout New Haven, is not particularly high in Beaver Hill. ​“According to the statistics, our ward is one of the safest wards in the city.”

He added, ​“I’m not going to take credit for that. Aldermen can’t stop crime.” He said all the board could do was support law enforcement — ​“and we’ve got a healthy police department” — and make structural changes so kids were less likely to become criminals. Much of the city’s efforts over the last few years have been focused on making things better for New Haven’s young people, Goldfield said. 

Wingate wants more community policing and more police. He noted that when he started going door-to-door in April, before he announced his candidacy, many people were upset about police layoffs. He said that as an alderman he would not have supported layoffs.

He is similarly willing to tap into unhappiness over the condition of the ward’s sidewalks, particularly in poorer parts of what Wingate described as ​“a very diverse ward.”

Uneven sidewalks was one of Bryant Grimes’ biggest complaints, as he took a break from tending his very green lawn Saturday morning to talk to Wingate and Ruth. They inventoried ward sidewalks. ​“On Stimson Road the sidewalks are all fresh. Ellsworth’s are good too,” Grimes, a state employee, said of the condition of two of the ward’s wealthier streets.

“We got to spread it around,” said Ruth, a United Illuminating employee, who was the University of New Haven’s track coach and now runs a youth track league.

In his campaign literature, Wingate argues that ​“working people, African-Americans, students & youth” have been left out of City Hall decisions. ​“As alderman, I’ll represent everyone in our community — whether you live on Blake St., Farnham Ave, or Bellevue.”

When asked where the money would come from to pay for better sidewalks and longer school hours, for more cops and community centers, especially when he opposes efforts to raise revenues through a stormwater authority or extending the hours for downtown parking meters, Wingate said: ​“I haven’t seen the budget. I don’t know where the money would come from, to be honest with you. I’d have to look at the budget and I haven’t.”

For Goldfield, the hazy objections to his and by extension the city administration’s policies are telling. ​“There’s nothing concrete,” he said. ​“I’m just portrayed as being in the pocket of the mayor.”

If Wingate’s campaign isn’t about getting more leverage for the Yale unions in the next negotiation, then Wingate and others should be better able to articulate the current administration’s failings, Goldfield argued.

​“They need to say, which they never do, what is being done wrong,” Goldfield said. ​“What is wrong? Have we not rebuilt schools? Have we not done school reform? Have we not supported affordable housing in this city? Have we not shown adequate concern for making sure policing is adequate? What exactly are we doing wrong?”

Although the problems Wingate and other union supporters identify are very real, Goldfield acknowledged, they’re not unique to New Haven.

“Every week I pick up The New York Times and there’s an article on stressed cities, and I think, ​‘Holy moly this is just like New Haven,’” he said. ​“It makes me feel better to know we’re not alone. Then, I think, ​‘Oh my God, we’re not alone. This can’t be good.’”

Bottom line, Goldfield said, City Hall and the board are doing as much as they can do under trying circumstances.

“Until you actually do this, you don’t know how complex it is to run this city. It’s diverse. We’re not Woodbridge. We live in this city because there’s a variety of income levels, ethnicities, skin colors. But it also means there are interests that need to be balanced. Everyone else is convinced someone else is getting something and they’re not.”

Given those realities and tough economic times, Goldfield argued the mayor and the board are doing pretty well. ​“I think we’ve been an incredibly humane city.”