nothin For Wonkish Rookies, City Hall Wasn’t… | New Haven Independent

For Wonkish Rookies, City Hall Wasn’t Hollywood

Paul Bass Photos

Holmes: Skin got thicker this year.

Marchand: Step by step.

In the Hollywood version, idealistic new elected officials appear in City Hall and declare: Let’s save $2 million on health care! Let’s have neighbors speak up to improve a good idea for building up their neighborhood! Everyone cheers. A new day dawns.

In the real-life New Haven version, idealistic new lawmakers made those declarations. They then spent months in long meetings and negotiations. In the end, they didn’t convince everyone. They didn’t get all they wanted. They did get some of it.

And they’re ready to seek more of it when Act II begins next week.

The new lawmakers starred in a political drama these past two years that could have been entitled: What Happens When Labor Wins Control of City Government.

Candidates backed by the city’s most powerful unions, Yale’s UNITE/HERE Locals 34 and 35, swept a majority of seats on the Board of Aldermen in 2011. They spent the past two years in their first term testing out how a labor-backed legislature can govern a modern American city, an experiment being watched nationally. The coalition has won a majority again in this fall’s elections; it begins a second term wiser about what it takes to move government policy.

Simply by winning two years ago, the coalition vaulted its three main priorities to the top of the city’s governing agenda. It led the mayor to hire a new chief to bring back community policing, which the chief has been doing. It formed a working group with corporate and City Hall leaders to create a new agency — New Haven Works — to help unemployed and underemployed New Haveners find jobs in the new ed-and-meds local economy; that agency opened its doors in June. It put together a plan to bring back youth centers to city neighborhoods, especially Dixwell’s shuttered Community Q” House. In term two, the coalition will be judged in large part by whether community policing continues to take root and cut crime and reconnect cops with neighbors; whether New Haven Works can find lots of people jobs; whether New Haven finds the money to build and run those youth centers.

Meanwhile, individual labor-backed first-term aldermen pursued less-visible initiatives that tested their ability to translate outside idealism into insider governance.

East Rock’s Jessica Holmes, for instance, rounded up neighbors to try to improve a plan to convert an empty old factory into needed new housing. Their activism ended up killing the proposal altogether, for a while, rather than improving it.

Holmes and Westville’s Adam Marchand, two labor movement veterans with policy-wonk streaks, thought they had an idea people on all sides could love: spending less on city government health insurance without sacrificing (perhaps by even improving) the care workers receive. The details of how to get there proved trickier than the pair realized at first. And labor leaders ended up helping to kill a big part of the idea.

In both cases, the pair did emerge with some victories to claim. They also received an education in governing, they said during a year-end chat at the Woodland Coffee & Tea shop on Orange Street.

Progress is slow,” Holmes reflected. I want change to happen yesterday. I want things to be better yesterday. I want plows to move faster. I want schools to be better. I want crime to go away completely. That’s not the way it works.”

It [takes] a lot more than you think to move issues,” Marchand agreed. You really have to persist and bring people together, There’s this Hollywood vision: You make a few speeches. People gather around you and say, Let’s pass gun control.’ It doesn’t happen like that. Progress happens step after step after step. And the work continues.”

Labor Vs. Labor

Thomas MacMillan Photo

Holmes and Marchand break the news to colleagues Nov. 18 about comign up short on health savings goals.

It was hard to see who would object to the goal Holmes and Marchand set early in the term: To start putting out to bid the contract for managing the city’s health insurance, in the hopes of saving $2 million a year and improving coverage along the way. The city hadn’t put the contract out for serious new bids in years.

The pair had both studied the issue extensively in their professional lives. Marchand crunches claims data as a leader of a Yale union-management team that deals with health benefits. Before coming to New Haven, Holmes worked for a HERE health care fund for Atlantic City hotel and casino workers.

Soon after taking office, Holmes and Marchand helped create a task force to look at reining in health spending. That task force in turn recommended that the city start bidding out the contract for its health insurance carrier. (While the city is self-insured, it contracts with a health insurance carrier to administer the coverage, including negotiating prices with doctors.)

Holmes and Marchand asked city officials to include municipal union leaders in a committee reviewing bids for the health care management contract. Officials called the idea too unwieldy” and also were concerned about conflicts with terms of contracts they were simultaneously negotiating with the same unions, according to Holmes and Marchand. (“That’s a little simplified, but it’s reasonably accurate,” said city Chief Administrative Officer Rob Smuts.)

The city did allow Homes and Marchand themselves to sit on the eight-person committee. They said OK.

I thought, Let’s move forward. This is an improvement,’” Marchand recalled. I had misgivings [about leaving out union leaders]. And it showed.”

The committee asked bidders to provide not just a price, but details on how they’d help improve the care employees receive — for instance, how to encourage more primary and preventive care, how to reward doctors for the quality of care rather than for how much medicine or how many procedures they prescribe.

About a half dozen companies bid on parts or all of the contract. The committee chose two finalists: Anthem, which currently has the contract; and Cigna.

Both bids came in lower than the existing contract. That was progress. Both bidders described efforts they’re making in other states to promote preventive care and rein in costs, and committed to launch similar efforts in New Haven. That was progress, too.

The committee chose Cigna. It had the lower bid.

Union pres Poindexter: “They didn’t do the bid properly … They should have included unions.’

That seemed like progress. Until leaders of two of the city’s municipal unions rebelled: the firefighters union and the management union. They lashed out at the change as a violation of their contracts.

In the public debate over the new Board of Aldermen majority, the broad brush of labor” backing confuses a more nuanced reality: private-sector Yale unions played the biggest role in electing that majority. Not municipal unions, although they played a role in the coalition. That was underscored by the rebellion against the proposed move to Cigna.

Marchand and Holmes said the union leaders had a good point. Since the 1990s, New Haven hasn’t required its insurance management contract to include SPDs” (summary plan descriptions) spelling out what a plan covers and when. Without SPDs, the union leaders didn’t trust that Cigna would cover as much as Anthem did before. The firefighters union’s contract also had language that required any new carrier to offer coverage that is identical in every respect” to existing coverage — an impossible threshold to meet,” Smuts said.

As a result, the city ended up with Anthem for another year. No $2 million savings.

Still, the city did save as much as $500,000 from the year before, according to Rob Smuts. In the meantime, the city has won language in new union contracts that will make it harder for union leaders to block a switch to a new carrier in future contracts. The city has also produced SPDs for its health-care plans.

That’s a start. Holmes and Marchand hope to do better next year. Last week Marchand and city officials met with Yale medical researchers to plan a study to identify what’s driving up city health care costs. And the aldermen hope to win municipal union leaders seats on the committee reviewing bids. That call will be up to the new mayor, Toni Harp — someone Holmes and the labor coalition recruited to run and worked to elect.

Two Bites At The Star” Apple

Thomas MacMillan Photo

Holmes with neighbors at the zoning board Dec. 10.

During this year’s mayoral campaign, Harp distanced herself from one of Holmes’ most visible efforts during her first term: organizing neighbors to change a plan to convert the empty old Star Supply factory on 3.22 acres along Upper State Street to 268 apartments, along with retail. Holmes led a crowd of neighbors and other activists to oppose key elements of the plan at the zoning board, which needed to approve the plan. The neighbors didn’t like the height of some of the buildings. And they wanted more parking spaces at the complex so new tenants wouldn’t take cherished street parking spaces. The zoning board saw the crowd in opposition, and in April killed the plan.

In a campaign interview, Harp criticized that decision: She said she’d spoken to many neighbors who liked the plan, who saw the need for more housing (as well as tax revenue) in New Haven. (She also criticized City Hall for not getting more of those neighbors involved.)

Holmes said in the year-end interview that she had all along intended to support the concept of the plan. As part of her coalition’s commitment to more democratic government, she also wanted neighbors’ ideas to influence and improve it. She brought those neighbors together with the developer, Ben Gross, to discuss their concerns.

I did want that site developed. The neighbors wanted that site developed,” she said. Bringing neighbors into the process is the right thing. I hadn’t predicted what would happen.”

Thomas MacMillan Photo

Holmes confers with developer Gross outside tense March zoning hearing

In retrospect, she said, she should have organized the meetings with the developers before the plan was submitted to the zoning board. That way the developer could have more easily made changes before zoners made an up-or-down decision.

Holmes and the neighborhood got a second chance. Gross returned with a new partner and a new plan this fall. Holmes and the neighbors met with them before they submitted plans to the zoning board. The developers made the project slightly smaller than before. None of the new complex’s buildings would rise seven stories this time, just five. It would have 235 apartments, not 268. The highest buildings would no longer overshadow private yards in the neighborhood. And the complex would have plenty more parking, 273 spaces, more than required by zoning. (It would also have 235 bike-parking spaces.)

Holmes and neighbors showed up at a Dec. 10 zoning board hearing to bless the plan this time, along with local preservationists. It appears destined to easy approval.

The plan still isn’t perfect, in Holmes’ view. At the end of the day I would like New Haven to have fewer cars and better transit,” she said. But she concluded that city mass transit hasn’t gotten to the point where it new Haven have comfortably supported the 0.6 parking spaces envisioned in the original Star Supply plan. She said she wishes the new plan didn’t go to the other extreme, with around 1.2 spaces per apartment. But overall the new plan is a good one, with a much improved scale and design, she said. It took a while to get there. Along the way, she came under harsh criticism from local business people, not to mention some (not all) Independent reader-commenters. Holmes and her colleagues have just done their darndest to convince [a builder] that New Haven’s an impossible place to do business,” wrote one sample critic.

It was a learning experience for Holmes — and not just about the politics of community development.

One of the things I’ve gotten out of the last year is a thicker skin,” she said. I’m [always] going to listen to feedback; I can’t be devastated by a comment in the Independent. I’m an alderman because I want to make the city a better place.”

Previous stories examining the new labor majority’s first term in office:

Labor” Agenda Takes Shape In 1st Year
Outside City Hall, A New Way Of Doing Business
Rookies Learn: All Politics Is Hyperlocal

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