Thomas MacMillan Photo
Alderwoman-Elect Foskey-Cyrus, Clyburn & Morrison at a Science Park local-hiring demonstration.
Someone forgot to tell Delphine Clyburn that the elections are over.
Or maybe she and her fellow labor-backed aldermen-elect preparing to take control of New Haven’s legislature have a new idea in mind for how to spend their time.
Clyburn and 18 other newly-elected aldermen will start serving on the 30-member Board of Aldermen on Jan. 1.
Meanwhile, she has kept knocking on doors four days a week in her Newhallville neighborhood. She’s no longer asking for votes. Rather she’s asking for help in developing a long-range team of politically active citizens independent of party organizations.
“The people will come with me,” Clyburn said. “I promise you.”
Clyburn and her colleagues have the potential to usher in a new era for a legislative body derided as a reactive second-fiddle to a strong mayor’s office. They promised to do just that. Some of them vowed not to repeat a mistake of the 2008 Obama crusade: getting elected by promising “change” and involving lots of new people, then abandoning grassroots organizing.
The potentially powerful new majority on the board isn’t the collection of first-term aldermen (though having 19 new members take office in itself augurs some kind of change). Speculation has centered instead on how an historic bloc of pro-labor candidates will use their potential influence. Clyburn was one of 18 successful candidates backed by the city’s most active independent vote-pulling force, Yale’s blue-collar and pink-collar unions. The unions, Locals 34 and 35 of UNITE HERE, have around 4,500 members; they also have a third union, GESO, which is composed of Yale graduate students.
Three of the successful union-backed candidates were incumbents; the other 15 were first-timers. In the past, Yale’s unions could count on maybe a half-dozen reliable votes when their issues came before the 30-member Board of Aldermen. Suddenly, combined with other incumbents allied with them in the past, this potential governing majority could control a commanding 20 or 21 out of 30 votes on most issues.
If it chooses to.
It’s unclear whether the new labor team will regularly present a set of proposals and meet to plan how to vote as a bloc. Whether it will designate a representative to negotiate regularly with the mayor’s office and the board’s leadership. On the campaign trail, the labor slate, while mounting a sophisticated and well-funded citywide electoral strategy, said remarkably little in unison about specific laws it wanted passed. With most municipal labor contracts in or headed to arbitration, or newly sealed, city employee salaries and benefits do not loom as major issues in the coming term.
So far it seems clear that the labor candidates’ ascendance will mean that Hill Alderman Jorge Perez will probably become the board’s president again. He was deposed six years ago despite backing from labor and opposition from the mayor’s office; Yale’s unions have held that against Mayor John DeStefano ever since. If returned to the post, Perez, the board’s longest-serving member and perennially named a potential mayoral candidate, will assume a leading negotiating and leadership role in city government. Especially if the new super-majority coalesces as an effective force.
One other clear result from the labor victories, most of which occurred in the September Democratic Party primaries. Mayor John DeStefano has taken notice. While short on specifics, the labor aldermanic campaigns delivered a unified general message that neighborhoods want dramatic new action on the city’s deadly violence in the form of a return to 1990s style New Haven community policing; on outreach to opportunities for young people in the poorest neighborhoods; and on job-creation.
This past week DeStefano brought Dean Esserman back to town as police chief. Esserman helped create the 1990s community-policing experiment as New Haven’s assistant chief from 1991 – 1993. He’s now vowing a return to citywide walking beats, which disappeared along with most of the community-policing approach during DeStefano’s mayoral tenure.
DeStefano has also vowed to pursue a vo-tech school for those kids who don’t qualify for “New Haven Promise” college scholarships and create a youth center, perhaps at the old Goffe Street armory. (Read Abbe Smith’s Register interview about that here.)
“I’m happy with the new chief in reference to him bringing back community policing. That’s what most of the candidates said on their campaigns,” said Brian Wingate, the newly elected alderman from Beaver Hills’ Ward 29. “Someone heard it. I’m very excited.”
“I’m glad the mayor’s paying attention,” said Yale Local 35 President and Greater New Haven Central Labor Council President Bob Proto. “The intention was not to send a message to the mayor. The intention was to get people that were willing to do the work and make change. We’re going to align with the Board of Aldermen to deal with job creation and safe streets.”
Proto said “no structure is in place” at this point to come up with bills to introduce or votes to deliver. “These folks aren’t even sworn in yet,” he said.
Rather, the unions and their affiliates — like their political action committees and their legally separate policy arm, Connecticut Center for a New Economy (CCNE) — are continuing a process that began seven years ago: Developing grassroots candidates and electoral organizations, and simultaneously developing a grassroots issues platform, by going door to door in city neighborhoods, where many of their members live. CCNE has launched “Social Contract” and “Economic Blueprint” and “Community Voter” and “Grassroots Community Agenda” projects and a “Civic Leadership Institute.” Union members and allies have knocked on tens of thousands of doors. They’ve pulled together survey data on what issues people care about, then researched those issues. That process will continue in coming weeks, offering a think tank-type backing for newly elected candidates.
They’ve also discovered union members or sympathetic neighbors who would make popular candidates. That’s how this slate of new faces suddenly emerged this year and, with the help of an estimated $180,000-$200,000 in citywide labor money, shocked the city by unseating a bevy of pro-City Hall incumbents and other candidates allied with a mayoral campaign that had over $400,000 to spend. (The majority of that money went toward reelecting the mayor. Indirectly, through polling and coordination and joint vote-pulling and candidate development, some of it helped pro-City Hall aldermanic candidates.)
Melissa Bailey Photo
That’s how, for instance, Wingate (pictured), a Local 35 Executive Board member, unseated the board’s president, 20-year incumbent Carl Goldfield. Wingate had an army of volunteers as well as paid help from the unions, and a popular touch. He did not have a specific agenda, but rather a call for more community involvement, community policing and jobs.
Wingate said this week he does have a specific proposal to shop around to his colleagues after their swearing-in. He doesn’t want to reveal it yet.
Meanwhile, he delivered three Thanksgiving turkeys this week to recession-battered constituents he’d met door-knocking. “One lady was homebound. I was able to give her a turkey and a bag of food. We’re going to deal with the issues, but the little specific issues count too.”
In Newhallville, Delphine Clyburn has continued door-knocking in a concentrated way. Four mornings a week, before going to work at a state group home for the disabled, she spends three hours revisiting constituents she has met during the campaign.
In some cases she’s checking in on what issues people want addressed. In others, she is following up with 79 people who, during the campaign, agreed to serve on a new neighborhood activism committee. She said she asked them to “take part in being leaders to change our community. They will go down to the City Hall when we’re talking about city issues like the crime, like the joblessness that we have here, youth, walking beats.” That committee would be separate from the ward committee, with which she also plans to stay active.
“That’s where I’m most comfortable,” on the doors, Clyburn said. She has been active in her union, SEIU District 1199, since 1987. She has worked on union organizing drives. She has phone-banked and done other work on election campaigns of union-backed candidates. She said she sees her work as an alderman as an extension of that organizing.
In East Rock’s Ward 9, Alderwoman-elect Jessica Holmes, a former Local 34 organizer, drew 20 neighbors to a community meeting a week after the Nov. 8 election to start mapping issue priorities. She said she hopes to turn out more of them to join a Dec. 3 citywide CCNE conference on developing New Haven issues again. She also hopes to include health care experts to a future committee to carry out one of her key campaign promises: to find ways to spend more wisely and efficiently the portion of the city’s budget devoted to health and pension benefits. For instance, she’s convinced the city could save significant bucks by linking its prescription drug plan with the state government’s.
Laurel Leff Photo
“The elections came out of many years of trying to build a grassroots community agenda and develop a set of issues” and developing candidates, said Gwen Mills (pictured), the union organizer most credited with coordinating the successful aldermanic slate’s campaigns. “That’s where the elections came from. So that’s what will continue to happen.”
She compared the approach to what didn’t happen after she and countless other progressive activists worked on the 2008 Obama presidential campaign.
“If you look at Barack Obama, there was a huge amount of grassroots organizing to get him into office that ended when he got into office,” Mills observed. “It made it much more difficult to change many of the things he talked about in the campaign. The key to achieving the changes people talked about on the campaign is maintaining the organizing at the grassroots that made the campaign successful in the first place.”
Following is a list of aldermanic candidates elected with union support in contested primary or general election races this year (All but the Ward 1 candidate had official endorsements from Yale’s unions.)
Ward 1: Sarah Eidelson
Ward 2: Frank Douglass
Ward 3: Jacqueline James
Ward 6: Dolores Colon
Ward 9: Jessica Holmes
Ward 11: Barbara Constantinople
Ward 13: Brenda Jones Barnes
Ward 14: Gabriel Santiago
Ward 20: Delphine Clyburn
Ward 21: Brenda Foskey-Cyrus
Ward 22: Jeanette Morrison
Ward 23: Tyisha Walker*
Ward 24: Evette Hamilton
Ward 25: Adam Marchand
Ward 26: Sergio Rodriguez
Ward 27: Angela Russell
Ward 28: Claudette Robinson-Thorpe
Ward 29: Brian Wingate
* opponent dropped out before the election
More likely this is the next step for the local unions... to take the Democratic town committee and then take the mayors office (with more outside money and more outside foot soldiers) In any event the other 130,000 new haven taxpayers will foot the bill for what could be a tyrannical minority looking to feather it's own nest; all in the name of mediocrity as goal.