nothin Plans For Newhallville Grant Rile Neighbors | New Haven Independent

Plans For Newhallville Grant Rile Neighbors

Markeshia Ricks Photo

Rembert’s idea: 24-7 community center.

Frustrated with how city officials plan to spend $1 million earmarked for their neighborhood, some Newhallville residents this week said they are fed up with being a guinea-pig community that officials mine to experiment with programs that don’t ever seem to change life for the better.

The neighbors met this week to draw up ideas for how to use a $1 million Byrne Criminal Justice Innovation grants from the U.S. Department of Justice coming to the city to address problems plaguing Newhallville.

The Harp Adminsitration won the competitive grant and is now starting to plan how to use it. It has met with tough questions from some neighbors, especially alders who grilled City Hall’s point person, Youth Services Department Director Jason Bartlett, at a recent hearing.

Bartlett was not present when the 50 dissenting neighbors met at Grace and Peace International Church on Starr Street Tuesday night to discuss alternative plans.

How should Newhallville spend $1 million? For starters, long time resident Patsy Rembert suggested a 24-hour, one-stop-shop community service center.

Her vision flowed from the concept, Get up! We’ve got something to do,” she said: That’s what the center would provide for young people at-risk for getting into trouble because they don’t have anything else better to do.

In her mind it is a place where children, from 12 to 21, would have a safe place to go after school. They’d receive mentoring, job and life skills training, medical and mental health services and a place to sleep if they need it.

This shouldn’t be a place that’s only open 9 a.m. to 5 p.m.,” she said. All these kids need is opportunity.”

She said this center also would be a job generator because it would need health workers, daycare workers, janitorial services, police officers and security guards.

Her idea was met with thunderous applause from the audience of her neighbors.

Newhallville activist Barbara Vareen jots down ideas at a recent neighborhood meeting.

And while Rembert’s vision was considered a long-term goal that residents should pursue, short-term they proposed that the city hire a project coordinator from their neighborhood for the Byrne grant; that the Board of Alders be part of a committee to select that coordinator; and that the neighborhood police substation get money to stay open longer hours with an officers present. They also called for using existing programs like PAL to foster deeper relationships with police officers.

The feds announced in October that New Haven had won the competitive Byrne grant. (Read all about that here.) The Harp administration applied for the money to help the police, street outreach workers, schools, youth and health-care workers, anti-blight officials, small businesses, and grassroots activists (like a new resiliency team” and Community Matters” team as well as the community management team) collaborate on ways to stem violence in one of the city’s poorest and most violence-plagued neighborhoods. (Click here to read the city’s full application describing the plan.)

Newhallville Alders Delphine Clyburn and Brenda Foskey-Cyrus organized Tuesday night’s three-hour meeting. Residents argued that yet another grant is coming to the city to address problems in the Newhallville, but not the problems they care about — namely bringing jobs and youth programs to the neighborhood; working with police to foster better relationships; and improving sidewalks, streets and lighting.

Many of the people who attended the meeting had not heard of the Byrne grant. Of those who did, several were disappointed to learn that the city had applied for the grant on behalf of the residents of the neighborhood, but never included them in the application process, they said. In fact, no group specifically based in Newhallville was included as a potential recipient of a portion of the grant in a sample budget presented as part of the application, though such groups might be eligible for mini-grants.

Clyburn, Foskey-Cyrus and Alder Alfreda Edwards presented a united front voicing their concerns that the grant might not be used in a tangible way in the neighborhood. They worked with their colleagues in December to secure more meetings with Jason Bartlett.

Bartlett has promised alders to provide more information about where a projected $868,000 in cash and in-kind matching money are coming from, and more details on the process for hiring a project coordinator, before the full board votes on whether to accept the grant. The full board is expected to vote during its Jan. 20 meeting.

Bartlett is expected to participate in the next neighborhood meeting on the grant, this coming Tuesday evening at Jackie Robinson Middle School.

Looking Ahead

Rembert’s vision prompted stories from people to share their experience of a time when children and Newhallville residents had good relations with police officers. One man said as a child he and his friends often stopped by police substations and hung out with officers. They also remembered a time when the community had the Vanguard Teen Center, where young people hung out and felt safe. She said those programs worked, but no longer exist.

Some attendees suggested that residents press the city to turn down the Byrne grant. Others suggested that they work to get what they could out of it and press the city to look for grant money to fund the other things that residents want.

City budget watchdog Ken Joyner told the crowd that the city was conditioned to accept grant money, and is not going to turn this grant down.”

Newhallville activist Barbara Vereen said while the city will have to tailor whatever it does to the parameters of the grant, it doesn’t mean that residents can’t ask for what they want within those parameters and hold people accountable for making it happen.

Clyburn said what she has learned as an alder is that the city respects ideas on paper. If the community goes to the city with a plan, it can press officials to write grants that pay for their ideas, she said. She said she would condense the ideas and present them to her fellow alders by the time they meet Jan. 20.

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