Smith: Independent quest.
Mayor Toni Harp has turned to a seasoned labor political hand to run her reelection campaign, as two familiar faces from the Newhallville neighborhood took initial steps up to oppose her.
Harp, who is seeking a second two-year term, hired Rick Melita to serve as her campaign manager. Melita has spent 30 years working on pro-labor electoral and advocacy campaigns. He served as field director for Ned Lamont’s 2006 Democratic U.S. Senate primary campaign, political director for the Connecticut State Employees Association, and policy director for former state House Majority Leader Chris Donovan.
“I’ve known Toni a long time,” Melita, who is 57 and lives in upper Westville, said Tuesday. “At my job at the Capitol I spent a lot of time at the General Assembly, I’ve really grown to admire her leadership skills and her ability to deal with complex situations and provide a real source of strength in difficult times. She’s been an excellent mayor.” (The video at left, from 2006, shows Melita addressing Lamont campaign workers.)
In a conversation Wednesday, and in initial blast emails, the campaign has portrayed Harp as a unifier in her first term, bringing people from all parts of the city together to reduce crime and reach out to at-risk young people, including the creation of community canvasses and a weekly YouthStat problem-solving convening of school administrators, cops, and probation officers. The campaign has also been touting what it calls improved snow clearance this winter. Harp’s first term saw the removal of a controversial decades-old fence separating the West Rock public-housing developments from Hamden; and the imminent reopening of the former Palace Theater as the College Street Musical Hall after 12 years in mothballs.
The first two candidates lining up to challenge Harp and that narrative are Sundiata Keitazulu, who has filed papers to run in the Democratic primary; and former City Clerk and former Newhallville Alder Ron Smith, who has filed papers to collect nominating petitions to earn a place as an independent on the Nov. 3 general election ballot.
Smith lost his clerk’s job in 2013 when the Harp campaign supported challenger Michael Smart, who defeated Smith at the polls. Smith needs 208 signatures of registered voters to make the Nov. 3 ballot. Smith could not be reached for comment for this story.
Paul Bass Photo
Keitazulu (pictured), a plumber by trade, ran a quixotic mayoral campaign in 2013. (Read about that campaign here.) He never attracted enough money to qualify for public-financing, or enough organizational support to collect the necessary signatures to make the ballot. But he earned widespread praise for his performance in debates, especially in pushing opponents to embrace more job-training and local hiring programs aimed at the un- and under-employed.
Keitazulu ended up dropping out of the race and endorsing Harp, who then in turn hired him to serve as her $55,000-a-year prison re-entry coordinator. That job lasted only a few weeks, though: Harp let him go when the state refused Keitazulu entry to prisons, because he had two outstanding arrest warrants. (Read about that here.)
Now Keitazulu is seeking a second chance with voters, saying the Harp administration hasn’t made enough progress on his key issues. He plans a formal announcement of his campaign at Lincoln-Bassett School in Newhallville, the neighborhood where he lives and runs the Nate The Snake plumbing company.
“I am the people’s candidate,” he said in an interview Wednesday. (Click on the video at the top of the story to watch highlights.)
In an interview Wednesday, Keitazulu, who’s 57, said he should have kept his prison reentry job. He said the ten years he spent in jail for a drug-dealing conviction make him especially qualified.
“I didn’t have to go into jail [to do the job] anyway … I could send my workers into the prisons,” he argued. “You have to have a face that’s been in the system to know how to work it. … You don’t know how those people feel. You don’t know how to get around the system.”
If elected, Keitazulu would push for more teen centers and after-school programs in existing school buildings, he said. He also called for more vo-tech programs; he said the two the Harp administration has launched are insufficient. He praised the new after-school programs at Lincoln-Bassett School, which his children attend; but he said he would add training programs for adults there and at other locations.
He also called for tax breaks for businesses running apprenticeship programs; mandatory Spanish classes for public-school students; and an 80 percent local hiring goal for government construction projects.
Asked about the job-training and local-hiring controversy du jour in City Hall—the suspension and investigation of Commission on Equal Opportunities chief Nichole Jefferson—Keitazulu said he hasn’t yet figured out which side is right.
“I have to investigate before I make a decision. I hear one side from Nichole. I hear one side from [city Economic Development Administrator] Matt Nemerson. There are two sides to the story. I’ve been kind of busy. I have to feed my family.”
From his 2013 campaign, Keitazulu said, he learned the need to put together an organization and do lots more door-knocking. He said he intends to do that. He needs to raise financial contributions of at least $10 a piece from at least 200 registered Democrats to qualify for public-financing under he city’s Democracy Fund.
He will not be elected Mayor, but he will change the conversation in the debates.