Guv Hopefuls Pay For Elm City Expertise

(Updated) Boise Kimber is getting Guy Smith into black churches. Audrey Tyson is opening Ned Lamont’s New Haven office. Clyde Ramos is sending Joe Ganim’s message out through Instagram — and picking up fundraiser stogies.

They’re among the New Haveners on the payrolls of candidates seeking the Democratic Party’s nomination for governor.

As the field winnows in anticipation of the May 18 and 19 party nominating convention, none of the candidates running for governor (or any other statewide office) comes from New Haven.

But except for Susan Bysiewicz and Sean Connolly, the Democratic candidates still standing are paying New Haveners — where the state’s largest pool of Democratic votes resides (as well as of party delegates, 100) — to help them win the nomination.

No Republican gubernatorial candidates currently employ any New Haveners, according to first-quarter financial disclosure statements filed with the State Elections Enforcement Commission (SEEC).

Ganim, Bridgeport’s mayor, has hired former New Haven Democratic Town Chairwoman Jackie James (she’s now the vice-chair) to manage his Democratic campaign for governor. James received a total of $15,750 from the Ganim campaign in the first quarter of 2018, according to his SEEC filing.

James was the head of Dannel P. Malloy’s New Haven gubernatorial campaign office in 2010.

“We’ve been engaging communities around the state,” James said about the work that she’s doing for the Ganim campaign, ​“bringing volunteers on board, raising money, looking for locations to open headquarters around the state.” She said that the Ganim campaign plans to open an office in Hartford tomorrow and an office in New Haven on Wednesday. The New Haven headquarters will be located in Dixwell Plaza.

“It’s going very well,” she said. ​“We have a lot of great momentum. We’ve made a lot of great connections statewide.” She said the campaign has visited over 400 locations around the state, and that they plan to go door to door in each neighborhood of New Haven to get out the vote in the lead up to the August primary. She said that the Ganim campaign has over 100 people working for them as volunteers or as paid staff.

The Ganim campaign also employs New Havener Clyde Ramos as its director of digital communications. Ramos has made $3,500 working for the Ganim campaign since February.

A professional filmmaker who spent 12 years in New York City doing commercial work for companies like American Express, Ramos said he moved back home to New Haven earlier this year as his family prepares to have a child.

“I handle social media, email blasts, digital advertising,” Ramos said. He said he is responsible for posting to the Ganim campaign’s official Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter accounts, posting about various events and comments that the campaign hopes to make.

Ramos’s campaign responsibilities have also included procuring cigars for the candidate, according to SEEC filings. Ramos was reimbursed for buying $530 worth of cigars for a campaign fundraiser from a shop in Orange on March 22.

Ramos, 30, said that he supports the Bridgeport mayor for governor because of Ganim’s executive experience and focus on cities.

“I decided to support the Ganim Campaign because he has by far the most experience and knows what it will take to have our cities be the engine that drive a new Connecticut economy that works for all of us, not just a few,” he told the Independent.

Guy Smith has shelled out the most money to New Haven residents to date, paying $48,400 between January and March for the help of Premier Consulting Services, LLC, which is run by local minister Boise Kimber, as first reported by Ken Dixon in the Connecticut Post. Kimber has been active in local and statewide campaigns for decades; he backed Malloy in 2010.

The SEEC filings for the first quarter of 2018 show that the Smith campaign paid $45,000 directly to Kimber’s home address on Stevenson Road. Another $1,300 was paid to Premier Consulting in the care of New Haven minister Aaron Moody, while the final $1,000 sent to Premier were delivered to Joanne Fields and Mary Shepherd in Stamford.

Smith said in a recent WNHH FM interview that his friends Bill Clinton (the former president) and Jesse Jackson hooked him up with Kimber.

“He’s advising Guy. He helps with outreach to the African-American community. You’ve seen, we’ve been to churches, on our social media. He helps with that. He gets us opportunities,” Dwain Schenck, the campaign’s communications director and political adviser, said Monday.

Kimber helped set up a Newhallville event at which Moody accompanied Smith, who decried the state Democratic Party for its lack of racial diversity on committees involved in nominating candidates and setting convention rules. (See the Facebook Live video of the event at left.) Kimber has spoken out publicly on behalf of Smith on the issue.

“He isn’t the regular politician,” Kimber said Monday, when asked why he signed up with Smith. ​“He thinks outside the box. He brings a fresh new perspective, and he isn’t clouded by the personal connections to local and special interest groups. I feel as though he has an Afrocentric air to learn more about the issues that are affecting urban communities.”

Before Smith entered the race, Kimber started out this gubernatorial campaign cycle helping Ganim, whose 2015 mayoral campaign he worked on.

Lamont Hires 4

The apparent frontrunner for the party convention endorsement, Ned Lamont, plans to open a New Haven office this week. He has hired Audrey Tyson, a Beaver Hills ward co-chair who has played an active role in New Haven politics for decades, to run the office.

The campaign prohibited Tyson from speaking with a reporter for this article.

The campaign has also hired a current and former alder: David Reyes, who represents the Hill, will serve as New Haven field director. Sergio Rodriguez, a former Upper Westville alder, will serve as a deputy of operations, according to Campaign Manager Marc Bradley.

The Lamont campaign opened a New Haven headquarters Tuesday at 560 Whalley Ave.

Lamont’s campaign hired New Havener Duncan Grimm, a 2015 graduate of Trinity College. Grimm lists his work for the campaign on LinkedIn as ​“Policy Research & Rapid Response.” He also oversees the Lamont campaign’s Facebook, Twitter and Instagram accounts. An avid hiker, Grimm wrote ​“his undergraduate thesis on Anglo-American relations during the early years of the Second World War” and ​“studied abroad at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland where he focused on the Scottish global diaspora and evolving counterinsurgency doctrines,” according to one of his web bios.

The Lamont campaign has paid Grimm $5,214 since he started working for them in February.