Thomas Breen file photo
Brennan (right) with Fabian Menges, Max Choulideer, and Dave Cruz-Bustamante.
Don’t rely just on bashing Yale and begging the state when it comes to raising enough money to fill city budget gaps.
Liam Brennan offered those words of caution as he pitched his mayoral campaign’s vision for how best to craft a “fair share,” pro-housing budget that rethinks the bounds of permissible local government action.
Brennan talked through those municipal-dollars-and-cents priorities and proposals during a public meetup his campaign convened Monday evening in the dining room of the Pistachio II restaurant at 1245 Chapel St.
Over a tall glass of mixed-berries-and-hibiscus tea, Brennan addressed a table-full of roughly a dozen New Haveners already supporting or curious about his bid to unseat two-term incumbent Mayor Justin Elicker in this year’s Sept. 12 Democratic primary. He’s one of four candidates running for the Democratic nomination, along with two independents set to run in the general election in November.
At Monday's Pistachio-hosted campaign meetup.
On Monday, Brennan focused the group’s attention on — and fielded question after question from about — a so-called budget “template” that his campaign released earlier in the day.
That seven-page writeup details the former federal prosecutor-legal aid lawyer’s vision for how to “more equitably” raise the funds necessary to run city government, as well as how best to spend those public resources to ensure that New Haven is a safe, affordable, fair, housing-and-education-rich place to live.
His revenue-side proposals include recruiting a new permanent city assessor and better funding that office to ensure that high-value properties are properly appraised and taxed. He suggested coming up with new city fees — on, for example, ride shares and gasoline — to raise funds from nonresidents. He proposed hiring more city staff specifically dedicated to applying for grants to tap into an unprecedented wealth of available state and federal aid.
On the expenditures side, Brennan said, he would prioritize hiring more Livable City Initiative (LCI) housing code inspectors instead of bulking up the police department. He said he’d also invest in building lots more housing on private and public land, including on underused car lanes on major arteries like Whalley that could be reclaimed as areas for denser urban residential development.
Time and again over the course of Monday’s two-hour meetup, Brennan criticized the Elicker administration’s budget as content with the “status quo.” He and pitched himself as capable of finding new, progressive, realistic and aggressive ways to help build a better city by, for example, looking into anti-trust laws to see if the city can break up some of New Haven’s biggest poverty landlords.
He also said that the city should not rely just on the age-old arguments that Yale and the state need to send more funds the city’s way.
Those pushes are important, he said. They also paid off in recent years with the state committing $50 million more and Yale $10 million more a year to the city’s bottom line. But, he said, the leader of city government has to think more creatively — and proactively — about how to use the powers of City Hall to achieve a fairer city without having to wait for Yale and the state to catch up and pay up.
“I’m trying to inspire new thoughts about how we do city government,” Brennan told the group.
In his budget template, he elaborated: “New Haven’s non-taxable property remains a problem to raising the revenue New Haven needs to fully fund city services. This truth often manifests itself in two results: looking to Hartford for more PILOT [Payments in Lieu of Taxes] funding or looking to Yale for a greater contribution to the city. Both are worthy goals — the State of Connecticut and Yale both owe New Haven a great debt that they are not fully paying. However, these are well-trodden paths that have usually led nowhere. …
“Instead of treading the same ground, we envision a municipal budget policy that looks within and starts from a place of strength. The city government should take a muscular, multi-pronged approach toward revenue generation which includes proper tax assessment, shifting costs to non-residents users when possible, and actively seeking grants to fund projects that
benefit the public.”
He repeated that message in response to a question from school board student representative Dave Cruz-Bustamante about finding a way to merge “people power” and “government power” to pressure Yale to pay its fair share.
While that is a worthy goal, Brennan said, too often city politicians spend too much time on trying to find ways to tax Yale. The city also needs to look at revenue-generating tasks “within our means” and that are “not specifically about Yale.”
That means, for example, making sure that City Hall has a “full-time” permanent assessor who lives in New Haven and looks at how much some of the most valuable properties in town really should be appraised at so they pay their fair share in local taxes, he argued.
“I think the value of the city is that the status quo is fine, that we don’t need to be aggressive with landlords, that policing should stay the same,” he said in response to a question from Max Inhoff about what Brennan sees when he looks at the city’s current budget.
In response to a question from Fabian Menges about upping the state’s reimbursements to the city for tax-exempt property, Brennan called for city leadership to build coalitions with other town and city mayors across the state around boosting local funding.
At the same timer, he said, his New Haven mayoral campaign is interested in trying to “break us out of the continual talk of the Yale or state.” All too often, the money is available to make transformative changes around housing, education, transportation, and other key issues, he said. The problem is that the city does not have the right leadership to make those changes happen.
Kiko Wang signing up to canvass for Brennan.
Elicker pushed back on Brennan’s plan in a statement provided to the Independent Tuesday afternoon.
“Talk is easy, but balancing a budget among many competing priorities is hard -– especially when you cannot rely on rhetorical revenue, as Mr. Brennan does,” Elicker wrote. “When I ran for mayor I made a commitment to get more funding from the state, and we did. I made a commitment to get more funding from Yale, and we did. I said our budget would invest in the most vulnerable, and we have. We have invested more in these past several years in New Haven’s historically underserved communities than in decades.
“I appreciate Mr. Brennan’s desire to bring new ideas to the table. However suggesting we should get revenue from new types of taxes when it’s against state law, or making claims about the current budget that are inaccurate (we do have a full-time assessor) just aren’t helpful.”
The fiscal-focused meetup took place several days before the Board of Alders Finance Committee is set to continue on Thursday its months-long review of Mayor Justin Elicker’s proposed $662.7 million general fund budget. The alders are expected to take a final vote on an amended version of that budget in late May or early June before it takes effect on July 1.
I'd like to hear Attorney Brennan's opinion on whether or not, in todays context, property tax exemptions for gigantic institutions that are assumed to be acting in the local public interest (but may not be) violate equal protection.