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Newly appointed Department of Community Resilience Acting Director Carlos Sosa-Lombardo.
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The mayor has tapped city social-services staffer Carlos Sosa-Lombardo to be the inaugural acting director of the Department of Community Resilience — a new city agency charged with finding a data-driven, coordinated response to social issues ranging from homelessness to mental health disorders to drug addition to prison reentry.
Mayor Justin Elicker made that appointment announcement Wednesday morning during a rain-soaked press conference held by the back entrance to City Hall.
Sosa-Lombardo is a 33-year-old Paraguayan immigrant who grew up in Mount Vernon, N.Y. and holds a master’s of public administration from New York University. He has spent the past year working as the special projects director in the city’s Community Services Administration (CSA). Before that, he helmed the city’s reentry services office.
Thanks to Wednesday’s appointment, Sosa-Lombardo will start his new gig as acting director of the Department of Community Resilience on Jan. 10.
(His title is “acting” because Sosa-Lombardo currently lives in Hamden, and the permanent department head job includes a New Haven residency requirement. Sosa-Lombardo said after the press conference that he plans to move to New Haven, and Elicker said he plans to appoint Sosa-Lombardo as permanent director once he moves to town.)
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City Community Services Administrator Mehul Dalal.
In his day-to-day work helping the city launch a one-stop reentry center and plan for a community crisis response team, Sosa-Lombardo already “embodies what the Department of Community Resilience is all about,” said his direct boss, Community Services Administrator Mehul Dalal. Dalal described that mission as “approaching communities and residents with compassion, respect and understanding.”
He described Sosa-Lombardo as a “fierce champion and advocate for communities and individuals made vulnerable in New Haven.”
CTVIP chief Len Jahad at Wednesday's presser.
Connecticut Violence Intervention Program (CTVIP) Executive Director Len Jahad agreed. Jahad said Sosa-Lombardo has been a critical point of contact at City Hall for Jahad’s street-outreach-worker nonprofit.
“Carlos is a collaborator,” Jahad said. “Not a lot of people work as hard as me. Carlos is always prepared, and he definitely outworks me.”
Sosa-Lombardo said that his top priority upon taking over the new department is to “engage in a department-wide strategic planning process to serve as a roadmap for coming years” and to “understand how regional spillover effects of homelessness, reentry, and gun violence affect us as a city.”
He said his department will work to “identify gaps and service needs” for individuals struggling with homelessness, mental health issues, and substance use disorders, and “integrate all these different programs under one umbrella. These programs serve people who have interconnected issues.” The city can be more efficient and effect in the services it provides to these vulnerable groups if there is more communication and coordination among existing programs.
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Sosa-Lombardo will serve as the inaugural acting director of a department that the mayor first proposed last August, and which the Board of Alders voted unanimously in support of creating and funding last September.
The Department of Community Resilience will consist of four existing City Hall positions: the CSA special project director, the coordinator of the Office of Housing and Homelessness, the manager of community development initiatives, and the homeless health outreach staffer. It will also have four newly created positions: the department director, a new coordinator of the office of violence prevention, a new coordinator of mental health initiatives, and a new data/GIS manager.
Dalal said that the city has already posted job listings for the violence prevention and mental health initiatives roles, and will post for the data/GIS manager job soon.
Sosa-Lombardo was asked about the status of the planned new community crisis response team, an idea first put forward by the mayor in August 2020 that would send social workers and trained mental health professionals instead of police officers to certain 911 calls. He said the city is “towards the end of the planning process.” He said the city is “compiling all reports from the community engagement process, and finalizing dispatch protocols and procedures.”
In the next few weeks, the city will finalize the contract for the pilot program of this new team, he said. He said the pilot should launch in the “first quarter” of this year.
The new department’s annual budget for each of the next four years will be $6 million: with $2.1 million each year coming from the general fund, $1.9 million each year coming from federal block grants, and $2 million each year from the federal pandemic-era American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) aid.
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Mayor Elicker.
Asked about the temporary nature of some of the funding for this new department, Dalal and Elicker said that the Department of Community Resilience’s work should prove over the coming years that it is worth of sustained funding — whether that be through more state and federal grants, or city general fund dollars.
“We’re confident that this is going to work,” Elicker said. “It is worth it for us to spend money on this in the long run. There’s a lot of interest around the nation about this [coordinated] approach to addressing many challenges around poverty and systemic racism and violence.”
That interest should mean that there will be plenty of grant opportunities at the federal and state levels for the department’s work. He said that the state’s significant increase in Payment in Lieu of Taxes (PILOT) reimbursements to the city as well as Yale’s commitment to increase its annual voluntary payments to the city also give the city “more flexibility” in funding this new department.
We don't need a separate department for this - if it's a priority, wrap it in something existing, rename or refocus an existing department. With funding running out in two years - Mayor Elicker clearly plans on taxpayers picking up the tab for the new department. This is so typical of this city's political elites. Remember the Elm City ID program? Launched with a grant; promised its worthless activity wouldn't fall to city taxpayers - and when the grant ran out? Yeah, it fell to city taxpayers. This city never dumps a program it starts regardless of its value or lack thereof - it just adds to the head count; adds to the cost and of course, just kick the taxpayers and make them pay more. So, we're paying a third of it now - soon it will be 100%. Notice by the way, how there is no metric by which this new department will be considered successful. None. Not one.