Sam Gurwitt Photos
Councilman Michael Colaiacovo and newly-elected Majority Leader Berita Rowe-Lewis.
At its inaugural meeting, Hamden’s first majority-female Legislative Council chose a leadership team of five experienced women and one man to lead the body through the 2019 – 2021 term.
After a tense election season, the new council sat down together for the first time to lock in the hierarchy its members had decided beforehand in closed-door caucuses.
The meeting Monday night lasted 20 minutes, and did not feature a single disagreement. That was a stark contrast with the meetings of the previous council, which frequently lasted late into the night, and sometimes into the next morning, because of heated disagreements between opposing factions in the Democratic Party.
On the previous council, a group of newer, progressive Democrats who criticized Mayor Curt Leng’s handling of town finances often clashed with the party’s establishment and long-serving council members who supported Leng. On that council, the leadership team was split between those two camps. Majority Leader Cory O’Brien was an outspoken Leng critic, as was Whip Justin Farmer, and they frequently disagreed with President Mick McGarry and Pres. Pro Tem. John DeRosa.
Town Clerk Vera Morrison opened Monday’s meeting, as a president had not yet been chosen. “Congratulations, or my condolences,” she joked. She urged the council to focus on collaborating and compromising.
“When nobody’s happy, we know we’re doing our job,” she said.
McGarry, the previous council president, then regained his seat in a unanimous vote. The council chose Kathleen Schomaker as its president pro tempore. Schomaker is currently the town’s energy efficiency coordinator, which is a part-time position that aims to make Hamden more sustainable. She served on the council from 2005 until 2017, and defeated O’Brien in a primary in September.
The Democrats chose Berita Rowe-Lewis as their majority leader. Rowe-Lewis served on the council from 2003 – 2007, and then again starting in 2011. They chose Jody Clouse as their whip. Clouse is now a second-term council member, and is the least experienced member of the new council’s leadership team.
The three Republicans on the council chose Betty Wetmore as their minority leader. By the end of her term, Wetmore will have served 20 years on the council.
Mick McGarry.
“The person hearing my whip is going to be Marjorie Bonadies,” Wetmore said, announcing her choice for the Republican whip. Bonadies was minority leader on the previous council.
The previous council’s leadership team had two first-term members: Cory O’Brien and Justin Farmer. Farmer won reelection, but did not get a leadership role.
The council’s new leadership team features only experienced members. None of the progressive Democrats who clashed with the establishment in the last term got leadership seats.
Only the president and the president pro tempore have roles outlined in the town’s charter. The president sets the agenda, creates committees, empowers working groups, and leads meetings. The president pro tempore serves those functions in the presidents’ absence.
Majority and minority leaders lead their respective party caucuses, with their whips as their assistants.
All members of leadership meet with the town administration before each meeting to go over the agenda and to review the administration’s submissions and offer feedback.
President’s Plans
Betty Wetmore.
In a brief speech after his election as president, McGarry outlined two initiatives he plans for this term.
“I want us to work collaboratively with the mayor to establish a plan for growth,” he said. That plan would mostly include capital projects that will help the town grow its tax base, he said. “The best way for us to resolve our financial issues is for us to grow,” he explained.
His other goal is to create a community-relations committee, he said. The last two years have featured a number of incidents and debates that highlighted friction and mistrust between various communities and the town’s government. An officer-involved shooting sparked months of protests and exposed a lack of trust that many residents say they have for the Hamden Police Department (read more about that here). The Board of Education’s 3R Initiative, a district restructuring and school construction plan, has also proven controversial and has highlighted the racial and socio-economic divides in the town.
The community-relations committee would serve an advisory function, and would act as a watchdog for an array of town initiatives. McGarry said that one of Hamden’s major strengths is its diversity, and the town needs a body that can oversee all town projects and functions with that as its guiding principle.
The council will meet again on Dec. 16 to make its first legislative votes.
We can't know whether it will be possible to grow our way out of the town's "financial issues" until we have an accurate assessment of what those issues are. Which means multi-year projections showing how our revenues and expenses are currently expected to evolve and how large a shortfall we'll be confronting in years ahead. Which means we need an adequately staffed Finance Department that can produce those projections.
What is the Council's plan for holding the Mayor accountable for taking even the most basic steps to address our financial challenges (adequately staffing the Finance Department and producing useable financial projections)? We've been without a permanent Finance Director since mid-2018. It's almost 2020.