Thomas Breen photo
Hi/Bye: Outgoing 911 Director Stratton, at March press conference announcing his appointment.
A month and a half after taking over the city’s 911 call center, Kevin Stratton is leaving City Hall — with the future leadership of the turmoil-wracked department now up for grabs.
Mayor Justin Elicker confirmed for the Independent during a Wednesday afternoon phone interview that Stratton will soon be departing from his role as the director of the city’s Public Safety Communications department, also known as the Public Safety Access Point (PSAP).
The mayor said Stratton’s last day on the job will be Friday. He said Stratton gave notice last Monday about his coming resignation.
“I’m very disappointed that he’s leaving,” Elicker said. “Kevin decided that it wasn’t the right fit. We would have loved to have kept him.”
During a Thursday morning phone interview, Stratton also told the Independent that the PSAP role just “wasn’t the right fit for me.”
He said that, after being in law enforcement for 25 years, “that’s where my heart is.” He said he’s now going back to his former job as chief of staff to the chief of police at the Shelton Police Department.
Stratton thanked the mayor and the city’s 911 call center employees for supporting him during his brief time on the job. He also recognized what a uniquely challenging job being a 911 call operator in New Haven is.
“Every department’s understaffed,” he said. That’s true for PSAP as well. “We don’t have even enough applicants applying for these jobs.” Over the last two weeks, he said, New Haven’s PSAP received 4,800 91 calls, and 9,700 administrative calls. That’s a lot, he said, for someone who could be working a 16 to 18 hour shift.
“I’m very kind of regimented,” Stratton repeated. “I think my expertise is more in the law enforcement side than in my position here.”
The mayor said his administration is currently looking for someone new to replace Stratton as the head of the city’s 911 call center. He said he hasn’t yet finalized who’s going to step in to lead PSAP in the interim.
Stratton’s resignation comes roughly a month and a half after he started in the role on March 28, after Elicker tapped him to replace recently retired PSAP director George Peet.
Before heading to City Hall, Stratton, a New Haven resident, worked as the chief of staff for the Shelton police chief. Before that, he worked for the state police for 23 years, rising the ranks from trooper to master sergeant.
During a March 21 press conference announcing Stratton’s appointment, Elicker said Stratton worked as an“executive officer” for the state police department, supervising 100 subordinates in all aspects of police work, including dispatchers assigned to various PSAP locations.
A press release sent out by the mayor’s office at that time said that, in his capacity as public safety communications director, Stratton would oversee all aspects of New Haven’s 911 PSAP operations, including“coordinating, managing and participating in the activities of the telecommunications center and its personnel. This includes fire, police and ambulance responses.”
Meanwhile, last year, a host of workplace woes at the 911 call center rose to the surface during an hourslong public workshop hosted by the Board of Alders Public Safety Committee.
Click here to read about that meeting, at which 911 call center operators, union representatives, and departmental leadership sparred over union contract-mandated scheduling requirements, the dearth of bilingual call operators, and departmental recruitment, hiring, and training protocols.
Asked if Stratton cited any particular reasons for leaving the job so soon after starting it, Elicker replied only that Stratton “felt like it wasn’t the right fit.”
More broadly, the mayor said, Stratton’s departure underscores just “how difficult it is to hire people for these specialized director positions in the city. Many of these high-level positions’ salaries are lower than for the same positions in other municipalities.” He noted that the city’s can’t hire retired city employees for these roles because of New Haven’s “no-double-dipping ordinance.” And he said that the city’s residency requirement for these department head positions often “makes it immensely difficult to hire people who are settled in another town” and don’t want to sell their homes, move their families, and uproot their lives to take a job at New Haven’s City Hall.
During his Thursday morning phone interview with the Independent, Stratton said that none of the issues cited more generally by the mayor — salary, residency requirements, or “double-dipping” — contributed to his leaving his job in this particular case.
Stratton isn’t the only public-safety department head to be leaving their post on Friday. That’s also the last day for city Acting Police Chief Renee Dominguez, who announced on Tuesday that she will retire as the city continues looking for a new permanent police chief. The mayor has tapped city Chief Administrative Officer Regina Rush-Kittle to serve as acting police chief in the interim.
Can't rehire retired city workers part time? Not true I've seen plenty in my day. New Haven is an extremely hard environment to work for, you have to like the politics and the intrigue and be able to survive. They should produce a show "Survivors, New Haven"