Laura Glesby Photo
Zelema Harris outside her Townsend home.
“I love math,” Zelema Harris divulged with a smile. “I love dealing with budgets.”
A pension analyst by day and an accountant on the side, Harris hopes to bring her passion for crunching numbers to the Board of Alders — along with a vision of children across the city educated in civics, engaged in afterschool activities, and prepared for an artificially intelligent future.
Harris is running as a Democrat to represent Morris Cove’s Ward 18 on the Board of Alders. She is competing against two other candidates, Democrat Leland Moore and Republican Anthony Acri, in a bid to take the baton from incumbent Democratic Alder Sal DeCola.
The ward includes a medley of coastal parkland and resource-intensive infrastructure used widely across the city. It encompasses the New Haven portion of Tweed airport, a power plant, a wastewater treatment facility, a coast guard station, the historic Townshend Estate, East Shore Park, the seawall, Lighthouse Point Park, and Nathan Hale Elementary School (which two of Harris’ four kids currently attend).
According to DataHaven, Morris Cove has the city’s highest homeownership rate (80 percent), lowest proportion of low-income residents (9 percent), and highest white population (79 percent). The neighborhood is one of the city’s highest-voting wards, and in widely-Democratic New Haven, it’s the ward where Republicans tend to have the most support; in 2024, Trump received 41 percent of Ward 18’s votes.
Democratic and Republican primary elections are slated for Sept. 9, with early voting available from Sept. 2 through Sept. 7.
Meanwhile, the general election is scheduled for Nov. 4, with early voting available from Oct. 20 through Nov. 2.
Harris moved to the neighborhood when she bought her Townsend Avenue house about three years ago. She recalled that on her kids’ first day of school after the move, her next-door neighbor brought over homemade cookies.
“I don’t even like chocolate chip cookies, but hers were amazing,” Harris marveled.
In the intervening years, Harris said, she’s found neighbors who feel like “family.”
That sense of care radiating from her neighborhood is too rare these days, Harris said. She recalled growing up in East Rock and Newhallville at a time when each neighborhood made a priority of “caring about the kids, caring about what happens.” She wants to help nurture that community feeling she counted on as a child.
“Covid has made a huge impact on people’s lives,” Harris observed. “Everyone does self-checkout. We have this microwave mentality: I want it now.” People are lonelier, she mused. She said that as alder, she would go “back to the basics” and focus on “door-knocking” and increased communication with neighbors.
Harris has run her own accounting company for 15 years while working by day as a pension analyst for the town of Hamden, a role in which she meets one-on-one with prospective municipal retirees to identify the benefits that work best for them. She works these two jobs alongside being a parent of four children (three of whom are currently in school) — plus, as of recently, a new grandparent.
“I’m here. My kids are here. This is where I’m gonna reside” for many decades going forward, Harris said.
In addition to being a New Haven Public Schools parent (and a graduate of High School in the Community), Harris said she worked for seven years as a substitute teacher in the school district, until around 2017.
Those three distinct windows into the school system have given her the sense that NHPS tends to be “reactive” rather than “proactive” about preparing kids for the broader world. She wants to explore how the school district can prepare for a global “reliance on A.I.,” for example.
More broadly, she said that, if elected alder, she’d want to increase access to after-school and summer programming for kids. Her own children have attended programs at The Perfect Blend and New HYTEs, which she called “amazing.”
One of the most significant and controversial changes planned for the neighborhood is the proposed expansion of Tweed Airport.
“There’s good and bad parts to the airport,” said Harris. She said her goal as alder would be to advocate for more transparency and communication from the airport about the environmental and quality-of-life impacts of the expansion. The project needs oversight, she said, to ensure it is “as safe as it can be and as environmentally safe as it can be.”
“A huge thing for me is responding” to every communication from neighbors, whether or not she can provide an answer immediately.
“The biggest thing is that people often don’t feel heard,” she reflected, ”and I can agree with that.”
Ward 18.