Jobs, Sidewalks Anchor City Point Contest

A clinical social services provider and a fourth-grade teacher are both vying to replace Alder Dolores Colon as she prepares to step down after nearly two decades representing the Hill and City Point on the Board of Alders.

Democratic candidate Carmen Rodriguez and Republican candidate John Carlson will both be on the ballot during Nov. 5’s general election as they seek to fill the soon-to-be-open Ward 6 aldermanic seat.

Neither Rodriguez nor Carlson has held public office before. Rodriguez helps connect insured and uninsured patients alike with food programs, heating bill subsidies, and other social services through her job as a clinical receptionist at Yale New Haven Hospital. Carlson spent the past two decades teaching at John Winthrop Elementary School in Bridgeport.

Carlson has run campaigns for alder and state representative in recent years, and was nominated by the Republican Town Convention this year for the alder seat. Rodriguez, who won the nomination at this year’s Democratic Town Convention, currently serves on the Ward 6 Democratic Party Committee.

On a recent campaign stop at the Robert T. Wolfe public housing complex at 87 Union Ave., Rodriguez said that ​“bringing community together so that we can build a better Hill” is her top priority if elected to the Board of Alders.

The Hill is a large neighborhood, she said, that needs coordinated leadership if it is to be best served. She pledged to work closely with her fellow Hill alders from Wards 3, 4, and 5 to make sure that the neighborhood is speaking in one, unified voice in City Hall and beyond.

A supporter of the local labor advocacy group New Haven Rising, though not a member of any UNITE HERE union herself, Rodriguez, who moved to New Haven from Rhode Island in 1985 and raised three kids who went through the city public schools, said that she has also heard time and again from her neighbors that they need good-paying jobs. ​“That what we’re hearing,” she said. ​“We want jobs for our city.” She promised to work with groups like New Haven Rising to keep pressuring large employers like Yale and Yale New Haven Hospital to hire locally.

Traveling up and down the Wolfe apartments building with longtime tenant Doris Doward, Rodriguez knocked doors, handed out campaign lit, and made her pitch in Spanish to tenant Doward said she herself had not been able to talk to about local politics and their needs because their primary language is not English.

“Since the projects are gone, this area is much better,” Doward said as she looked out a seventh-story window at the vast, vacant lot that used to house the adjacent former Church Street South apartment complex.

Doward said she has heard so many rumors about what will be going in that space instead: More apartments. Just retails. A parking lot for Union Station commuters.

“We do have to get someone out here to be specific as the plans for that site,” Rodriguez said. She promised Doward, and every neighbor she spoke to in the apartment building, that she would be coming back after the election — even if she does not win — to talk more about what they need and how to improve their quality of life in the Hill.

This neighborhood, and this ward, will be changing tremendously over the next few years, she said. The former Church Street South and Coliseum sites are both in Ward 6, as is the latest phase of Downtown Crossing. Community cohesion and making sure that everyone in Ward 6 feels represented by their alder, she said, is a top priority.

“As a community, we need to embrace each other,” she said.

Carlson, meanwhile, said he’s running for the Ward 6 alder seat because ​“we haven’t had representation. Nothing’s been done for Ward 6 for a long time.”

As a public school teacher with decades of experience in the classroom, he said he would be ​“a voice for education” on the Board of Alders and in the neighborhood.

The last time he ran for alder, in 2017, he said he heard over and over from neighbors about how there weren’t enough after-school activities for youth in the Hill.

So he co-founded the Hill Regional Baseball League, a tee-ball league for 5‑to‑7 year-olds that takes place over the course of the summer at the baseball field on Hallock Avenue across from the Sound School. They just wrapped up their second season, he said, and saw roughly 50 local kids participate. He’s hoping to expand the league soon to include kids as old as 12.

“I basically grew up in the Boys & Girls Club,” he added about the neighborhood after-school spot that recently almost had to shut its doors because of financial trouble. That club kept him and his friends off the streets, Carlson remembered. ​“It’s a Hill institution. I’d make sure that it gets funding and continues to stay open.”

He said he would also work to reopen the old Barbell Club at Salem Street and Carlisle Street that’s been vacant for nearly two decades. That spot used to provide tutoring and other after-school activities, he said, and needs to be revived, and perhaps converted in part into a senior center.

Chipped and broken sidewalks, he said, are another big problem in the neighborhood that he would dedicate time on if elected alder. He said Ward 6 needs more and better sidewalks on Salem Street, on Greenwich Avenue, on Putname Street, and on 5th and 6th Streets.

“I am a no vote for any and all tax increases for the City of New Haven,” he added. ​“The city has to do a better job at being fiscally responsible.”

He also said that his being a Republican shouldn’t be a liability, but an asset, for his candidacy. The current Board of Alders is and has long been served entirely by Democrats, he pointed out.

“They pretty much live in an echo chamber. There’s no oppositional voices. Sometimes you need an outside voice that says, ​‘Maybe that’s not a good idea.’”

“A lot of people don’t like the president,” he continued. ​“But they also know that Donald Trump’s name is not on the ballot. A vote for or against me is not an endorsement or condemnation of Donald Trump’s. It’s support for or against John Carlson.”