City-Yale Deal Wins Final OK

The Board of Alders unanimously approved a deal for Yale to increase its voluntary payments to the city by $52 million over six years — and design and control a city-owned pedestrian plaza on High Street.

Local legislators took that vote Monday night during the latest regular bimonthly meeting of the Board of Alders. The in-person meeting took place in the Aldermanic Chamber on the second floor of City Hall.

All 25 alders in the room voted in support of an order accepting $52 million in voluntary payments from Yale University over the next six years.

The now-approved deal also authorizes the mayor to work with the university to implement a handful of initiatives detailed in a November 2021 letter written by Yale President Peter Salovey, including the conversion of a section of High Street from Chapel to Elm Streets into a car-free walkway and the creation of a new Center for Inclusive Growth, to be housed at Yale’s business school. (See more below for details on each of the four components of the deal.)

Dixwell Alder Jeanette Morrison said that, since her childhood growing up in New Haven, ​“there’s always been the unsaid rule that Yale individuals and city individuals should not involve themselves with one another. That rule was always dumb to me.

“To see something like this happen, to see that the university sees the importance of the city, sees the importance of its residents, and to come to an agreement to have this money be handed to the city in order for our city to grow, is definitely a step in the right direction.”

Downtown/Yale Alder Alex Guzhnay — who grew up in Fair Haven and is currently an undergraduate at Yale — agreed. 

“I think at the end of it all, we’ve all seen firsthand how the inclusion and the work of New Haven residents makes Yale a better university, because our city and its residents are extremely talented and gifted,” he said. ​“I think it would be a disservice not only to our city but to the university as well to fail to include our city residents the most they can” and to work towards bringing town and gown closer together.

Monday’s vote marked the culmination of over a year’s worth of negotiations between the university and the Elicker Administration focused on increasing the university’s voluntary payments to the city’s bottom line. 

Several of the alders who spoke up Monday night also stressed how the aldermanic vote was a tribute to the many years’ worth of community organizing that has put pressure on Yale to contribute more to the city it calls home.

Fair Haven Alder Sarah Miller thanked ​“all of the organizers who have been working for years to make this possible.” Referring to the money included in this deal as a ​“downpayment,” she said that ​“we need more money from the university in order for the city to function.” And she pledged to continue working with other city organizers to ​“keep pushing until we get what we need.”

East Rock Alder Anna Festa was the sole alder to criticize the deal Monday night, even though she wound up voting for it.

She cautioned that the agreement expires after six years, and that the city does not have a plan in place to ensure that the increased voluntary payments continue. She lamented that High Street between Chapel and Elm will lose its 30 metered parking spaces after the street’s conversion to a pedestrian plaza. And she pointed out that the alders ​“didn’t even receive a rough draft of what” the proposed Center for Inclusive Growth will look like or do.

“The city can use the money, so I’m glad for the cash,” Festa said in explaining why she ultimately voted in support. 

But, she said, ​“I feel like our hands get tied when dealing with these types of negotiations, and it’s a ​‘take it or leave it’ situation, and I hope that changes.” 

Click here, here, here and here for previous articles about the proposed deal.

Click here, here, here, and here for the documents included in the formal aldermanic submission.

Deal Details

The Yale-city deal approved on Monday night has four key components:

• An increase in Yale’s voluntary payment to the city by $10 million for each of the next five years, and by $2 million in the final year of the deal, which would be Fiscal Year 2026 – 2027 (FY27). That means that Yale’s annual voluntary payment to the city would increase from the current amount of $13 million to over $23 million for each of the next five fiscal years.

That increased contribution comes a year after Yale saw its endowment skyrocket in value by $12.1 billion. After the latest citywide revaluation, Yale’s tax-exempt properties have also increased in value by $700 million over the past five years, to a new tax-exempt total of around $4.2 billion.

• The conversion of High Street between Chapel and Elm Streets downtown into a new publicly owned plaza open to pedestrians and bicycles, but closed to automobiles. Yale is responsible for designing, converting, maintaining, and controlling the pedestrian- and bicycle-only plaza, even though the city will still legally own the land. Top city and Yale officials have previously framed the street conversion as similar to what the university has already done on nearby stretches of Wall Street and High Street, but, with the city rather than the university actually owning the land.

• The establishment of a new 12-year sliding scale for local property taxes on properties newly acquired and converted to tax-exempt status by the university. That will see Yale pay 100 percent of a property’s local property tax amount for three years after acquisition. The university will then have to pay the city a sliding scale of payments that reduces steadily from the fourth year to the 12th year after acquisition, resulting in no property taxes paid on that property from the 13th year on.

• Yale’s creation of a new Center for Inclusive Growth to which the university will contribute $5 million in the first six years. That center will be run by Yale School of Management Dean Kerwin Charles.