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Leslie Radcliffe: “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.”
A new training program for community management team leaders is in the works, as a group of alders aims to offer centralized guidance to the grassroots neighborhood teams.
The Board of Alders’ Public Safety Committee voted Tuesday night to recommend that the teams receive the training.
The vote followed a three-hour-long hearing on management teams’ roles and procedures, at virtual hearing attended by more than 75 people. The full Board of Alders will now consider the training proposal.
The contents of the training — and the specifics of who would run it — are yet to be determined. The committee decided to gather input from the management teams on what, exactly, would be helpful to cover. Committee Vice Chair Brian Wingate, who proposed the training, suggested that technological assistance, marketing and outreach, and agenda-making could be possible topics.
“This is not city government trying to take over,” Wingate told the Independent, after some people testifying at the hearing raised that concern. “We’re not trying to dictate the training, because if that’s the case then we’re not listening to them.”
New Haven’s 12 community management teams started out as a 1990s-era community policing initiative, convening neighbors monthly in the city’s various police districts with police officers based in their part of the city. Since then, the management teams have grown into neighborhood-based forums where residents can weigh in on proposed new developments, community projects, and anti-blight reports from the Livable City Initiative, among other topics.
For the most part, management teams have little direct oversight over development projects and other items at hand. But they have become an influential site for neighborhood organizing and communication in many neighborhoods. In recent years, they have also managed participatory budgeting programs through the city’s Neighborhood Public Improvement Project.
Why the need for a central training? Tuesday’s hearing was prompted by a couple of recent rifts within some management teams. Most notably, the Quinnipiac East group is currently undergoing a leadership election dispute, which led to two parallel organizations claiming to be the neighborhood’s management team.
Many management team members and alders attested that their local teams have been functioning well. Hill resident Leslie Radcliffe was among many speakers who questioned the premise that aldermanic intervention is necessary.
“It’s likened to when a student shoots a spitball and the whole class gets called into the principal’s office,” Radcliffe said. Individual disputes should be handled on the neighborhood level, she argued, and not every management team needs to reassess its daily functions. “The first step to address the problem is to identify it, and that has not been identified. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.”
By the end of the meeting, several management team leaders affirmed that it would be helpful to have cohesive training. Many management team leaders raised recruitment and outreach as common challenges.
Elena Grewal, who chair the East Rock management team, noted that “diversity of membership” os a top concern for her management team. That management team represents both the wealthier, predominantly white neighborhood of East Rock and the lower-income, more diverse mini-neighborhood of Cedar Hill. The West Hills/Westville management team similarly straddles class lines in the two neighborhoods it represents, and has a majority of Westville residents as regular attendees.
Lee Cruz, a chair of Fair Haven’s management team, offered that it would be helpful for management team leaders to discuss “setting standards for the openness of the meetings … to form as diverse a group as possible from within that neighborhood.”
The question of who would lead the proposed training remained unresolved.
Quinnipiac Meadows resident Aaron Goode suggested that an external organization like the Community Foundation for Greater New Haven could run the training. A city-run workshop, he said, “would look coercive or heavy handed.”
Committee Alders Wingate and Abby Roth agreed with the suggestion of an outside training leader — so long as the city can find funding, Wingate said after the meeting.
Woke, yet fast asleep. Somebody please get a bucket of cold water.
For the mist part the CMTs are an extension of the DTC. The exception is the Westville West Hills CMT led by Joshua Van Hoesen.
Now get this: No CANDIDATES for political office are allowed to present to the CMT. BUT, the INCUMBENT politicis are able to broadcast their agenda at the CMT.