Paul Bass Photo
Ron Hurt leads fellow alders in prayer at endorsement.
If the election were up to New Haven’s Board of Alders, Toni Harp would be reelected mayor this year.
A majority of the board’s 30 members Wednesday announced that they are endorsing Harp in her quest for a fourth two-year term.
Fourteen of those alder endorsers showed up to a press conference in front of the Cinque statue outside City Hall. The group included Alders Tyisha Walker-Myers, Jeanette Morrison, Evette Hamilton, Kenneth Reveiz, Brian Wingate, Evelyn Rodriguez, Delphine Clyburn, Dolores Colon, Ernie Santiago, Richard Furlow, Jill Marks, Frank Douglass, Ron Hurt, and Adam Marchand. Kampton Singh, who has won the backing of Ward 5’s Democratic committee to fill a vacant alder slot this year, joined the group on the steps.
Two other alders who didn’t make the press conference — David Reyes and Jose Crespo — later confirmed to the Independent that they’re backing Harp, bringing the number of current alders in her camp to 16.
The event took place 24 hours before a scheduled Democratic Town Committee convention to endorse a candidate for the party’s mayoral nomination.
Those at the press conference Wednesday know that city’s 58,000 or so registered voters get to elect the mayor, not the Board of Alders. But many of the alders present are known for working hard to turn out the vote, a crucial task for any successful campaign.
State Rep. Juan Candelaria — who had been rumored as a possible mayoral candidate this year — showed up to the event, too, to support Harp.
Board President Walker-Myers, who served as emcee for Wednesday’s event, alluded to that fact in her remarks.
“We endorse you. We support you. And we will get out there and work for you,” she told Harp.
Walker-Myers put the endorsement in the context of the work she and fellow members of the board’s majority have done since first getting elected as a team in 2011. Yale’s UNITE HERE unions backed, and continues to back, that board majority. Walker-Myers spoke of the group’s ongoing focus on “responsible community policing,” jobs, and affordable housing. She said the alders have made progress on those fronts in tandem with Harp, whom they first helped elect mayor in 2013.
“We have taken this journey together,” Walker-Myers said. “And the mayor has been part of it.”
She credited Harp’s administration for launching inter-departmental neighborhood sweeps that are identifying and fixing quality-of-life problems like blight and broken streetlights. As a result, she argued, neighborhoods like Newhallville are no longer “left behind.”
“We are going to continue to lead this city together,” Walker-Myers ” We are going to continue fighting until we have a city that we can all be proud of, from Newhallville to Morris Cove.” She said the assembled alders represent a group that “looks like New Haven.”
In her remarks, Harp echoed the focus on affordable housing, community policing, and job creation. She spoke of crime being at a “50-year low” in town, and new affordable housing going up, including new units announced earlier Wednesday at the soon-to-be-rebuilt Rockview Circle public-housing complex.
“New Haven is the city turning around Connecticut’s economy,” Harp declared. “New Haven will be the city that turns around its economy for all people.” (The above video includes her and Walker-Myers’ remarks.)
In office, Harp has consistently supported major priorities of the UNITE HERE contingent, including backing Yale graduate students’ unionization drive, supporting a proposed Bridgeport casino and signaling to hotel developers that they should expect to have a union if they want to build in New Haven.
Justin Elicker — who’s challenging Harp for the Democratic mayoral nomination in a rematch of their 2013 contest — has so far collected the backing of four members of the Board of Alders: Darryl Brackeen Jr., Anna Festa, Steve Winter, and Abby Roth.
In her 2013 mayoral campaign, Harp received a joint endorsement from 18 alders at an event in her Whalley Avenue headquarters and the backing of 39 former alders at a separate event at the former Bentara restaurant on Orange Street.
Black, Latino Clergy Find Common Cause
Thomas Breen Photo
Clockwise from left: Pastors John Lewis, Boise Kimber, Willis Miller, Donald Morris, Jose Champagne.
The alder endorsements took place a day after two dozen African-American and Latino ministers endorsed Harp’s reelection at an event in Goffe Street Park.
The ministers visited the Independent offices Wednesday to stress that they see the joint endorsement as an historic coming together of religious leaders from two communities that haven’t always worked together in New Haven. They said they felt that point got lost in first-day coverage of their endorsement.
Pastor Donald Morris and Rev. Jose Champagne said they organized the group for the endorsement and did some honest soul-searching about their past relationships.
“We realized that the Latino and the black communities have a need to come together,” Morris said. “We have a lot in common.”
“I’ve lived here for 29 years. I’ve never seen Latino pastors wanting to have this relationship with the African-American community,” Champagne said. “We live in the same city. Our children go to the same schools.”
I will state the obvious. The only endorsement that counts is that of the voters in November. Politics really does make strange bedfellows.