Thomas Breen photo
Elicker and Harp onstage. Below: Capacity crowd at Co-Op.
Mayor Toni Harp and challenger Justin Elicker pitched radically different visions of clean government and clean elections — and of New Haven’s need for change — in a passionate final face-off before their Democratic Party primary.
The occasion was a debate before a capacity crowd Thursday night at Co-Op High School’s theater on Crown Street downtown. Harp and Elicker are slated to face off in the Democratic mayoral primary this coming Tuesday, Sept. 10.
The theater’s 350 seats were already full by the time the debate, which was co-sponsored by The Democracy Fund, the New Haven Independent, and La Voz Hispana, started just after 7 p.m. According to Co-Op theater staff, a second fire marshal had to be called in order to ensure that at least 400 eager onlookers could fit safely into the high school theater.
Time and time again over the course of the hour-plus event, Harp, a former city alder and state senator who has been a fixture of New Haven politics for the past three decades, forcefully rebuffed Elicker’s accusations that her administration has wasted public funds on fruitless legal battles and bad hires and that her campaign has cozied up to deep-pocketed special interests.
Questioners Paul Bass, Mary O’Leary, Mercy Quaye, and Carlos Resto.
She argued that, instead, her administration has prioritized the welfare of the city’s primarily black and brown working-class neighborhoods through targeted public safety and youth engagement initiatives like YouthStat. She said she has fired employees immediately upon learning that they were acting unethically.
And she said that her campaign has accepted high-dollar developer contributions not because of a prejudice towards the rich, but because the current public financing laws discriminate against the poor. She credited New Haven under her leadership with embodying the best of this country’s ideals, of unity and diversity and economic opportunity, and called on city residents to rally together to keep those ideals alive. She repeatedly depicted Elicker as the candidate of the wealthy and privileged, and her administration as a defender of the poor and working class.
Elicker, a former East Rock/Cedar Hill alder, nonprofit leader, and 2013 mayoral runner-up, reinforced his campaign-long argument that he would clean up City Hall and prioritize ethical government.
He argued that his campaign’s participation in the Democracy Fund’s municipal public financing program, which caps individual contributions at $390 a piece and prohibits special-interest donations, and his neighborhood-spanning door-knocking campaign have been testaments to his democratic commitments. He asked New Haveners looking to transition into a new generation of leadership, a new generation of politics, to cast a vote for him.
“Stacked Against Poor People”
The starkest division of the night came in response to a question about the Democracy Fund, in which Elicker is participating and Harp is not. Participants agree to cap individual contributions at $390 (rather than $1,000) and forswear special-interest contributions in return for receiving public dollars.
An Independent reader named Anna Barry wrote in the question, saying that she is a progressive Democrat who believes in public financing, and appreciates the work that Harp did as a state senator to create the clean election laws. What would get Harp, who has criticized the structure of the program in the past, to participate? In this campaign, Harp, who can accept individual contributions as high as $1,000 a piece, has received many donations from developers with a history of landing lucrative construction contracts with the city.
Harp responded that the Fund’s rules favor candidates who cater to wealthier donors. Because it takes a lot of contributions to qualify for matching money, candidates need donors who can write $390 checks rather than poorer constituents.
“It takes hundreds of thousands of dollars to run for mayor,” Harp said. “And yes, you might be able to get the $30 donations, but the higher donations that come at $350, in certain neighborhoods, particularly in those neighborhoods that I represent, it would be almost impossible to get enough money to run.
“So only very wealthy people from wealthy neighborhoods can run,” she said. “Like my opponent.”
She said the municipal program should be changed to work more like the state clean election program, which she said allows candidates raise money at a certain rate and then receive benefits, as opposed to capping those donations at a certain dollar amount.
“If you have a system that really rewards people at the higher end,” she said, “$350, that’s a lot for the people that I have traditionally represented. Yes, I can get the $30, but not the $350. People who come from the more privileged neighborhoods, they can get that. I think that the current system is stacked against poor people who want to run for mayor.”
Elicker vehemently disagreed.
“I’m so disappointed in what the mayor just said,” he said. “The mayor has accepted thousand dollar donations from so many contractors that get millions of dollars in contracts from the city.” The mayor has accepted more than $1,000 from the fire chief, he said, and $1,000 from the superintendent.
Seventy percent of financial contributions to his campaign, meanwhile, have come from city residents, he said.
“This is not about dividing us, or saying that it’s a rich or poor thing. This is about good governance.”
“It’s time that we change the direction of this city,” he added, “and fund campaigns by the people and not contractors.”
“More Ethical Leadership In This City”
Voter registration pamphlets at a League of Women Voters table outside the theater.
New Haven Register reporter Mary O’Leary asked the two candidates if they plan to beef up the city’s Code of Ethics to cover not just city employees, but all board and commission members, too.
“Yes,” Elicker said. “I think that we need to do so much more on the ethical side in New Haven.”
He said that he would implement a lobby and disclosure form that would require lobbyists who donated to political campaigns to disclose their political spending before getting work with the city.
He said the city needs to have an “open checkbook policy, so every check the city puts out is on the web.” That way residents can scrutinize all financial matters, and not learn about mishaps or misspending only through the newspaper or Freedom of Information Act requests.
He pointed to the Escape Teen Center project and the city’s Youth Department as currently the subject of an FBI subpoena.
“It’s time that we have more transparency in government and more ethical leadership in this city.”
Harp pushed back.
Under her leadership, the city’s pension boards implemented new standards and codes of ethics. Anyone in City Hall who has a concern about ethics can always go to the Board of Ethics, she said, which hears out complaints about potential conflicts of interest.
Then she accused her opponent of slandering the good names of all city employees by repeatedly slinging corruption accusations.
“We hear from Justin Elicker that the Harp administration is corrupt,” she said. “Think about what that means for everybody who works for the City of New Haven.” A Department of Public Works staffer named Edwin Martinez recently rescued a baby left alone while his mom was inadvertently locked in the basement of their home, she said. “He’s not corrupt or unethical.”
Elicker took back up the mic to respond.
“Nobody is claiming that Edwin Martinez is corrupt,” he said. Instead, he pointed back to never-completed plans for the Escape Teen Center, for which contracts went to a friend of a city official now on leave and which the FBI is now scrutinizing.
“What We’ve Done Together”
In their impassioned closing statements to voters, Elicker and Harp doubled down on what they had been pitching all night: a transition to a new style, a new generation, a new era of government, or a re-commitment to the unity, diversity, and working-class advocacy and representation of the Democratic Party at its best of the past few decades.
Elicker, standing and taking a step from the table on Co-Op’s stage where he and Harp had sat all night, told a story about his child beginning school — as a metaphor for generational change he promises to bring to New Haven.
“Natalie and I dropped off Molly on Tuesday, and saw her onto the bus for her first day in kindergarten. It actually was a lot more emotional than I was expecting it to be.
“She was really afraid to get on the bus. She’s four years old, she’s a young kindergartner. To see her waving as the bus drove away, it was a transition to a new stage in her life, a stage where she was growing and moving beyond. It was difficult for all three of us, but we knew it was the right thing.
“And New Haven is at a moment where we’re ready for a new stage, a new type of government and leadership that is more accessible and more responsive, that invests and ensures that everyone in New Haven, no matter their political connections or backgrounds, have the opportunities to thrive.
“We’ve had a long history in New Haven, and I respect and admire the history of Mayor Harp and her work here. I think its time for us all to get on the bus and go to a new phase in our lives.
“Where, even though it may be difficult and we’re taking a risk and it may be a little bit emotional, it’s time that we look forward and take a step into the future and grow together. And i hope you agree with me and join me in voting for our team on Tuesday.”
Harp’s closing statement depicted a thriving city in which diverse groups of people have worked together to bring positive change, success on which she promised to build in a fourth term:
“So New Haven is a place where everyone can be somebody, where everyone has a voice in our government. And my administration has given room and a place for everyone to participate.
“We decided together that we wanted to improve education, that we wanted to make sure that our young people would graduate from high school. When I became mayor, our high school graduation rate was 68 percent. It’s now 80 percent.
“We wanted to make sure that our young people had an opportunity to actually grow up. There was a time in New Haven when so many of our young kids were being gunned down. We worked hard to get together to make sure that we wrapped services around our young people and gave them life, really, and an opportunity to move forward in their lives.
“These things are not easy things to do. They’re things that we’ve done together.
“We’ve decided together that New Haveners needed to have good paying jobs. So we worked with our friends at New Haven Rising. Dave Johnson for two years went door to door to door to talk about how important it is for people in New Haven, in our most challenged neighborhoods, to have a good way to take care of themselves. To have a good job at Yale. To have a good job somewhere in our community. And we got Yale to come up with resources to provide training and to provide jobs.
“That’s what we’ve done together. We have moved New Haven forward.
“There is still more work to do. But i want to work with each and every one of you. I want to use your ideas. I want to work with you to make them materialized so that all of the people in New Haven can benefit from them, and we can together move New Haven forward.”
Click on the Facebook Live video below to watch the full debate.
Mayor Harp decisively won the debate. Her answers on building intergenerational wealth and on "America being more like New Haven," while not the focus of this article, took the house down, twice. Her answers not only shook the room and stirred the crowd, they even surprised and shook Elicker. While he has run an effective campaign, the Mayor took charge tonight and secured a decisive victory.