Candidates File Petitions For 4‑Way Hamden Mayoral Primary

After two full weeks spent searching for signatures, three Democratic mayoral candidates filed the minimum of 946 voter signatures on petitiions Wednesday, bringing the town one step closer to a slowly solidifying a four-way Sept. 14 primary.

Wednesday marked the deadline for Democratic and Republican candidates who are planning to primary for a place on the general election ballot in November to file their petition papers.

Independent candidates filed their forms a week earlier, on Aug. 4. Read more about that here.

Assuming the signatures on their petitions are verified as legitimate, the Democratic candidates who filed petitions will compete with the Democratic Town Committee’s full slate of endorsed candidates, including endorsed mayoral candidate Lauren Garrett for mayor. Read more about those endorsed candidates here.

Incumbent Mayor Curt Leng filed to run for mayor with a slate of nine other Democratic candidates. Those include Melinda Saller for Town Clerk; Kathleen Schomaker, Richard Mutts, Rachel Scolnic Dobin, Berita Rowe-Lewis for Legislative Council At-Large; and Frank Dixon, Jennifer Jason Sweeten, Joshua Watkins, and Nicholas McDonald for Board of Education. That means all of those candidates needed to collectively earn 946 signatures to make it onto the ballot.

Kathleen Schomaker and Berita Rowe-Lewis are incumbent council members who, like Leng, bypassed the DTC convention. Saller, who is currently on the BOE, also did not attend the July convention, though she is running for a different elected seat than she currently holds.

Democratic mayoral candidates Peter Cyr and Brad Macdowall also independently filed successfully by the deadline. This reporter and the Registrar counted over 1,000 signatures for each mayoral candidate. Democratic Registrar Rose Mentone said that by the 4 p.m. deadline, she and her team had verified 756 signatures for Curt Leng, 230 for Brad Macdowall, and 149 for Peter Cyr. She said she hopes to be able to check that each signature is the real name of a registered Democratic voter by Friday.

“I don’t see any reason why all three won’t qualify,” she stated, gesturing to the hundreds of papers stacked around the room. She added that in the decade she has spent as the Town Registrar and her lifetime as a politically active Hamden resident, she has never seen a four-way, or even three-way, race for the mayoral office.

The last four-way race she could recall was more than 30 years ago, when Salvatore Diglio was elected probate judge.

In addition to the three mayoral candidates and Leng’s slate, two other candidates appear submitted petitions to primary for council positions. Oscar Bolanos, who is running for the Third District, handed in 122 names. He’ll need 97 notarized signatures to qualify. Montrel Morrison received 180 signatures and needs 144 notarized signatures to make it to the primary.

Only one Republican, Dolphuss Addison, filed papers to petition for the position of town clerk, but reportedly withdrew his application for ​“personal reasons” before the deadline. Read about the candidates that the Republican Town Committee endorsed in July here and here.

The cramped primary has grown more heated over the past week, with candidates calling one another sexists and vote-suppressers. Read more about the ideological split that has occurred in the Hamden DTC over recent years here and the complicated aim of the more progressive candidates, like Garrett and Macdowall, to beat out moderate leadership, like Leng, here.