Opinion: Who Is Really Responsible For Hamden’s Financial Disaster?

Opinion—Hamden is on the brink of bankruptcy, with insolvency so close that I can almost touch it.

With debt of more than a billion dollars (approximately $18,000 per man, woman and child) and a mill rate that is now more than 50, Hamden is one of the most financially fragile towns in the state.

When I was a member of the Legislative Council, from 1999 to 2005, it was already clear to me that we were heading down the path that would lead us to this point. However, nobody cared to listen to me then and I was persona non grata on the council, having to fight in a primary, twice, against the party establishment, to retain my place on the Democratic ticket.

Now, suddenly, and thanks to the efforts of a small heroic group of private citizens led by Christian McNamara, people are waking up and demanding solutions to our catastrophic problems. However, waking up now is akin to shutting the stable door after the horse has bolted. It’s too late to turn things around, much too late, and we cannot look to those who got us into this mess to get us out of it.

But who got us into this mess? It is unquestionable that Hamden’s mayors, Amento, Henrici, Jackson and now Leng, are responsible for much of it, as are the members of the Legislative Council who enabled the profligate and irresponsible behavior of these mayors for two decades.

But the rot goes deeper. In Hamden, a heavily Democratic-leaning town, anyone on a Democratic ticket is likely to win election. So, in our municipal elections, whoever gets on the ticket on the Democratic line is almost certain to be elected mayor or councilmember, as the case may be (with the exception that, by statute, there must be two members of the minority party among the six at-large members of the Legislative Council).

But how do the Democratic mayoral candidate and the candidates for the council get on the ballot? It’s no mystery. 

The answer to this very important question, an answer of which few people in town are aware, is… the Hamden Democratic Town Committee (HDTC). The HDTC consists of seven people from each of the nine districts of Hamden.

But how do these 63 people get their power; who gives them their authority? The answer is… the registered Democrats in each district.

The 63 members of the HDTC are elected, every other February or March, at local meetings, known as caucuses, that can easily be taken over by someone or some group that is well organized. For the past two decades, the best-organized groups have been the ones representing narrow personal interests. After all, a seat on the council comes with a lot of private influence over what goes on in town — over, for example, who gets hired for what job in the administration or the various departments, who gets contracts for municipal goods and services, and what salaries are agreed upon during the budget negotiations. 

Occasionally, there are competitive elections (on these dark and cold wintry nights) for town committee but, over the past two decades, little attention has been paid to these winter elections, which receive relatively little publicity (although, of course, they are legally posted). Sometimes, the election of district members is contested with a ​“primary” in March — but it takes a lot of work and energy to fight endorsed candidates so, more often than not, it is the people elected to the HDTC at the early spring caucuses who end up representing their districts on the HDTC.

(This winter, there were primaries in seven council districts, a record. A batch of newer members won in almost every district.)

When the elections are over, each district has a ​“table” at meetings of the HDTC where, most of the time, members engage in sometimes-heated discussions of trivial or major issues. These discussions are, basically, a waste of time because the members of the HDTC are essentially impotent. Their main concrete activity — bar one — is fundraising for the party at events once or twice a year. 

And here is the one exception: every other year at a convention in July (at Miller Memorial Library), each ​“table” selects the person who will run as the endorsed candidate for the seat on the council from their district in November. Then all the ​“tables” together choose the endorsed mayoral candidate and the at-large candidates (plus the endorsed candidates for town clerk and the Board of Education). At-large candidates run to represent the entire town.

As noted above, since Hamden is a majority-Democrat town, anyone who gets selected/endorsed by the HDTC has a very good chance of being elected. To contest the endorsement, anyone can primary an endorsed candidate but that requires a lot of work in a short time — in this case during the hot summer months of July and August.

So until the HDTC presents better candidates as endorsed candidates, we shall either continue on the downhill path, or we need to identify better candidates who are either endorsed by the HDTC or who are willing to do all the work, in summertime, of contesting the right of endorsed candidates to appear on the November ballot. 

There is nothing, apart from energetically lobbying members of the Legislative Council, that the citizenry can do at this point to alter the town’s trajectory unless they show up in January 2022 to choose the people who will choose the people who will appear on the November 2023 ballot for the rest of us to vote for.

Finally, I should note, more in sorrow than in anger, that anyone who has been involved in Hamden politics for the past 20 years and has not protested vociferously in the past can be assumed to be acting, now, out of expediency and ambition and not out of principle. New blood and new leadership are desperately needed. A functioning democracy is not a spectator sport.