Harp reelection campaign
A new TV ad by Mayor Toni Harp’s reelection campaign attacks challenger Justin Elicker for supporting a police proposal to use drones to track dirt bikers.
“Can we trust Justin Elicker?” a narrator asks in the 30-second ad, which began airing Tuesday on cable stations.
Elicker is challenging Harp, a three-term incumbent and the Democratic Town Committee’s endorsed candidate, in a Sept. 10 party primary.
The new Harp ad (watch it above), produced by the firm Bromstein & Weaver, accuses Elicker of wanting to use “police drones to spy on our neighborhoods” and “violating our rights.”
At a community meeting held three weeks ago, police officials announced they’re working a series of proposals to tackle the rampant speeding and recklessness on city streets by dirt-bike riders. They said their work includes developing a plan, still not formulated enough to unveil, to use drones. “When I see a drone buzzing through Edgewood Park, I’ll be happy,” Assistant Chief Karl Jacobson said at the meeting. (Read about the meeting here.)
Harp’s ad cites an Elicker Instagram post. Elicker wrote the post after attending a Hill North Community Management Team meeting at which residents expressed frustration about dirt bikes. “There are things we can do to better address theses issues. For example, with dirt bikes we have a no chase policy, but we could use drones to follow the bikes and ATVs until they need to gas up.”
On two appearances this month on WNHH FM’s “Mayor Monday” program, including this week’s, Harp has expressed reservations about using drones that way. She said she worries about drones flying near to teen dirt-bikers, thus increasing the chances they’ll crash. And she expressed general concern about drones invading people’s privacy.
Elicker took exception to the ad’s portrayal of his drone position.
“That wholly misrepresents what I said,” he said Tuesday evening. “This is one creative way to address the dirt bike issue, which Mayor Harp has been wholly ineffective in doing. I never said to surveil neighborhoods. If she’s going to misconstrue and completely misrepresent what I’m saying — and by the way, her police department has been looking into using drones to surveil dirt bikes.” Elicker argued that since the police have a no-chase policy for dealing with dirt-bikers, they need to look at “creative” alternatives, from monitoring social media to potentially using drones.
The new ad also attacks Elicker for “propos[ing’ to cut over $1 million in school funding” as an alder in 2010.
Elicker argued that that claim, too, misrepresents his position. At the time then-Mayor John DeStefano was proposing to raise the schools budget by $1.5 million. Elicker and then-Alder Roland Lemar proposed to keep funding flat instead by cutting the proposed increase.
Harp reelection campaign
The two attacks appear in the first half of the ad, which portrays Elicker in grainy, black and white photographs.
Harp reelection campaign
The second half of the ad shifts into color and promotes Harp’s record, from the precipitous drop in street violence during her tenure (inlcuding a 50-year low in homicides) to an increase in high school graduation rates.
“Just ask President Obama,” the narrator states, showing Obama’s White House shout-out to Harp for the work her team did in canvassing neighborhoods to identify young people at risk of getting shot and then developing programs to reduce violence. (Read about that here.)
“Mayor Harp is using negative messaging and totally misleading people about the facts about my record,” Elicker said about the ad. “The facts about Mayor Harp’s record are clear: a 11 percent tax increase. Hundreds of thousands on lawyers for lawsuits the city should never have been in in the first place, and chaos on the Board of Education.” He said the lawsuits he was referencing include an ongoing lead paint class-action case and a challenge to her administration’s firing of former Commission on Equal Opportunities chief Nichole Jefferson.
Meanwhile, in a press release about the new TV ad, the Harp campaign accused Elicker of seeking “to distort Mayor Toni N. Harp’s record with one inaccurate, alarmist claim after another. Instead of offering ideas, he has lobbed distortions and falsehoods about New Havens progress over the last six years.”
“Rather than running a false negative campaign like my opponent, I have focused on a vision for the city’s future and developing the partnerships and strategies needed to achieve it,” Harp is quoted as saying in the release.
You know you're deep in the hole when you have to sling mud