It’s A 3‑Way Race In East Rock

Like her two opponents, the newest candidate in the special election for East Rock alderman is focusing on schools. She said she’d like to organize neighbors around the new East Rock Global Magnet School — as in union organizing.

Jessica Holmes, a 31-year-old stay-at-home mom on Nash Street, is the latest candidate to jump in the race to replace outgoing Ward 9 Alderman Roland Lemar. She has experience organizing with Yale’s unions, but no official endorsement from them at this time.

Lemar, who’s running for the 96th District General Assembly seat with no opposition in a Nov. 2 election, is expected to resign as alderman at a Democratic ward committee meeting Thursday. Committee members will then vote for a replacement, who would become the party’s nominee going into a Nov. 2 election.

Holmes joins two other candidates, Matt Smith and Jane Edelstein, who are seeking the Democratic Party nomination for the seat on Thursday. The meeting is set for 7 p.m. at New Haven Academy at 444 – 448 Orange St.

Holmes, a relative newcomer to town, faces two longtime East Rockers at the convention. She said she’s been getting to know the community through walks through the neighborhood, pushing her baby in a stroller. She said if she doesn’t win the support of the ward committee Thursday, she will run as a petitioning candidate — forcing a competitive election in November.

The race now has two openly gay candidates — Holmes and Smith.

Holmes moved to New Haven in 2003 with her partner, Katie Poynter, who works at the Achievement First charter school group. Holmes just moved back in town in June after spending three years away, from 2007 to 2010. She sat for an interview in the kitchen of her Nash Street apartment, as her 9‑month-old daughter, Evie, crawled around on the floor.

Her entrance into New Haven politics came through the city’s unions.

When she moved to town in 2003, she worked as a secretary at the Yale Medical School, and got involved in UNITE HERE Local 34, which represents over 3,400 clerical & technical workers at Yale. Sometime around 2005, she took a leave of absence to take a year-long ​“union internship.”

She worked on the community benefits agreement that was leveraged through the opening of Yale’s Smilow Cancer Center; documented medical debt; got to know the staff at the Connecticut Center for a New Economy; and knocked on doors for some pro-union aldermen, including Jackie James in the Hill. She said during that time, she interviewed people in the Hill about what they’d like to see in the benefits agreement, which was struck in 2006.

After getting a Masters in Public Health from Southern Connecticut State University, Holmes worked on a not-for-profit health fund in Atlantic City. The fund was managed by a joint board of union and management in casinos; her job was to come up with health care plans would save the companies money while maintaining good benefits for the workers.

Holmes said she’d like to continue that kind of community organizing as East Rock’s alderwoman.

Like Smith, she saw an opportunity in the remaking of the East Rock Global Magnet School, which is being demolished this year and completely rebuilt.

“It’s a great organizing opportunity for East Rock Magnet,” Holmes said. She said she’d like to get a wide range of people involved and ​“shape what it will be.”

In particular, she said ​“I would love to have more neighborhood kids get in.” East Rockers who live outside the boundaries for the popular, high-performing Worthington Hooker School ​“need to have another option,” she said.

Hugh Baran, who works for Locals 34 and 35 at Yale, said those unions won’t endorse a candidate before Thursday’s meeting.

Like the other two candidates, Holmes opposed privatizing custodial work and the mayor’s monetization plan, called for more transparency in the Board of Education. Here’s how she responded to a range of issue questions:

School Reform

Aldermen don’t have enough say in the direction of the citywide school reform effort, nor in the school board budget, Holmes said. Aldermen need to ​“make the Board of Education more transparent and accountable.”

She said she’d do that through charter reform. This year, there’s a once-in-10-years chance to change the city’s fundamental laws of governance. Holmes said she’d use the charter review process to ​“look at the governance” of the school board, which is the only one in the state to be entirely appointed by the mayor instead of elected. She didn’t take a stance on whether she’d support a hybrid, or an elected, school board.

Holmes has a bit of personal experience in the education system. She spent a year as a classroom teacher in New Orleans as part of Teach For America (TFA) program. Holmes said the job didn’t quite work out; she forwent the second year and moved to Marianna, Arkansas, where she worked as a reporter for a local newspaper as her partner completed her own TFA stint. During that time, the largely African-American families in the school system led a week-long boycott of the schools, protesting decisions made by the white leadership of the school board. As a reporter covering that conflict, she said she observed that elected boards can have their problems, too.

Her partner, Poynter, subsequently became a founding teacher of Elm City College Prep, an Achievement First middle school in New Haven. Achievement First has been nationally recognized for its charter schools, whose non-unionized teachers have been credited with closing the achievement gap through long days, high expectations and strict discipline. Of the charter school group, Holmes said ​“I feel like they’re doing a lot of things right.”

Custodians, Monetization, Taxes

Not surprisingly, given her union work, Holmes said she’s against the mayor’s plan to privatize school custodial work.

“It’s a bad idea,” she said, noting that the subcontractors who bid offered lower wages than the unionized force currently gets.

“We can’t use city money to subsidize poverty wages,” Holmes said.

On the mayor’s plan to sell off future parking revenue to fill a budget hole: ​“It’s incredibly short-sighted. We can’t give away long-term revenue to get short-term cash.”

On Tax Assessor Bill O’Brien: Scrutiny on the issue of erroneous assessments should focus on having an open, coherent, transparent process, not on forcing the assessor to resign.

On the budget: Holmes said the city needs to find ​“efficiencies.”

“There are lots of places where we could find savings,” she said. She said she’d look first at the Board of Education budget, but she didn’t give specifics.

Overall, she said, ​“East Rock cannot thrive alone.” Whoever becomes East Rock’s alderman ​“needs to have an eye to the whole city,” including helping other neighborhoods get rid of blight and build jobs long-term.

Looking ahead to the convention Thursday, Holmes said she hopes to clinch the nomination, but she recognizes she is a lesser-known entity in the neighborhood.

“I’m more of an outsider than the other candidates,” she conceded. She said that’s not a bad thing.

“East Rock does have people who have been here for generations — but also people who are transient, and who are just setting down roots,” she said.

“When we moved back here, it was because this is where we want to raise our family,” Holmes added. ​“Now we’re here to stay.”

The other two candidates have been around for much longer and are expected to have more support on the committee. Smith and Edelstein both said they agreed to support each other if the other one gets the nomination.

Holmes, however, said she won’t give up this week. She said she will ​“absolutely” petition to get on the ballot for the special election, which is likely to be held on Nov. 2.

The office of alderman ​“shouldn’t be handed down from one person to another,” Holmes said. ​“The people in East Rock will have a better candidate if there’s a race.”