“Biden Dems” Face ​“Warren Women”

The latest intramural contest between ​“Biden” and ​“progressive” Democrats has come to our shores, at least in the view of candidates competing in a hotly contested local primary.

Hamden Mayor Curt Leng sees himself as that ​“Biden Democrat.” So do candidates supporting him in a Sept. 14 mayoral and Council primary.

A progressive wing of the party, kicked into gear out of the 2016 Bernie Sanders presidential primary, has taken over the Hamden Democratic Town Committee (DTC) in the past two years. And it bypassed Leng, a centrist Democrat, in endorsing mayoral candidate Lauren Garrett and a slate of progressive allies running for Council seats as part of a years-long effort to shift the local Democrats’ ideological direction.

Leng and allies, in turn, have petitioned their way onto the Sept. 14 primary ballot in a battle for the soul of the party.

The race mirrors other primaries that have taken place nationally since 2018, with moderate office-holders branding themselves ​“Biden Democrats” in the face of progressive challenges. Click here for a recent New York Times article assessing those races, ranging from Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s New York surprise victory to Shontel Brown’s come-from-behind recent primary victory in Ohio.

Those labels can become more complicated when applied to local issues like those facing Hamden, whether the topic is policing or fiscal austerity.

Just the same, incumbent Leng, now running as a challenger, embraced the ​“Biden Democrat” label between sips of an iced black coffee during a recent interview in a government center conference room. Those endorsed by the DTC reflect idealist ideologies and political strategies put forward by lefties like Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez. Lauren Garrett more specifically aligned herself with Sen. ​“Elizabeth Warren” in demeanor and outlook.

Both candidates also are appealing to voters to look beyond labels.

“There are all different flavors of pudding in the government,” Leng said. ​“There’s a rainbow of different Democrats, but everyone is painted either super left wing or super moderate.”

On Friday, the same day he qualified for a spot on the Sept. 14 primary ballot alongside a slate of Democratic candidates, Leng sat down to talk about his campaign for a fourth full-term in the mayoral office with the Independent. (A third mayoral candidate, Peter Cyr, an anti-Lenger who has identified as more moderate than Garrett, is also on the Democratic primary ballot.)

Leng officially announced his candidacy back in July, the day before the Democratic Town Committee held their nominating convention and endorsed Lauren Garrett, Leng’s opponent in 2019, for the position. He skipped his own party’s convention, having lost support of the leadership. He represents a group of Democratic town leaders who have expressed discontent with a new — more overtly progressive — town party that some have called exclusionary and overly nationalized.

Virtually every community and political leader in town is in consensus: Hamden’s partisan divide is growing deeper, and doing so at the expense of local productivity and community.

“There are two extremes at the national level,” Leng asserted, referring to ultra-conservatives and Democratic Socialists. ​“They talk at each other and can’t get stuff done.” He said he admires the Gang of Eight, the group of half Democratic, half Republican senators who came together to collectively write a 2013 immigration reform bill, as an example of successful democracy at play.

Leng said that his decision to bypass the convention and petition was first influenced by the DTC’s municipal platform, released in January. That document identified six topics — policing, housing, environment, fiscal accountability, economic development, and education — and listed recommendations for how the DTC would like to see candidates solve specific problems within each of those categories. Read the platform here and learn more about the 2019 DTC split here.

“It was written in a way that was anti-administration,” Leng said. ​“There was a lot of talk about finances that weren’t factual, and a lot of the police positions were not based on what we’ve been working on but on theory.”

“I don’t represent those positions, and those positions don’t represent me,” he said.

Mandates & Finances

Covid-19 protocols, fiscal outlooks, and policing policies might best showcase the ideological differences that separate the two factions of the Democratic party — and illustrate the way each group understands the meaning of leadership.

For example, Leng has steered clear of mask and vaccine mandates during the resurgence of Covid-19 cases, asserting that ​“people are exhausted with mandates and don’t want to hear it anymore.” He said he is following the recommendations of the federal Centers for Disease Control and local health districts. He said he prefers to focus on steps to help people easily take precautions — like providing public metrics of social distancing — rather than strictly enforcing a certain form of conduct. (Update: The mayor did issue an indoor mask mandate Wednesday afternoon.)

Opponent Garrett said in a recent interview that she would pass an indoor mask mandate and require town employees to receive vaccines. Justin Famer, the incumbent Fifth District representative who is running on the DTC platform, backed Garrett’s stance, expressing concern about the rights of workers whose health will be put at risk by patrons who do not comply with mask guidelines.

Leng said that he fears mandates would facilitate ​“rebellion” and create larger societal splits. Garrett and Farmer suggested that mandates should foster a greater sense of communal responsibility and unity.

Finances are another point of contention for the candidates. Leng and Garrett have manufactured two different perspectives on the state of the town’s bond rating — one ​“cautiously optimistic,” the other warning of ​“financial peril” — based on the same data, as the Register’s Meghan Friedmann recently reported.

Leng has critiqued progressives for being too critical themselves. ​“Making the sausage is not something that’s fun to look at, but people like to have the sausage when it’s done,” Leng said, describing how the process of building back Hamden’s finances has been ​“ugly to look at, and we haven’t been able to finish making it.”

Leng pointed to a report from independent rating agency Standard & Poor that improved Hamden’s outlook from negative to stable as evidence of fiscal success. He said that the upgrade reflected cuts in medical expenses, reduced pension expenses and other labor expenses through negotiations. In addition, he said, Hamden’s pension was funded at 100 percent for the last two budgets, ​“something that previously didn’t happen in Hamden’s history.”

On Monday, the mayor also released the results of Hamden’s August sale and refinancing of bonds. Read those here. The town received investor orders of $115 million for only $19 million worth of bonds. ​“Sophisticated investors don’t invest in a community who they believe is in crisis. Just last week we had major investors so interested in Hamden’s improvements and success story that they helped us save over $2 million in a refinancing, as someone would do with a mortgage to save money,” Leng said.

Garrett accused Leng of painting a pretty picture to cover up fiscal mismanagement and dishonest budgeting practices. (Read more about that here.) She said that Hamden’s success with bond sales were due to ​“the general economy and interest rates remaining low,” citing articles discussing how municipalities are currently profiting from selling junk bonds.

“It’s not that the administration is doing anything that’s creative or really thoughtful. It’s that the market rates happen to be good for Hamden right now,” she argued.

She asserted that the municipal budget has increased by around $60 million since Leng took office and that the mill rate has increased by about 13 mills during the same period of time.

Garrett said she is not necessarily looking to demonstrate greater fiscal conservatism than Leng, but to guarantee better transparency and alter spending priorities. She recalled having to submit freedom of information requests from the administration as a member of the Legislative Council so ​“we could have an understanding of what we could vote on.” She also cited the town’s privatized skating-rink contract as an example of obscured mismanagement: ​“We didn’t know much the skating rink was in debt until it was finally put into the audit. There’s so much that’s hidden from the council, which is supposed to be the fiscal authority in town,” she said. (Read the New Haven Independent’s investigation into the skating rink contract here.)

Cop Talk

One example of how the DTC progressives and centrist slate differ on spending — and approach debates on notions of compromise and extremism — is policing.

For instance, the progressive Democrats have come out against having cops in schools (aka ​“school resource officers”). Leng’s team has supported them. (Click here for a previous story about the debate between Leng and progressive Democrats on the issue.)

And the Garrett Democrats have called for restructuring the police department to decrease the number of high-ranking officers in order to lower overtime costs. While some of Garrett’s slate members have called for defunding the police, like Justin Farmer, Hamden’s police union contract means the department must include a minimum of 102 bargaining unit positions and guarantees no layoffs or downsizing for the next three years. (Read more about that in this New Haven Register story.)

Leng named policing as ​“probably the most stark difference between me and the far left of the party,” adding that ​“you cannot compromise on ​‘abolish the police.’”

He said that he believes in adding — and has added — social workers into a broader public safety plan to better effective crisis response and take inappropriate work off the shoulders of police officers. But he added that he thinks the police department is still understaffed, noting that ​“we have the same or less sworn officers than we did in the 1970s, but we have 20,000 more people and a far more complex and problematic society.”

He said he has noticed that other towns of similar size have around 20 more officers on average than Hamden.

“I think defunding the police would be catastrophic to the town,” he continued. He said he wants to invest in both additional officers, community services, social services, and methods of police reform to confront public safety concerns.

He said ​“community policing” measures he and Chief John Sullivan have led and launched — like bike patrol and youth programming with cops — reflect a transformation in the ​“overall department philosophy.” He added that he is proud that the Hamden police are 26 percent nonwhite; 15 years ago, he said, only around 5 percent of the police force was made up of women and folks of color.

He said that the DTC’s slate ​“anti-police” platform brought national issues of police brutality into a town where such concerns were not as relevant. He said that on a recent neighborhood walk with the police, he and a team of supporters knocked on random doors around town and found that ​“there was not one person that said they did not want more police.”

“I know that the economy is how you prevent crime,” Garrett replied, suggesting that she would invest in infrastructure and ​“courting businesses” to show individuals the value of coming to Hamden.

Justin Farmer, one of the slate’s most vocal candidates on changing policing, expanded on Garrett’s point. He said creating jobs, investing in affordable housing, and confronting food insecurity in Southern Hamden would decrease crime and improve the health and well-being of all residents — a key part of public safety.

He listed myriad instances police misconduct and shootings in Hamden over the past year. (Click here, here and here to read about some of them.)

“Three times I’ve asked on record, ​‘Can we have a meeting to talk about public safety?’” Farmer said. ​“No, we haven’t done it.”

He stated that one set of suggestions for police reform would have been passed in a planned once-a-decade rewrite of the town charter, like a pathway to a civilian review board. That proposed charter revision, advanced by progressives, was killed by members of Leng’s slate along with the council’s Republicans.

Leng and Kathleen Schomaker, one of the incumbent Council candidates running with Leng, have stated that they are in favor of the reform policies that were in the charter, and that they are working to pass them through ordinances.

Farmer said that Leng has supported policies that will ​“support the optic” of improved policing, like ​“paying the police overtime to play football with kids,” but that he believes there are opportunities for more substantive compromises, such as creating clear police districts that ensure people in a given community personally know the officers who patrol their neighborhoods.

Who’s Slated for Success?

Jim Pascarella, a DTC member and former councilperson who is also an avid Leng supporter, said ​“there has been too much harsh rhetoric” tossed around by the Garrett campaign.

“It’s not all about shock and awe to scare people into voting for you,” he said.

Leng said that while he usually runs with the DTC endorsed slate, he has enjoyed putting together his own team to run with this time around.

He said he worked to put together a diverse group of community-minded candidates with different political viewpoints and levels of political experience to promote a human and non-partisan group of elected officials. For example, Kathleen Schomaker and Berita Rowe-Lewis, two incumbent council persons who have served for over a decade but also skipped the DTC convention, will run with Leng. His slate also includes newcomers like Joshua Watkins and Frank Dixon for the Board of Education. Read about Watkins, who works in food security, here and Frank Dixon, chair of the charter revision commission, here.

Schomaker, who also serves as the town’s energy efficiency coordinator, affirmed that she views herself and the slate as ​“Biden Democrats” and the DTC slate as ​“Bernie”-like. She, like many of the other slate members, such as Joshua Watkins, has a specific focus that informs her other policy beliefs: sustainability.

“We’re part of the ecosystem, not outside of it,” explaining how physical nature, the economy, and community conversations all have to work together in a symbiotic way in order to produce positive change.

“I like that our slate has people who don’t automatically agree with each other,” she said, noting that Frank Dixon voted differently from her on the charter. ​“We have to ask ourselves: Are we listening to each other? Are we grappling with our differences in a creative way? Are we getting out of our bubbles?”

She said that unlike Leng, she did not necessarily disagree with the policies described on the DTC platform— she said she leans more progressive than moderate— but that she believes community solidarity and ​“courage” to have difficult conversations is more important than specific ideologies.

Garrett said that the DTC slate is composed of experienced individuals with progressive and valued histories like Dominique Baez, Cory O’Brien, Melissa Kaplan, and Mariam Khan.

She and Farmer both questioned how centrist Democrats understand ​“compromise”: ​“They’re compromising with Trumpers rather than with members of their own party,” Garrett asserted, pointing to a controversial charter vote last week in which the moderate Democrats unanimously sided with conservatives to veto the entirety of a new proposed charter that had taken more than a year of volunteer labor to produce.

“You can’t just be positive puppies and rainbows,” Farmer added in response to claims of over-negativity on the part of progressives. ​“You need substance. There are things to celebrate in Hamden, but cronyism and lack of transparency and lack of planning are not things to celebrate.”

Garrett said that the new DTC was partly developed in response to ​“Curt’s fight to keep progressives out of Hamden,” and noted how he challenged the more progressive candidates in the DTC caucuses. ​“If Curt had embraced progressives more, there probably wouldn’t be such a divide,” she argued.

Garrett and Farmer described their slate as a concrete team unified on a shared vision ​“of what the town could be and that inspires people to see the best in our community,” in the words of Farmer.

Pascarella said that the mayoral race would be the ultimate judge of whether or not the DTC truly reflects the will of Hamden Democrats. He said that turnout to the DTC caucuses is much lower than to mayoral elections, and that the majority of people who voted in the DTC elections were ​“activists.”

“If the belief that everyone should have the ability to get a good job in your community and find housing is extreme, then, yes, I’m an extremist,” Farmer said. He added that he thinks of Leng as further right than Biden, calling him more of a Republican than a Democrat.

“The DTC is an elected body of people that represent the Democratic body of the town,” he countered. ​“Leng lost the respect and trust of the DTC. That’s the clearest point that it’s time for him to go. Cuomo resigned because he lost the faith of his caucus, and Mayor Leng, along with his parallel group of people, Berita and Kat, have lost the faith of their caucus.”

“We need change,” Farmer said.