Primary Puts Plantation Politics To A Vote

A central issue has emerged in a three-way rematch race for aldermen in Ward 22: How should Dixwell deal with City Hall and with Yalies?

The issue reflects an age-old debate in ward politics in neighborhoods like Dixwell, Newhallville, Fair Haven, and the Hill. What’s unusual is how starkly the three candidates in this race articulate and represent three poles in that debate.

The rematch election takes place next Tuesday, Sept. 11. The election is a Democratic primary, which in one-party neighborhoods like Dixwell has historically been tantamount to a general election.

Alderman Greg Morehead (pictured at left) is seeking to hold onto a seat he won five months ago in a spirited special election. Once again he is running with the support of the citywide Democratic Town Committee’s vote-pulling operation and its allies in Yale’s Democratic Party. The ward comprises the Dixwell neighborhood as well as four of Yale’s residential colleges.

Neighborhood organizer Lisa Hopkins (pictured at the top of this story), who lives across the street from Morehead, is running against him, as she did in April. She’s pitching her campaign to voters seeking independence from City Hall and party leaders and other organized groups from outside the ward.

Cordelia Thorpe (pictured), another neighborhood activist who ran in that April special election, is technically running in Tuesday’s primary. But Thorpe, who’s backed by some prominent older black politicians from outside the ward who are currently at odds with City Hall, said she’s concentrating her efforts on an independent candidacy in November’s general election. She argued that Democratic leaders prevented the chance of a fair primary because of their manipulation of party rules.

Morehead: City Hall A Needed Ally

“I don’t mind being called the mayor’s puppet,” Greg Morehead said in a conversation Friday outside the Community Resource Center at Monterey Place. ​“Because I know the job I’m doing for my constituents.”

City Democratic Party leaders, bypassing a vote by the ward’s party committee, chose Morehead as their candidate in the April special election. They brought in experienced vote pullers from across the city to identify and bring loyal machine voters to the polls. In addition, they worked with City Hall-friendly Yale undergraduates to bring some 90 Yale students into Dixwell to vote for Morehead in that election. Even though Yalies make up only a small portion of the ward, few longtime residents vote in the ward. (One exception: 1989, when voters waited in line for hours to help elect New Haven’s first African-American mayor.) With four candidates running in the April special election, still only 439 people voted.

Morehead said he made a point of reaching out to Yale students. ​“I want to get them involved,” he said. Even though most students stay here only four years, he noted, ​“there’s a lot of resources they bring when they’re here. Why not bring them in?” He noted that he still would have won the special election without the Yale votes.

He also reached out to Mayor John DeStefano and leaders of the Democratic Party to back him in the primary. ​“I felt it would be counterproductive for the ward to go in without the mayor’s support,” Morehead said. With City Hall’s support, an alderman has a better chance of obtaining benefits for the ward, he argued.

In office, Morehead, an entrepreneur who gives motivational speeches to inmates, has organized events for kids and seniors. He said he’s proudest of working with the company that manages elderly complexes at 114 Bristol St. and 69 Webster to open a senior community room and hire a coordinator to plan activities for seniors.

“They felt like they were in a prison” without anyting to do, he said of the seniors.

On citywide issues, Morehead has proved a loyal, and largely unquestioning, vote for the Democratic administration of Mayor John DeStefano.

For instance, Morehead expressed full support for the city’s proposed deal to sell (for $1) land and subsidize the construction for a 31-story tower on the Shartenberg site at Chapel and State streets.

Asked why, he responded, ​“Gosh, you’re hitting on all the issues. I had only one concern [the $1 sales price]. But on the flip side of that, the company coming in, what he wanted to do and bring is going to be real beneficial for New Haven. It has the potential to create a lot of revenue for New Haven. That more than makes up for it.” He also likes that the plan includes 50 subsidized ​“affordable” units.

Morehead voted for the $443 million city budget, a 6.54 percent increase over last year. ​“I’m a homeowner myself. I was voting to raise my own taxes,” he said. He said he voted against last-minute budget-cutting amendments introduced by aldermen independent of City Hall because they would have delayed the hiring of cops and firefighters. In the future, he said, he’d like to see a review of people in office who make a lot of money” in ​“various departments” to see if some of their jobs can be cut.

Hundreds of people recently turned out in Dixwell to complain that community policing has withered under the DeStefano administration the past few years. Morehead said Friday he believes ​“we’re on the right track” with community policing, although ​“more can be done.”

What about a recent consultant report that portrayed community policing as having lost community support and the police department as in need of severe structural change? ​“It was all right,” Morehead said. ​“I looked at a few pages of it. I feel the report and what they found was correct.”

Hopkins: Paging ​“Independent Thinkers”

“Are we even doing community policing right now?” Lisa Hopkins responded when asked about the same issue.

In a conversation on her front porch Friday, Hopkins, an affordable-housing consultant, disagreed with Morehead on each citywide issue.

She said community policing won’t come back until people in neighborhood like Dixwell organize more block watches. (She recently got one going on at the Victory Gardens complex and is organizing another on her street, Frances Hunter Drive.)

She said she would have voted against the Shartenberg project. (“We’re spending so much time on building luxury developments, oversaturating the housing stock with luxury housing with subsidies… It amazes me how we bend over backwards to help a develop to get a property for a dollar when we can’t help taxpayers who are being killed” by the budget.)

She also would have voted against the city budget, she said. ​“In three years, there will be [new homeowners] on my street who can’t afford the taxes.”

Where would she have found new revenues or budget cuts to balance the budget? In the short term she would have supported the last-minute proposal by Alderman Jorge Perez and other aldermen independent of City Hall to delay filling some unfilled jobs in the fire, police, and education budgets, Hopkins said. Ultimately she believes significant cuts can be found from the city workforce if a hard look is taken, especially at political appointees. She noted the swarm of city employees from all over town who were able to take off work during the day during the special election to help Greg Morehead defeat her in April — a swarm found every election day in wards targeted by City Hall and Democratic leaders to preserve loyal votes or defeat potential critics. If they all had vital work to do, they’d be at their jobs those days, Hopkins argued.

More broadly, Hopkins departs from Morehead on the political strategy Dixwell should take toward City Hall and Yale. It shouldn’t be confrontational necessarily, but it should be independent, she said.

For instance, she said, she doesn’t see a purpose ​“bitching and moaning” about how party leaders organized the Yalie vote for Morehead. She, too, is reaching out to Yale students in this election, but not, she said, by making her political bed with party leaders from outside the ward. She has been meeting with the Black Student Alliance at Yale and generally making a pitch to ​“independent thinkers” on campus.

“Yale produces independent thinkers,” she said. ​“Sometimes the political machine supsercedes that” by lining up the votes of well-meaning students who ​“want to be part of the in group, whatever the mayor’s doing right now. I’m reaching out to all students who are independent thinkers, who can appreciate a Democrat who may not be part of the political machine and has something to offer.”

Within the Dixwell neighborhood, too, she is pitching to ​“independent”-minded voters. Since the rise of a one-party state in New Haven in the mid-20th century, many aldermen from black or Latino neighborhoods like Dixwell have openly worked with the machine under a tacit understanding that has gone by the name of ​“plantation politics”: They produce reliable votes or little argument on citywide issues of concern to a strong mayor and their support for his campaigns. In return they’ll get more jobs or paved sidewalks or government grants for people in their wards.

Critics have long argued that that arrangement works in the self-interest of the aldermen but rarely pays off in terms of significant support for their wards — and can hurt everyone in the city, including the aldermen’s ward, by shutting democratic debate and independent scrutiny of development and budget and police issues that affect all of New Haven.

Hopkins falls in the category of such critics. While not ditching the Democratic Party, she didn’t seek the mayor’s support in the April special election; nor did she run against him. As a neighborhood organizer she has taken on City Hall over what she calls broken promises by a city-aided developer who built the subsidized homes on Frances Hunter Drive; she has been the leader of a homeowners’ group that has won concessions.

“Playing ball with the mayor gets you nothing but a title of of being hand-picked. You’re able to push the mayor’s agenda. But it’s a new day. I don’t think that’s the way things get done,” Hopkins said. She argued that City Hall-allied aldermen ​“still get the short end of the stick” in neighborhoods like Dixwell. ​“The history shows it… You garner more respect” by ​“remembering who elected you” and staying independent and building support primarily from the neighborhood, Hopkins argued.

Thorpe: Go Outside The Party

Candidate Cordelia Thorpe stands somewhere between Hopkins and Morehead on citywide issues, but takes a harder line on what she calls machine control of ward politics. She tried to get the results of the special election thrown out in April by appealing to the state Democratic Party in Hartford, arguing that the local Town Committee had violated party rules by not allowing ward committee members to vote on an endorsed candidate. She looked for support from veteran black political figures from outside the ward who are currently at odds with City Hall, such as the Harp family and former Mayor John Daniels.

“The city has plantation-style politics,” said Thorpe, who runs a home day-care center. ​“What I’m trying to do is work for democracy.”

Click on the play arrow to watch a video report by the Yale Daily News’ Andrew Mangino on Thorpe’s and Daniels’ adventures pressing their case in Hartford.

On specific citywide issues, Thorpe said in a conversation last week that the cops are ​“doing the best they can under the circumstances” with community policing. Asked about the recent consultant report calling for major structural changes at the police department, Thorpe said, ​“I have read” it.

Her view on the Shartenberg project?

“What’s the pros and cons?” she responded. ​“If they’re going to hire minorities, I’m for it. If they’re going to hire all outside people, no.”

Thorpe said she would have voted against the budget. She said she would look to new revenue, through development of new business, rather than budget cuts in order to avoid tax increases.

Thorpe said last week that she’s focusing more on an independent November run because ​“The Democratic Party doesn’t want to be inclusive.”