It looks like the new Board of Aldermen will have four members who also work for the mayor-appointed Board of Ed. A fifth is an employee of the mayor-appointed parking authority. Thanks to an ethics loophole, that’s legal. Critics worry that, legal or not, it’s bad news for New Haveners seeking a democratic government with checks and balances.
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Good fortune came in twos this month for Michelle Edmonds-Sepulveda. She won the Democratic primary for alderman in the 30th Ward on Tuesday, Sept. 13. Two days later she began work as a full-time truancy officer for the Board of Ed. Edmonds-Sepulveda and another apparent alderman-elect, Gerald Antunes of Quinnipiac Meadows, will join four other aldermen who owe their jobs to appointees of the mayor.
Antunes, a retired cop, oversees security for the New Haven Parking Authority. Edmonds-Sepulveda, who’ll represent West Hills and West Rock, taught dance and drama part-time for 14 years for the city schools; she’d been hoping for years to move into a full-time position.
Newhallville Aldermen Charles Blango also works as a truancy officer. Alderwoman Katrina Jones of Newhallville and Babz Rawls-Ivy of Beaver Hills work for the Board of Ed’s Adult Education division.
They all can do so legally thanks to a loophole in city and state ethics laws. For obvious conflict-of-interest reasons, city employees may not serve as aldermen (and therefore cast votes that may please or displease the boss to whom they owe their livelihoods). The law aims to ensure that aldermen are free to represent their voters’ interests rather than their bosses’ interests.
But the law exempts the Board of Education, the parking authority, and the housing authority, because they are not technically city agencies. They are technically separate from City Hall (although the aldermen vote on the Board of Ed budget and hold hearings on matters involving all three agencies). That means city schoolteachers or administrators or public-housing workers aren’t technically “city workers.” Each of the three agencies receives lots of state and federal money and has a separate board responsible for hiring and firing. So the mayor doesn’t technically do any hiring and firing.
What’s The Problem
Here’s the catch. In New Haven, unlike in most other cities, the mayor appoints the Board of Ed. Same with the parking and housing boards. And New Haven’s mayor, John DeStefano, rules with a strong hand. People know who the boss is — “when it comes time to buying tickets to political fund-raisers, for instance.
“It’s not a good idea” to have aldermen who work for the Board of Ed, argues former Alderman Jonathan Einhorn. “It just creates an untenable situation. You’ve got aldermen whose loyalty is divided. It’s tough enough to keep the city from becoming not just a strong-mayor system of government, but a single branch of government with no legislative checks and balances.”
Einhorn served 16 years as a lonely Republican voice on the almost exclusively Democratic board. He also worked on three separate charter revision commissions — all of which tried to give the Board of Aldermen more power in New Haven to match the great power of the mayor’s office. Einhorn sees the rise of aldermen who work for the mayor-appointed Board of Ed, the largest agency in city government, as setting New Haven back in its efforts to build more of a democracy with independent watchdogs.
“One thing a mayor always wants is not to have to answer to a legislative branch,” Einhorn observes. “It makes governing easier.” But it hurts the city.
Voting for a President
The issue of the board’s independence has arisen in the current contest over who will become the next Board of Aldermen president in January. Supporters of the mayor are trying to replace incumbent Jorge Perez, a City Hall critic, with Beaver Hills Alderman Carl Goldfield. They say they’re not looking to become rubber stamps, but rather to build a more policy-oriented, effective board. They and the mayor maintain that it’s this group of aldermen, not the mayor, who are pressing the campaign and lining up votes. Perez’s side accuses City Hall’s forces of trying to silence critics.
Edmonds-Sepulveda announced her support for Goldfield, the mayor’s team’s choice, right after her primary victory and right before starting her new Board of Ed job. Goldfield was able to declare he has a majority of board members’ support for the January vote. Edmonds-Sepulveda joined the other incumbent aldermen on the education payroll in backing Goldfield, with one exception: Blango supports Jorge Perez for board president.
Despite the fact that Perez’s supporters helped him win his primary, Gerald Antunes says he hasn’t made up his mind yet whom to support for the board presidency. “There’s a lot to learn about each of them. I plan to talk more to them. It’s an important vote,” Antunes says. West River Alderman Yusuf Shah, whose wife got a Board of Ed secretary job last year, also supports Goldfield.
There’s no evidence that any aldermen were told jobs were on the line if they vote otherwise. The aldermen themselves say they receive no such pressure on this or other votes. Some, like Edmonds-Sepulveda and Blango, worked for the Board of Ed long before their elections. They say their role as aldermen has never come up in the context of obtaining or keeping their day jobs. There’s no evidence that any of the aldermen had their arms twisted by the mayor or his top officials in deciding whom to back for the board presidency.
In the public mind, however, the potential always exists for the appearance of conflict, at the very least.
When to Abstain
One way the aldermen try to address that problem is to abstain from votes affecting their employer. Edmonds-Sepulveda says she definitely plans to abstain from voting on the Board of Ed budget, as do the other Board of Ed employees. Yusuf Shah goes the extra step of abstaining from Board of Ed votes, he says, even though he doesn’t personally work for the school system.
Even when an alderman abstains from a vote, he or she can potentially influence colleagues or theoretically trade for votes on other issues.
Antunes, for one, is confident he can stay on the right side of the ethical line.
“I may abstain” from voting involving the parking authority, he says. “That doesn’t mean [other members] many not ask my thoughts. I’m not anticipating any political pressure. I’m not a person that can be bullied by that kind of thing.”
"Clean" elections cannot come soon enough! I received in the mail recently an invitation to a DeStefano for Governor Fundraiser. While he may talk the Mr. Clean game, he still has plenty of hair, no cowlick, and that white T-Shirt has been filthy for years.
The invitation listed Hosts and Patrons. Patrons? As in Patronage? How overt! Many are good folks who give immensely of themselves to the wellbeing of the greater New Haven community. But if they can credit the Mayor and City Hall as the source of much of their good fortune, I believe the DeStefano Campaign should consider turning down donations from some, and in the least make public those relationships. Connecticut voters should understand that this list represents people who may well be more fortunate than the average citizen to have a Governor DeStefano, just as they been under Mayor DeStefano.
Comments on some names I noticed:
"Patrons"
Frank Altieri - City of New Haven Director of Management and Budget
Three Giordanos - Michael, Vincent and Linda - Giordano Construction is contractor for an uncountable number of New Haven Housing Authority and New Haven Board of Education building projects.
Frank Nasti - housing developer and recipient of hundreds of thousands of dollars in control of the Mayor
David Nyberg - downtown developer who would not be who he is without Fernandez/DeStefano.
Cesar Pelli - New Haven architect has done some City work, widely known as subject of dispute between Mayor and CT Dept of Public Works as the Mayor has made it clear Pelli should design new downtown Gateway Campus.
Michael Schaffer - recipient of a gazillion dollars of state and city funds for the retail, parking and market rate residential development of Church and Chapel Streets.
"Hosts"
Catherine Sullivan-DeCarlo - longtime New Haven employee, currently New Haven Public Schools director of communications.
Bitsie Clark - as director of the Greater New Haven Arts Council, her projects were the beneficiary of un-tally-able quantities of City funds, handpicked by DeStefano in 2002 to fill a vacant Ward Alderwoman slot in 2003
Joe Luciano - Giordano Construction employee. That make's four or more donors from the Giordano company. Any others, perhaps one named Billie?
Readers, did you get this invitation? Do you recognize more of DeStefano's Patrons and Hosts as actually having received a little patronage of their own from the Candidate? Are they "giving back to the community" by returning some of their City Hall funding to a chance at Governor's Mansion funding. I will not soon forget the days in the late 1990's when boxes of files were carried from New Haven City Hall by the FBI and King's Horsemen fell so the leader could emerge "reformed" to stand tall.
We will never have "Clean" Elections until those who are running on the Clean Election platform practice Clean Electioneering from day one.