nothin Voters Decide Harp-Paca Round 1 Tuesday | New Haven Independent

Voters Decide Harp-Paca Round 1 Tuesday

Paul Bass Photo

With appeals to vote for either experience or fresh energy, New Haven’s Democrats head to the polls Tuesday to nominate who’s best to run the city and who should serve three parts of town on the Board of Alders.

Polls open from 6 a.m. through 8 p.m. for Tuesday’s primary. Click here for a list of polling places. Click here to find out what ward you’re in and where to vote.

Marcus Paca is challenging two-term incumbent Toni Harp in a citywide mayoral primary. If he wins, he’ll be the Democratic Party candidate facing Working Families Party candidate Sarah Ganong in the Nov. 7 general election. If Harp wins, she will be the Democratic candidate in the general election; Paca’s name will be on that ballot as an independent candidate.

Party primaries are also taking place Tuesday for open seats in three of New Haven’s 30 wards:

• West Hills/West Rock’s Ward 30, where Michelle E. Sepulveda, Tosha James-Goldson and Charlie Delgado are running. (Read about the race here and here.)

• Newhallville/Prospect Hill’s Ward 19, where Kim Edwards faces Sarah Ofosu. (Read about the race here, here and here.)

Renee Hayward faces Robert Lee in Fair Haven Heights’ Ward 11.

Although candidates’ names will appear on the ballot for a probate judge primary, it’s not really taking place, because one of the candidates dropped out following revelations that he submitted fraudulent petitions to have his name appear on the ballot.

The Main Event

Markeshia Ricks Photo

Paca campaigning at the East Shore Senior Center.

With so few alder primaries, most attention has focused on the mayoral contest. Few specific policy differences have separated candidates Harp and Paca in the campaign. But they have offered different overall takes on pressing issues at two debates. (Click here and here to read about those debates.)

Prime example: New Haven’s affordable housing crunch, which is occurring amid the construction of thousands of upscale apartments. The candidates have not cited a specific project or development proposal they would have handled differently. More broadly, Harp argues that the new construction doesn’t constitute gentrification” because it doesn’t displace anyone and it could lower rents at other buildings; meanwhile, the new projects will build the tax base to support government spending to help the poor, she argues. Paca argues that such a policy represented failed trickle-down economics” and that government hasn’t heard or done enough to help families struggling to make the rent. He promises to make affordable housing, as well as neighborhood commercial development, more of a priority.

Both candidates have portrayed the election as hinging on who better represents New Haveners and who has a personal track record of success — and who has a personal track record of failure. (The details of that argument can be found in this blow-by-blow account of last week’s debate.) Harp argues that while Hartford faces possible bankruptcy, her administration has balanced the books for four straight years and kept the mill rate constant for three. She notes that New Haven’s violent crime rate has consistently fallen; this year Hartford and Bridgeport have had murder rates more than triple of New Haven’s. Paca argues that Harp has borrowed money to conceal mismanagement and looming financial disaster. He argues that the crime statistics reveal a persistent violent crime problem that leaves citizens fearful for their lives, and that any progress can be traced to programs that Harp inherited.

(Click on this video to watch last week’s candidate debate from a Facebook Live feed. Suggestion: Start watching at the 10:55 point. Technical difficulties — with the school’s sound system and a noisy fan — made the principal’s introduction the moderator’s introduction and the first question hard to hear in the part of the video leading up to that point.)

In some ways, this contest has echoes of the 1999 Democratic primary and general election: The incumbent mayor then, John DeStefano, had taken heat for firing three top aides as a result of ethics controversies in his administration, he faced a spirited challenge by a former alder named Jim Newton. Harp’s firing of several appointees — including Paca, her former labor relations director; and a policy aide named Mendi Blue (Paca’s wife) — helped set the stage for this year’s contest.

In the final month of public campaigning, Harp has neglected to mention some of her administration’s bigger successes, while Paca has neglected to mention some of the Harp administration’s bigger failures.

Markeshia Ricks Photo

Harp campaigning at a Newhallville community garden.

For instance, Harp hasn’t spoken about three accomplishments that eluded her predecessors for decades: A notorious fence sealing the West Rock public-housing developments from Hamden finally came down, and the sky didn’t fall afterwards. Her administration found a way to overcome Yale’s legal roadblocks to turn a vacant College Street theater into a concert hall that’s bringing thousands of visitors downtown each month. And it it found a way to enable a developer to start building $100 million worth of apartments, stores and offices or labs on an 11.5‑acre stretch of the Hill that has sat largely vacant since the 1980s.

And while Paca has focused on individual staff firings to criticize Harp’s management record, he has in recent weeks made no public mention of how the administration repeatedly fumbled in its handling of a data breach that compromised the personal information of over 500 New Haveners with sexually transmitted diseases. (Back in May Paca did write this opinion article on the episode.) Nor has Paca made an issue of the repeated cases of alleged violations of citizens’ First and Fourth Amendment rights by city cops — and the failure of officials to acknowledge error or issue discipline or announce any efforts to have officers act differently, while an officer with an establish record of abusing citizens got promoted. (One exception: Paca has criticized the handling of an alt right group’s gathering that went awry on the Green.)

The Base Speaks

Michelle Liu Photo

Former Mayor John DeStefano.

Theoretically, 37,963 registered Democrats are eligible to vote Tuesday. But voting turnout tends to be smaller for municipal elections than for national elections. In 2011, 13,397 Democrats voted in a mayoral primary. In 2013, 14,723 voted. (There was no Democratic primary in 2015.)

Four candidates were running in each of those last two primaries. This year’s primary features just two candidates. Some analysts predict this year’s turnout could fall below 10,000.

Former Mayor DeStefano, who mounted 11 campaigns, said he expects Tuesday’s turnout to be especially small in part because of the lack of alder primaries, which spark neighborhood-based campaigners to pull their neighbors to the polls. Specifically, Yale’s UNITE HERE locals, the largest vote-pulling group in town, are pretty much absent from this alder primary season.

Also, DeStefano said, this year’s campaign lacks a compelling issue” to bring out large numbers of people who otherwise wouldn’t vote, such as a tax increase or a spike in violence. New Haven’s violent crime has steadily declined in recent years; the city has had four straight balanced budgets and three years without a tax increase. (Paca argues that the statistics mask dangerous underlying crime and pending fiscal woes.)

As a result, DeStefano predicted, the primary turnout will consist largely of voters of habit”; people who have lived in New Haven a long time (“How many people are going to vote out of the Novella? Or the Corsair?” he asked rhetorically); and small groups of people connected to the candidates and fired up by issues that don’t excite the city at large. So it makes sense that in primaries candidates generally focus on their base rather than on undecided voters or people in the opposition, DeStefano argued: It’s a more profitable use of time to pick more low-hanging fuit — that is, to excite your base than to try to convince unconvinced voters.”

If Paca wins Tuesday’s primary, he will not face Harp in November, because she did not petition for an independent spot on the ballot. If Harp wins Tuesday’s primary, Paca gets a second shot on Nov. 7, when his name will appear on the ballot as an unaffiliated candidate. (So will the name of Sarah Ganong of the Working Families Party, who said she’s working to win 1 percent of the vote so the party can secure a guaranteed ballot spot in future municipal elections.)

It is generally believed that Paca needs to capture at least 40 percent of the vote Tuesday to have enough momentum to compete in a general election match against Harp. The city has 14,544 unaffiliated voters, 2,364 registered Republicans, and 514 members of other parties who can’t vote this Tuesday but can vote in November, according to the most recent statistics from the Registrar of Voters Office.

Since 2011, two-shot mayoral elections have become the norm (except in 2015): Candidates who failed to win the Democratic primary run again as unaffiliated candidates in November.

DeStefano suggested that New Haven copy other cities in doing away with partisan primaries — instead having all mayoral candidates compete in a first run; then, if no candidate wins more than 50 percent of that vote, the top two finishers compete in a second election. Citywide elections should get rid of the party thing,” DeStefano argued. There’s not serious competitoin between the parties.” Republicans last elected a mayor in 1951. They do not have a mayoral candidate on the ballot this year.

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