Ward 1 Blog

In my three years in New Haven, I don’t think I’ve seen a more entertaining Board meeting.

The highlight of the meeting was that Charter Revision was halted. As you may know, Charter Revision is the process by which the City presents voters with a referendum on changes to the Charter. It happens at least every ten years. The issues that were most often discussed this year were extending aldermanic and mayoral terms to four years and decreasing the size of the Board. Due to disagreements mostly with the process — where people who were going to sit on the commission didn’t even come in to testify before the Aldermanic Affairs Committee — and over the narrow focus of the commission (since there were also other issues that many wanted the body to consider, a group of aldermen ended the process with some procedural maneuvering. While their objections were legitimate, I did think that we should have worked out some compromise where the process could have continued in a different manner. There will be tens of thousands of voters who vote this fall who won’t come out next year. And for that reason, we should have found a way to have these issues on the ballot this fall. But, at least for now, it doesn’t look like that’s going to happen.

I also introduced a proposal to increase and expand the City’s Living Wage ordinance; I’ll post more information about that sometime soon.

Sorry about the pace of my updates lately; I actually haven’t had a committee meeting since the CDBG process wrapped up, and with there being five Mondays in April, there was also an extra week without a meeting.

We did meet last week though, and while there wasn’t anything of great importance that received final passage, there were a couple of interesting items that will be sent to their respective committees over the next month. One of those items was an order requiring applicants for city jobs to be residents of the city, and the second was an order establishing a working group to study parking (which I co-sponsored).

Residency

The residency order, led by Alderman Darnell Goldson, would require all applicants for city jobs to live in the city, offer incentives for current city employees to move to the city, and require a contribution from city workers who live elsewhere to help maintain our infrastructure.

Other cities do have residency requirements — and I believe New Haven had one at some point too — but such requirements were banned by the General Assembly in the late 1980s. I believe that having a residency requirement would be a step in the right direction: police officers would be seen more favorably by the community if they actually lived in the areas that they police. In the spirit of community policing, having officers who lived in these neighborhoods would make the force seem much less militaristic and much more community-oriented. It would also make officers more effective if they were more familiar with the respective areas and had more credibility in the community. Likewise, teachers would be more familiar with the challenges that their students face if they lived nearby.

But more broadly, requiring city employees to live in the city would help solidify our middle class and bring millions of dollars in salaries back within the city limits. That money would come back to the city in property taxes and to local businesses where employees would be more likely to shop. Plus, it could open some employment opportunities for many in town who really need good jobs.

Unfortunately though, without a change in state law, this legislation may not make much of a difference. But it will be useful to at least have the conversation.

Related articles: Independent, YDN, Register

Dynamic Parking

The second item that I’ll discuss is the order that I co-sponsored with Aldermen Elicker and Lemar from East Rock. It will create a working group to examine on-street parking in the city. While the group wasn’t formed explicitly to reach a particular conclusion, we do want to look at ways for the city to maximize its parking assets while providing fair and adequate access to potential parkers.

More specifically, we’ve been looking at a system called dynamic parking, which sets parking rates according to the demand at a given moment. As such, on some streets prices would decrease for most of the day, while they could rise at other times. But by having a competitive pricing scheme, there would almost always be parking available (with increased turnover), which would in turn reduce the environmental impact of cars circling the block looking for spaces while providing local businesses with more customers. Likewise, the city would be able to maximize its revenue by setting parking fees according to the demand for each space at a given moment instead of arbitrarily setting rates for the entire city.

There are also some other good ideas about parking, and I hope the working group can devote some time to all of them.

Related articles: YDN, Independent, Register

On March 17th, I attended my first meeting of the Food Policy Council. I found out that the Council is in a period of transition as there are several members who are in the process of rotating off. By the way, if you know anyone in the community who might be interested, please invite them to apply. With the recent closing of Shaw’s, a lot of people are thinking about these issues, so it’s an exciting time to get to work.

During the meeting, we heard about work that the Yale Law Clinic is doing with the Greater Dwight Development Corporation to recruit a replacement for Shaw’s, and we talked about the food system map of New Haven that some of the Council’s members are currently producing. We also talked about some new potential projects, and I brought up the idea of a green carts program that would incentivize street vendors to offer local, fresh food. NYC has such a program already, and because some of these carts serve local residents in addition to students (especially at the med school campus), it could be a great way to provide fresh foods to local residents who wouldn’t otherwise have access. We’re doing some research on this idea and others, so if you’re interested in learning more, come to the next meeting. We meet on the third Wednesday of each month at 8:00 a.m. in City Hall.

On Thursday, we had a CDBG hearing for the hardware portion of the program. You can find more information about the process and a brief definition of hardware below.

The hearing was for the non-city uses, and it was great to hear from all of the community groups. It’s always nice to see how much people really do care about this community, and that can easily be seen in the commitment that everyone has to these organizations.

I’m considering a couple of amendments, and if I decide to submit one, I’ll discuss it in this space.

Deliberations (the final Joint CD/HS committee meeting where we’ll decide on a final plan to submit to the full Board) will occur on Wednesday, March 31.

Hope to see some of you there!

In this month’s Leg meeting, we discussed a proposed ordinance amendment that would ban beer and wine at Lighthouse Point Park. It’s currently the only park in the city where any alcohol is allowed, and only beer and wine are legal. Proponents of the change cite quality of life concerns (mostly for “families” on the beach), and lewd incidents that have happened in the surrounding neighborhood (like people changing in front yards) that might have occurred after drinking at the park.

While I understand these concerns, I’m inclined to vote no for three reasons: it doesn’t seem to be a frequent problem, banning drinking could easily cause more serious adverse issues, and targeted complaint-based enforcement is likely to disproportionately target young people and minorities.

On the first point, according to statistics provided by the police department, there have only been 8 911 calls about drunk people in the park over the past two years. Obviously, every drunk person isn’t so belligerent as to warrant a 911 call, but the infrequency suggests that there isn’t a major issue with people getting too drunk. If there are issues with conduct, then we need to make sure that the police have the ability to regulate conduct that could be harmful to others. But to ban drinking when there isn’t really an overwhelming issue strictly caused by alcohol consumption seems a little odd.

Plus, if alcohol is banned, people will either drink too much before they come to the beach, or attempt to disguise it once they’re there. Both of those actions are more harmful than simply drinking in public at the park — both to the drinkers themselves and the public.

Finally, as Lieutenant Hoffman’s testimony indicated, this will be a complaint-driven process. Everyone at the hearing seemed to be comfortable with couples drinking wine at the beach, which suggested that alcohol consumption itself wasn’t the real issue that they were concerned about. Rather, people wanted to give officers additional tools (through complaints) to police “undesirable actions” under the guise of alcohol enforcement.  Under this system, tickets wouldn’t be given to the couple enjoying a glass of wine. But they would be given to the young people who might be playing their music a little too loudly, or whose presence might make others less comfortable. Or that’s how it appeared to me. If we’re really concerned about alcohol consumption — and if it’s so dangerous that we need an outright ban — than it should be so banned for everyone. There’s absolutely no indication from any of the testimony offered that this ordinance change would be enforced as such.

We’ll have another hearing next month to talk through these and other issues; I encourage everyone to attend.

You can read about the hearing here: Register and Independent

So as spring break winds down, I’ll be catching back up on some posts. There have been about three Joint Human Services/Community Development hearings, a Legislation hearing, and two BOA meetings that I haven’t discussed here. For what it’s worth, there haven’t been any votes in the committee hearings, and the highlights of the BOA meetings have already been discussed in earlier posts. But I apologize for not keeping up over the past couple of weeks.

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In the March 1st BOA meeting, the two most notable items were passage of the PDD for the Yale SOM and the zoning change in Fair Haven described in an earlier post. Both of those items came through the Legislation committee, received its full support, and passed the full Board (almost) unanimously — there was one “no” vote for SOM. The budget was also presented in that meeting, and I’ll discuss that over the next month or two as I have more time to review the entire document.

In the BOA meeting this week, there wasn’t anything of particular interest to Ward 1 residents. There will be some more interesting meetings — particularly in committees — over the next few weeks, and I’ll be sure to update everyone.