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