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.
