From the Office of Legislative Services:

The scheduled hearing of the request of Yale University for a Planned Development District for 2 new residential colleges in the area generally bounded by Prospect Street, Sachem Street and the Farmington Canal Greenway has been postponed from next Monday – November 8 at 7 P.M. – to Monday, December 13 at 7:00.  The Legislation Committee will not meet in November.  The December 13 meeting is the next regular meeting of the Legislation Committee.

Over the summer:

• The Board voted to ban alcohol at Lighthouse Point Park over my objections and those of four other aldermen;
• I won a pledge from the City to fund the overflow shelters through the winter;
• We approved a Planned Development District for Science Park (I had to conduct the hearing with the chair absent.);
• And after weeks of tough debates, we passed a budget for this fiscal year.

This semester, I’ve been spending my time working on the response to the events at Elevate Lounge, advancing the living wage proposal, and working on a couple policy ideas with the Food Policy Council that I hope to announce soon. The Parking Working group has also started to meet to tackle challenges with on-street parking and pricing across the city. You can track the group’s progress and give your input here.

We also have the New Haven Action Legislative Aide/Policy Assistant program functioning now, and several students are paired with aldermanic committees performing field research. I’m also acting as chair of the Board’s legislation committee; former alderman Roland Lemar resigned in September to become the next state representative from the 96th district. As vice-chair, I’m filling the role until the chair is named.

Next Monday, I will conduct my first hearing in this capacity, and the main item on the agenda will be Yale’s application for the two new colleges. There was no public testimony offered at the City Plan commission hearing, so I encourage students and other community members to attend and testify this time. The Board could benefit from hearing more perspectives. The meeting will take place on Monday, November 8th at 7p at City Hall.

If you have any questions about this proposal or any other good ideas for improving our community, don’t hesitate to reach out to me at michael.jones@yale.edu. I can’t wait to hear from you!

More to come soon, so stay tuned! In the meantime, feel free to e-mail me at michael.jones@yale.edu with any other concerns that you might have.

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.

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 another note, many of us on campus have heavy hearts today. While there’s never a good time to lose a friend, it always hurts to see it happen so early in life — and especially for someone like Cameron. He was honestly one of the most genuine people who I’ve met at Yale, and he always seemed to have a smile on his face.

The last time I saw him, I promised him that we would grab a meal soon. But we didn’t get that chance.

So I know that everyone is busy, but take some time and talk to your friends. It’s worth the extra few minutes.

Hope to see some of you tonight.

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.

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!

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