Leaders and advocates representing the city’s food banks and soup kitchens made the request during a Board of Alders budget workshop Wednesday evening in City Hall. The organizations have begun to experience the fallout from reductions in federal food assistance spending.

“There’s a perception that the community will take care of itself when it comes to food assistance, and that’s just not the reality,” Steve Werlin, the executive director of the Downtown Evening Soup Kitchen, told the News.

The food kitchen has recently received less food than normal from the Connecticut Foodshare, which depends partly on federal money, Werlin said. He expects DESK’s stockpile of food to dwindle “at some point in the next few months” without a new source of funding.

Alycia Santilli — co-chair of the Coordinated Food Assistance Network, or CFAN, the coalition that made the proposal — told the Finance Committee that 27 percent of New Haven residents currently face food insecurity, compared with 18 percent statewide. She added that nearly two-fifths of Elm City residents reported receiving groceries or meals from food assistance providers.

Coalition members developed their “legislative agenda,” totaling $993,000, before the 2024 election, Werlin said. They presented it to New Haven community services officials in the winter as Mayor Justin Elicker was preparing his budget proposal.

Elicker announced his $703.7 million budget proposal for the 2025-26 fiscal year in late February, saying he took a “primarily status quo” approach amid the unpredictability of the Trump administration’s funding for local programs. The proposal did not include CFAN’s proposed spending.

Werlin and Santilli both said they hoped alders would be sympathetic to their requests in the wake of the Trump administration’s cuts. They stressed that the city has not usually provided regular funding for food assistance.

 “I know that a lot of alders really care about this issue,” Santilli said, “and they probably weren’t fully aware that the city doesn’t really spend money in this way.”

Elicker said Thursday in a statement provided by his spokesperson that he has proposed directing almost $150,000 in federal Community Block Development Grant money to food assistance organizations, including $35,000 for DESK.

He also said the city planned to allocate about $890,000 from two federal grants to Haven’s Harvest, a nonprofit focused on reducing food waste — but that the grants are now frozen.

“The cuts by the Trump administration to food banks and meals programs are devastating,” Elicker said in the statement. “We would always like to do more, but we can’t make up the difference from the federal government.”

About a dozen food assistance advocates attended Wednesday’s aldermanic meeting. Four of them testified directly to the alders, and some held signs saying, “FOOD IS A HUMAN RIGHT” or “Hungry for Change!”

Alder Anna Festa of East Rock’s Ward 10 said alders face a difficult balancing act as they refine the mayor’s proposed budget.

“It’s going to be some very difficult decisions, because if we contribute to every little thing, every nonprofit that’s not getting aid, that cuts into the budget, which means higher taxes for the residents, which means for some of those folks, they’ll now have to decide themselves if they need to go to the food pantry or not,” Festa said.

New Haven has over 50 food pantries and soup kitchens, Santilli told the alders.

The post Food aid groups seek city money to plug Trump gaps appeared first on Yale Daily News.

It was early in 1986, and Mayor Biagio DiLieto confronted delays in housing funds he was expecting to flow to the city from the federal government. President Ronald Reagan, trying to curb government spending, had deferred paying out $8 billion to cities — including $638,000 due to New Haven that year from a Community Development Block Grant, as well as housing subsidies for nearly six thousand city residents.

“New Haven depends on these programs for its poor and elderly and for its revitalization efforts,” DiLieto said in a press release after the city filed a complaint that February in federal district court in Washington, D.C.

The city won the case on summary judgment and won an appeal. Now, 39 years after New Haven took the Reagan administration to court, Mayor Justin Elicker signed the city on as a plaintiff in two lawsuits against the Trump administration during its first two months.

The first recent lawsuit takes on President Donald Trump’s crackdown on so-called sanctuary cities that refuse to bolster immigration enforcement. The second one challenges his moves to freeze environmental grants — and the complaint, filed this month on behalf of six cities and eleven organizations, cites the 1987 appellate ruling that reaffirmed New Haven’s victory over Reagan. For New Haven, it’s a precedent twice over.

Graham Provost, an attorney with the nonprofit Public Rights Project that helped assemble the new lawsuit, said in a statement provided by the group’s spokesperson that the complaint’s authors “chose which cases to cite based on their legal relevance. And it is an added benefit to point to a situation involving one of our plaintiff cities.”

The legal issue in the Reagan administration’s 1986 appeal concerned the 1974 Impoundment Control Act, which restricts the president’s authority to withhold or delay congressional appropriations. In particular, after the Supreme Court had invalidated the law’s one-house legislative veto power over presidential spending deferrals, could the president still defer spending by himself?

No, the district and circuit courts concluded. At least not for the president’s policy reasons, as opposed to routine “programmatic deferrals” in the course of executing a law, according to the unanimous three-judge appellate panel — which included Judge Robert Bork, just six months before Reagan would announce his ultimately failed nomination to the Supreme Court.

It’s that technical distinction between policy and programmatic spending delays, outlined in the 1987 D.C. Circuit ruling in City of New Haven v. United States of America, that comes up briefly in New Haven’s latest joint lawsuit against the Trump administration. But in both cases, the city emphasized the urgent real-world implications of a dispute about the separation of powers.

“Much more is at stake here than the political machinations between two branches of government operating at either end of Pennsylvania Avenue,” New Haven argued in a 1986 filing to the district court.

Neil Proto, a New Haven native and former Justice Department lawyer who represented New Haven in the housing funds lawsuit, told the News that it was part of a broader push by DiLieto to revive the city’s urban center and housing options. DiLieto was also waging a multifront legal battle against a proposed shopping mall in North Haven that he feared would gut his city’s downtown.

Where Reagan pulled back on some spending, Trump has taken a more radical approach to disrupting the federal government, Proto said. Trump has signed a torrent of executive orders, several of them threatening funding streams to cities. The Environmental Protection Agency has put in limbo over $30 million in grant money promised to New Haven, some of which would normally be paid as reimbursements for projects already underway.

“We are doing what we can in New Haven to confront this climate crisis,” Elicker said at a March 20 press conference about the environmental funding lawsuit. “Unfortunately, we have a president of the United States right now that is doing just the opposite and illegally stymieing and setting up roadblocks to our nation’s ability to address climate change.”

There are other differences between the 1986 and 2025 lawsuits, besides the presidential actions at issue.

Elicker has made a wide-ranging push to counter the Trump administration, through municipal policies and through messaging frequently focused on championing progressive “values.” He struck a defiant tone in his State of the City address last month, describing New Haven’s multicultural character as a rebuttal to Trump’s vision for the country.

DiLieto was less liberal and less ideologically driven, according to Steve Mednick, a lawyer who served on the Board of Aldermen, now called the Board of Alders, representing Westville’s Ward 26 from 1982 to 1991.

“He wasn’t part of the progressive movement. He was pretty middle of the road,” he said about DiLieto, who was New Haven’s police chief before running for mayor. The desire to sue the Reagan administration, Mednick said, “came down to the fact that we were going to lose substantial sums of money.”

New Haven is receiving free legal support for the two current lawsuits from Public Rights Project, the California-based organization that is mobilizing municipalities across the country to challenge Trump policies.

San Francisco and Santa Clara County, California, spearheaded the sanctuary city lawsuit, which had three other plaintiffs when it was filed in California in February and later added 11 more plaintiffs — all of them cities or counties. The Southern Environmental Law Center joined with Public Rights Project to assemble the climate funding lawsuit, filed in South Carolina. Elicker is the only New England mayor to participate in either lawsuit, at a time when many local leaders are lying low to stay out of Trump’s crosshairs.

In the clash with the Reagan administration, New Haven stood out even more. As the National League of Cities, or the NLC, looked for cities to join forces against the housing money delays, DiLieto had another idea, Proto recalled.

“He didn’t want to just piggyback on top of a dozen other cities. He wanted to be first,” said Proto, who had been a political strategist for DiLieto. “That was one of my purposes, to ensure that that happened, and we did” — by one day.

New Haven submitted its complaint on Wednesday, Feb. 19, 1986. On Feb. 20 came a lawsuit on the same subject from a bevy of plaintiffs, including the NLC and four members of the House of Representatives — among them New Haven’s Rep. Bruce Morrison and New York’s Rep. Chuck Schumer, now the Senate minority leader. New Haven moved to consolidate the cases the next month, retaining its pride of place in the case name.

David C. Vladeck, the lead lawyer for the NLC and other plaintiffs, later wrote that he had “serious reservations about the City’s decision to file its own case.”

That comment came in a letter to the editor of the New Haven Independent — a weekly newspaper that stopped printing in 1990, succeeded since 2005 by a news website of the same name — in which Vladeck defended Proto’s integrity from the newspaper’s suggestion that he had milked the case for profit while playing a redundant role. The original Independent story, headlined “Case pays off for Proto,” reported that the city paid Proto $10,000.

No doubt, DiLieto cared about New Haven’s prominence in the proceedings. In a memo to the mayor after the district court argument — preserved along with other documents from the case in Proto’s papers at his alma mater, Southern Connecticut State University — Proto reported that he had let the NLC attorney speak first. “As I indicated before, however, I have retained the option of going first in the Court of Appeals, if necessary,” he wrote.

In the end, Proto said, he stood up first at the appellate oral argument to say that New Haven would adopt Vladeck’s arguments, before ceding the podium to him.

By the time the decision came down from the D.C. Circuit on Jan. 20, 1987, Proto had already been officially commended by the Board of Aldermen for his “tremendous efforts” toward the lower-court triumph. And, the prior July, the contested funds had already been distributed after Congress intervened with a supplemental appropriations bill.

DiLieto stepped down in 1989 after a decade as mayor, and died in 1999.

The post New Haven’s lawsuits against Trump echo Reagan-era fight over housing funds appeared first on Yale Daily News.

Orosco, a former mixed martial arts fighter who owns an MMA gym in Milford, announced his candidacy on Tuesday during a radio interview on “Dateline New Haven,” before filing the necessary paperwork to make his campaign official. He is only the second candidate to enter the race after Elicker, the third-term Democratic incumbent, filed to start his reelection bid in December.

Elicker is facing no primary challenger thus far, unlike in his last campaign two years ago, and any Republican candidate faces tough prospects in a city where no Republican has occupied the mayor’s office since 1953. But Orosco said on “Dateline New Haven” that New Haven has suffered from one-party government and that he would try to engage voters who are dissatisfied with the state of the city but do not regularly vote.

“It’s just the same thing over and over. Crime hasn’t gotten better. Education has gotten worse. Economic vitality hasn’t gotten better, and people are very frustrated,” he said. Orosco did not respond to the News’ request for an interview before the publication of this article.

Orosco said he wants to refocus the budget on top priorities such as education and public safety, while cutting other spending. He also said on “Dateline New Haven” that he opposed the two lawsuits New Haven has joined against the Trump administration — defending so-called sanctuary cities and federally funded environmental projects — and that he “absolutely” supports Trump.

Support for Trump among New Haven voters increased by three percentage points from 2020 to 2024, landing at 17.4 percent. Orosco was also on the ballot last year, challenging for a second consecutive election the longtime Democratic State Sen. Martin Looney, the Senate president pro tempore, in a district that includes eastern New Haven and part of Hamden. Orosco lost, with 22 percent of the vote.

“New Haven’s booming,” Elicker told the New Haven Independent on Tuesday. “We certainly have our challenges. But when you look at the amount of construction, the number of affordable units we’ve brought online, the progress we’re making on reducing crime and improving our public schools, it’s clear to anyone who’s paying attention that New Haven is making progress.”

Orosco said he would try to build support among fellow Black men, a demographic group that moved right in last year’s election.

“That’s where my target is going to be, and that’s also where the least amount of people vote in the first place,” he said. But he acknowledged that he will have “an uphill battle” as a Republican in New Haven.

Orosco said he planned to opt for private fundraising over public financing from the city’s Democracy Fund. John Carlson, New Haven’s Republican Town Committee chair, told the News that he “can’t say enough positive things” about Orosco but that the party would not provide financial assistance before the formal endorsement process in July, when Orosco may compete against other Republican mayoral hopefuls.

Carlson said that Elicker has neglected residents’ local priorities while pursuing the lawsuits against the Trump administration. He complained that taxes have increased while crime remains too prevalent and educational outcomes inadequate.

“Elicker is simply grandstanding, trying to make a name for himself because he wants to run for Congress when Rosa DeLauro retires,” Carlson said.

Without addressing his political ambitions, Elicker told the News in response that he has heard broad support from residents for the lawsuits against the Trump administration, driven by pride that the city is standing up to the president. He said the moves are necessary to defend New Haven’s finances and its progressive values.

When asked whether challenging Trump detracts from tackling local issues, he added, “We can walk and chew gum at the same time.”

Orosco launched his first New Haven political campaign in 2021, when he ran for the Ward 18 alder seat in East Shore and garnered just under 40 percent of the vote, losing to incumbent Alder Sal DeCola.

Orosco maintains a prolific Instagram account, labeling himself “MR. SMASH” after his gym’s name. His bio also refers to the “OMAD lifestyle,” which entails eating one meal a day. The account boasts over 57,000 followers — compared to 2,859 for Elicker’s official Instagram account.

A website promoting Orosco’s mayoral candidacy, with the motto “Be the Change,” retains his criticisms of Looney from the state legislative race and has not been fully updated to oppose Elicker. His biographical webpage calls him a “strong business leader with financial expertise in both budget allocation and revenue generation.”

The general municipal election will be held on Nov 4.

The post Republican Steve Orosco enters mayoral race appeared first on Yale Daily News.

The Board of Alders last Monday passed a pair of measures designed to curb the industry’s growth and protect the health of residents under age 21, officials said. Mayor Justin Elicker signed the legislation on Thursday.

One of the two laws, a zoning change, restricts stores that sell tobacco or vape products from opening within 1,000 feet of schools, houses of worship or parks, or within 3,000 feet of another smoke shop. The result, according to a map made by city officials, is to bar the creation of any new smoke shops except for a barren segment of Water Street near Long Wharf — at least until existing establishments close.

“We have 212 tobacco and nicotine retailers in a city of 139,000,” Elicker said to reporters and television cameras invited for the unusually promoted signing ceremony. “We don’t need any more of these shops.”

Smoke shops that already operate will be required to remove flashy signage and make their products and paraphernalia less conspicuous to passersby.

The second measure in the new regulatory regime requires tobacco and vape sellers, beginning in October, to obtain municipal licenses that will cost $150 each year. Failure to comply may lead to fines of as much as $1,000 per day, for repeated violations.

Joel Coronado, at the counter of Chapel Smoke Shop on Monday afternoon, said he understood the rationale behind the new laws and is happy they do not shut down existing retailers. 

“They’re trying to take it away from the parks, the schools, but at least they’re not messing with the establishments that are already here,” he told the News. “Everybody that’s grandfathered in, they grandfathered in. That’s cool.”

Coronado said that he blames a “backlash” toward smoke shops on the poor behavior of other stores.

Although Coronado had heard of the new laws, he was not aware of the regulations on signage. Chapel Street Smoke’s storefront windows are bordered by flashing LED strips, apparently contrary to the prohibition on “lights that flash, shimmer, glitter.” Coronado said he planned to visit City Hall for clarification.

While several smoke shops still have storefront displays that would be illegal under the new regulations, Mist Tobacco & Convenience, located at 342 Orange St., has already begun to adapt its storefront based on the newly passed ordinance — turning off their LED signs and retracting advertisements for nicotine products.

City Health Director Maritza Bond was alongside Elicker at the signing ceremony. She announced that the New Haven Health Department will make an effort to educate smoke shop owners about the ordinance before it goes into effect. The health department will proceed with compliance checks after Oct. 1 to ensure smoke shops adhere to the new regulations.

“This is about protecting public health and the safety and welfare of our youth,” Bond said, according to the New Haven Independent.

Both laws emerged from a working group of alders and city officials, spearheaded by Alders Richard Furlow of Westville’s Ward 27, Eli Sabin of Ward 7 in East Rock and downtown and Frank Redente of Ward 15 in Fair Haven.

The zoning and licensing components came before the Legislation Committee in January and February, respectively. They were delayed repeatedly for final passage by the board while staff adjusted the legislative text.

“This zoning regulation is long overdue, but we took our time and we worked months to get it right, and I believe we have,” Furlow, the board’s majority leader, told his colleagues before the vote on the zoning ordinance amendment.

The crackdown may have little noticeable effect right away and, by design, will make smoke shops less noticeable in the Elm City. But it allowed local leaders to unite behind a legislative achievement that the city can execute on its own, at a time of struggles over funding from the state and federal governments.

Alder Adam Marchand said the licensing mandate “has at its center the goal of protecting the public health, and to shield our youth and most impressionable residents from the powerful allure of these addictive and harmful products.”

The ordinance comes over a year after Connecticut Attorney General William Tong brought a lawsuit against Anesthesia, a smoke shop on Chapel Street, for the unlawful sale of cannabis.

The post Per new law, nearly no more smoke shops fit in New Haven appeared first on Yale Daily News.

According to the lawsuit, which also names Elon Musk, the Department of Government Efficiency, the Environmental Protection Agency and other members of the Trump administration as defendants, New Haven has received at least three grants totaling more than $30 million from the Environmental Protection Agency in the last year through the Inflation Reduction Act. Since February, however, the city has been unable to consistently access the funds, which finance salaries and operations that are already ongoing, the complaint says.

“It is wrong for cities and organizations to have to be left holding the bank when we have a federal government that, with a binding partnership, is turning their back on our cities,” Mayor Justin Elicker said in a press conference announcing New Haven’s participation in the lawsuit.

The lawsuit was filed Wednesday — in federal court in Charleston, South Carolina — by New Haven, Baltimore, Columbus, Madison, Nashville, San Diego and eleven nonprofit organizations.

It continues Elicker’s aggressive posture toward Trump, following a February lawsuit filed against the Trump administration’s policies toward sanctuary cities, as well as the city’s signing of an amicus brief supporting lawsuits against cuts to federal research funding.

New Haven was again represented in the new lawsuit by Public Rights Project, a California-based legal organization that has assisted liberal state and local governments in taking on the Trump administration.

In both lawsuits New Haven has joined against recent federal actions, it has been the only New England city among the plaintiffs. Elicker told the News last month that he has tried to rally more mayors to challenge Trump in court, but that many have instead sought to avoid drawing the president’s ire. There is no indication to date that New Haven’s legal moves against the federal government have yielded any adverse impacts or targeting.

EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin presented the grant freeze as a crackdown on wasteful spending, a move to better steward taxpayer money, promising that his agency would not be “a frivolous spender in the name of ‘climate equity.’”

“The days of throwing gold bars off the Titanic are over. The well documented incidents of misconduct, conflicts of interest, and potential fraud raise significant concerns and pose unacceptable risk,” Zeldin said. He referred a few examples of the “misconduct” to EPA Acting Inspector General Nicole Murley, although none of the examples pointed to New Haven specifically. 

New Haven Director of Climate and Sustainability Steve Winter countered, at the City Hall press conference, that the funds are strictly regulated.

Recent executive orders from Trump, Elicker said, “lawfully defy congressional mandates by freezing, disrupting, and terminating funds that Congress has directed and appropriated to specific grant programs.” 

Many of these grants, the mayor explained, are “reimbursable,” meaning that New Haven spends funds for grant-approved projects with the expectation that it will be reimbursed by the federal government. Now that these funds are currently suspended, the city is in an “impossible situation” because it does not know whether it would get reimbursed should it continue its operations that rely on federal grant financing.

In July 2024, the city was awarded $1 million to help residents switch from heating oil to heat pumps and from gas stoves to induction stoves, to reduce heating costs and air pollution. 

Winter, also a state representative, explained that the city has already begun the project. For now, he explained, the city can keep directing residents to state energy efficiency programs, but it can no longer promise to provide heat pumps or induction stoves while the grant funds are in limbo.

Community Action Agency of New Haven, one of the organizations conducted by the city for the project, has already hired a full-time staffer to help with the implementation of this program, who will have to be laid off if grant funding remains suspended, the lawsuit says. Other partner organizations have billed New Haven for project-related staff time, but without reimbursement, the city cannot continue covering these costs unless funding is unfrozen.

Also in July 2024, New Haven received $9.5 million to fund a shared geothermal heat pump system for Union Train Station and a nearby 1000-unit mixed-income New Haven Housing Authority development. This heat system would provide the lowest possible cost for heating and cooling for both buildings, while also reducing their air pollution and carbon emissions, Winter said.

While the funds for that grant were open as of Thursday’s press conference, Winter explained that they had been frequently “frozen and unfrozen,” making the city’s ability to access the money in the future uncertain. Before moving forward with a design contract with an engineering firm, New Haven wants to be certain that it will be able to receive reimbursement from the federal government.

Most recently, in January, New Haven received $20 million to “improve climate resiliency and quality of life for residents of 14 disadvantaged neighborhoods.” 

The city planned to use this funding to address climate issues, as well as help residents access affordable housing and public transportation and reduce their energy bills. Winter added that funds would also go towards bike lane improvements and community gardens.

“To have that funding inaccessible as we want to begin work on that whole menu of projects really hamstrings us,” Winter said. “We really can’t get started with that work and help our residents in a meaningful way on a day-to-day basis if we don’t have certainty that we can hire people to get this project off the ground.”

Last week’s lawsuit came days after Elicker, Rep. Rosa DeLauro and Sen. Richard Blumenthal denounced the Trump administration’s termination of a $500,000 EPA grant to a charter school in New Haven, resulting in immediate loss of employment for over 70 local youth participating in the workforce development program and school staff.

“I was disheartened and thrown off by the sudden cuts in the funding,” Suprya Sarkar, a high school student activist in New Haven Climate Movement, wrote to the News. “The city has been working so hard to implement programs, infrastructures, and community networks that focus on sustainability, so pausing these outlets for change is harmful for the community as a whole.”

Sarkar is grateful that local governments are making an effort to protect citizens from climate change and feels that New Haven is showing that it does not want to regress in combating climate issues. 

EPA administrator Zeldin terminated $20 billion in grant agreements on March 11, 2025.

The post New Haven sues Trump administration over climate funds freeze appeared first on Yale Daily News.

In each case, Mayor Justin Elicker joined a band of local leaders from across the country to publicly challenge President Donald Trump, defending municipal support for undocumented immigrants or the flow of federal dollars to academic institutions like Yale. And in both cases, New Haven received free support from a progressive legal advocacy nonprofit based in Oakland, California, that is mobilizing cities against Trump in the courts.

“We have two options right now. One is to hide under a rock, and the other is to stand up,” Elicker said in an interview, complaining that too many other cities are choosing the former path. “If everyone stood up, we would have a much more powerful resistance to the unbelievably unethical things that are going on in Washington right now.”

Public Rights Project, which works on proactive legal strategy with state and local governments, had not previously worked with New Haven. But its founder, Jill Habig LAW ’09, told the News she based the civil rights group on a model she had practiced as a student and then faculty supervisor at a Yale Law School clinic, the San Francisco Affirmative Litigation Project.

In starting Public Rights Project in 2017 — after she worked for Kamala Harris’ California attorney general’s office and 2016 Senate campaign — Habig wanted to fill a gap between local governments’ power and their ability to “make use of that authority in ways that advance civil rights,” she said. Public Rights Project employs a dozen lawyers, according to a spokesperson for the organization, and is now hiring four more.

The sanctuary city lawsuit, filed Feb. 7 in federal district court for the Northern District of California, challenged a Jan. 20 Trump executive order that instructed senior officials to ensure that sanctuary jurisdictions — those that limit municipal law enforcement coordination with immigration authorities — “do not receive access to Federal funds.”

In addition to the leading plaintiffs San Francisco and Santa Clara County, the original plaintiffs were Portland, Oregon; King County, Washington, which includes Seattle; and New Haven. More jurisdictions were expected to join the lawsuit this week.

Elicker said New Haven joined the lawsuit after getting in touch with San Francisco’s legal team through Yale’s San Francisco Affirmative Litigation Project.

Thanks to Public Rights Project, the only direct cost to the city stemming from the lawsuit is a $328 fee for its top lawyer, Corporation Counsel Patricia King, to be specially admitted to represent the city in the Northern District of California, according to Elicker’s spokesperson. She had not been admitted by Wednesday, after her name appeared in the original lawsuit with an asterisk.

Public Rights Project had a $7 million operating budget last year, according to its spokesperson. Its major funders include the Ford Foundation, Bloomberg Philanthropies and other foundations.

“The federal government can’t possibly carry out a mass deportation agenda without help from local governments,” said Habig, who teaches at Berkeley Law School. “And so cities actually have a lot of leverage if they’re equipped to use it.”

She declined to detail the extent and nature of the organization’s involvement in drafting the lawsuit complaint or assembling the coalition of plaintiffs.

A large group of plaintiffs can show judges the case’s magnitude, according to Habig, and diffuse any potential retaliation from the Trump administration — a fear that Elicker said has kept many other mayors from taking a similarly prominent stand against the sanctuary city crackdown and other Trump policies.

“A number of my conversations with other mayors, their decision is to keep a low profile, and while I respect that decision, I wholeheartedly disagree with that decision,” Elicker said. “If we all stick our heads up, you’re less likely to get your head cut off. And it doesn’t seem fair to me to allow some municipalities to stick their necks out when we all will benefit from the actions of those few municipalities.”

Since 2006, New Haven has barred police officers from inquiring about residents’ immigration status or aiding federal immigration enforcement, expanding the policy to all municipal employees in a 2020 “welcoming city” order. The city has not yet lost any funding due to Trump’s sanctuary city executive order, the mayoral spokesperson said.

The lawsuit echoed one brought by San Francisco in 2017, in the first year of Trump’s first term, against another executive order targeting sanctuary cities. The 9th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in the city’s favor in 2018 and 2019, creating a precedent likely to help the cities suing this year. New Haven was not a plaintiff in that case, and the Public Rights Project, then in its infancy, was not involved.

Former Mayor Toni Harp, who led New Haven for the first three years of Trump’s first term, made a different kind of statement against Trump in 2018 — when she boycotted a White House gathering of mayors she had planned to attend to protest a Justice Department letter to other sanctuary jurisdictions. “Where’s Toni? Toni? Toni?” Trump asked the crowd.

Harp told the News this week that New Haven’s undocumented immigrant community has long benefitted from Yale Law School clinic work on individual deportation cases.

“People were being picked up,” Harp said, referring to ICE activity in the city during Trump’s first presidency. Law school students and professors, she said, were “vigorously trying to get those people back into our communities with their families.”

Two weeks after the sanctuary city complaint, New Haven and 44 other jurisdictions filed an amicus curiae brief in a cluster of cases challenging cuts to National Institutes of Health funding for scientific and medical research. That case is in the District of Massachusetts.

When asked whether the city would join other legal actions against the Trump administration, Elicker said he is “evaluating different opportunities as they arise” to confront what he called “an existential crisis in our country right now.”

The sanctuary city lawsuit is set for a virtual hearing on May 6.

The post In anti-Trump vanguard, New Haven backed by California group appeared first on Yale Daily News.

Leslie Radcliffe announced that she would not serve a fourth one-year term as chair partway through a regular virtual commission meeting on Wednesday evening. The volunteer body, which consists primarily of five mayor-appointed commissioners, is responsible for reviewing a range of proposals related to land use, zoning and long-term planning for the city.

Without any contest, the commission unanimously elected Ernest Pagan — Radcliffe’s vice chair and a politically unaffiliated member of the commission — as the chair for 2025. Joshua Van Hoesen, the commission’s sole Republican, was elected the new vice chair.

“I remember when development didn’t come knocking at the door in New Haven,” Pagan said in an interview after the meeting. “So to see how much activity we have now, I think that’s a highlight, and that’s a benefit to the whole community. I’d rather be involved than just watching from afar.”

A lifelong New Havener and Westville resident, Pagan leads the local carpenters’ union and works to train high schoolers and people released from prison in the trades. He told his colleagues that he wanted to emphasize communication with residents in his new position.

As participants in the webinar-style Zoom meeting took turns commenting on the transition, City Plan Director Laura Brown, an official who works closely with the commission, thanked Radcliffe and the rest of its members.

“You all put in so much time and thoughtful effort,” Brown said. “It sometimes seems like it goes unnoticed, but it really is not unnoticed.”

Radcliffe, who retired in 2021 from her career as an administrative assistant at Yale, told the News that she decided not to continue chairing the commission so she could focus on taking care of herself, after experiencing health issues in the past year.

The New Haven Independent declared in 2021 that one would “be hard pressed to find a New Havener more involved in ‘civic engagement’” than Radcliffe, who previously served on the Civilian Review Board, a police oversight body, and currently serves as the board of directors president for Neighborhood Housing Services of New Haven.

“Once my civic activism began, I was all in,” she said. “I tell people I’m like Liam Neeson in ‘Taken’: I have a certain set of skills that I bring, and my skills are usually needed,” she added, riffing on a line by the actor in that action movie franchise who plays a former spy. “Organizing skills, running meetings, keeping track of agendas, action planning.”

Radcliffe said she also now wants to devote more time to her neighborhood, the Hill, by attending more community management team meetings, some of which conflict with City Plan Commission meetings, and by encouraging more residents to vote. She is a member of the Democratic committee in Ward 4.

Her third term on the City Plan Commission will end in February 2026, after which she said she would be willing to continue as a member if no one else steps up to fill the spot.

The post City Plan Commission elects new chair appeared first on Yale Daily News.

DeLauro, an 81-year-old Wooster Square native and the top Democrat on the House Committee on Appropriations, has emerged as one of the most prominent voices of congressional opposition to Trump policies aimed at cutting expenditures, such as foreign aid, already set out by law.

Her position as ranking member of the Appropriations Committee, which she chaired from 2021 to 2023, puts DeLauro at the center of annual negotiations over how to allocate federal funds — and now in the intense national spotlight of a constitutional debate over the separation of powers. She has made a slew of television appearances and posted several stern video messages on social media since Trump took office.

On Monday, she was named one of three co-chairs, beneath a chairman, of a “Rapid Response Task Force and Litigation Working Group” formed by House Democratic leadership to challenge what they deem Trump administration overreach. And on Wednesday, DeLauro published an op-ed in The New York Times denouncing Trump’s aggressive approach to reducing federal spending, including via Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency.

“I will not surrender the authority of Congress and the Appropriations Committee, where I serve as ranking member, to the tide of cronyism and unlawful decision making that threatens to unravel our constitutional form of government,” DeLauro wrote.

She took aim in particular at impoundment, the withholding of appropriated funds by the president, which DeLauro called “stealing congressionally appropriated dollars promised to Americans.” Trump and his allies have claimed that the Impoundment Control Act of 1974, which generally prohibits the president from unilaterally stopping spending, is unconstitutional, a view that cuts against legal precedents.

DeLauro’s op-ed echoed her remark, at a Hartford press conference last month, that Trump’s attempted federal grant funding freeze amounted to “nothing less than highway robbery” from the grants’ designated recipients. A separate State Department stop-work order led to significant layoffs at New Haven’s Integrated Refugee and Immigrant Services.

But in addition to pointing out the local impacts of Trump’s policies, DeLauro is mounting a constitutional case against the president’s broad claims of executive power. She began her New York Times essay by invoking the Constitution and quoted Article I, which establishes the legislative branch.

“She literally has put the entire branch on her back,” Vincent Mauro Jr., the chair of New Haven’s Democratic Committee, told the News. “She is putting herself at the forefront to defend a branch of this government that very few people are defending, and by doing so she is going to make herself a target.”

Mauro, who has known DeLauro through a lifetime in New Haven politics, said he was proud but not surprised that she would throw herself passionately into opposing the president’s actions. He added that DeLauro is inviting the wrath of wealthy and powerful Trump allies like Musk.

She already has. After DeLauro criticized Musk’s role in upending a congressional spending deal in December, Musk wrote on X, formerly Twitter, “This awful creature needs to be expelled from Congress!”

The bill eventually enacted at the time extended federal spending through March 14, necessitating another so-called continuing resolution in the next month. DeLauro will play a central role representing Democrats in negotiations to avoid a government shutdown, and she has said she will use the process to push Trump to keep previously appropriated money flowing, all from her perch on the Appropriations Committee.

“That is a committee that does an enormous amount of business across the aisle,” said Charles Tiefer, a retired law professor at the University of Baltimore who worked for 11 years in the House of Representatives’ general counsel office.

He noted that the House is nearly balanced between Democrats and Republicans, who currently control both chambers of Congress. DeLauro “can be chair of Appropriations two years from now if there’s a stiff breeze at the polls, or even if there’s a light breeze at the polls,” Tiefer said.

Lawsuits challenging Trump spending cuts will mostly come from people and organizations directly affected by them, according to Tiefer, but DeLauro “has the bona fides to defend the House appropriation authority” in the court of public opinion.

DeLauro was elected to her 18th term in Congress in November.

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Elicker delivered the 27-minute speech, his sixth State of the City, on Monday evening to a room of alders, city officials and other attendees in City Hall. He discussed progress on and goals for a slew of local policy issues — such as housing, public safety, education and economic growth — but devoted the start and end of his remarks to a strong message of defiance against Trump and pride in the Elm City’s “shared values.”

“The Trump administration will attempt to test our values and threaten to cut funding from programs that our residents, particularly our most vulnerable, deeply rely on, in an attempt to break us, to weaken our resolve, to turn us against each other,” Elicker said, alluding to federal pressure to aid immigration enforcement and to roll back diversity programs.

He addressed a portion of the speech to the Trump administration, listing a series of examples of New Haven’s multicultural character: Saturday’s Lunar New Year festival, a Juneteenth celebration on the Green, the public commemoration of Christmas, Kwanzaa and Hanukkah. And he noted the audience in the Aldermanic Chambers.

“The diversity in this room is not some D.E.I. initiative, it is America,” he said, referring with irritation in his voice to diversity, equity and inclusion efforts that have come under fire from Trump. “New Haven is America.”

The first two weeks of the second Trump presidency have brought a barrage of headaches for Elicker and, above all, uncertainty about how Trump’s promised spending cuts may affect New Haven. A White House directive last week to freeze federal grants triggered emergency discussions in City Hall about potential fallout, only to be itself paused by a judge while Elicker was denouncing it at a Hartford press conference, and then rescinded.

But federal policy will not be the only wild card for Elicker or New Haven this year. The state legislative session underway in Hartford carries far-reaching implications, especially for public education funding, as Elicker emphasized in his speech.

NHPS has lately contended with acute financial and infrastructural problems. Elicker said the city had increased its contribution to New Haven Public Schools by 50 percent over the past five years, but that, “aside from one-time COVID spending, state spending to public schools hasn’t even kept up with inflation.”

“Can you think of anything that hasn’t gone way up in cost over these past ten years? I can’t,” he added. “Our city is doing our part, and we need the state to do its part.”

The effort by Elicker and other mayors to boost urban school districts and special education may face resistance in Gov. Ned Lamont, a proponent of spending limits that have fortified the state’s finances but that critics say excessively curb services for underprivileged residents. Lamont is set to deliver his budget address on Wednesday.

In his speech, Elicker touted New Haven’s own financial health, citing “five straight years of balanced budgets and three straight years of bond rating increases from independent financial rating agencies.”

While expressing concerns about federal and state funding, Elicker did not mention Yale, other than one reference to Yale New Haven Hospital’s new neuroscience center. He did not address the departure of former University President Peter Salovey or the arrival of President Maurie McInnis, or renew his call for the University to increase its voluntary contribution to the city budget.

“I was surprised that I didn’t hear him talk about Yale,” Ward 8 Alder Ellen Cupo, who represents Wooster Square and serves on the executive board of Local 34 UNITE HERE, the union of Yale’s clerical and technical workers, told the News. “I heard him, you know, call on the state to increase funding, and I think that is right, but I also think that Yale should pay its fair share as well.”

On the subject of housing, Elicker said the city had gained a thousand new units in the past year, 40 percent of them under market rate. He made the case for further development as a boon for housing affordability, analogizing it to egg and gas prices in a crash-course on supply and demand. And he praised the work of the Fair Rent Commission and Livable City Initiative in clamping down on absentee landlords using heightened fines.

“If you are a landlord that takes care of your property, we love you,” he said. “But if you’re a landlord that doesn’t take care of your property, we’re coming for you.”

He attributed the continued decline in gun violence to a combination of community-oriented policing, camera technology and violence prevention programs. He gave a passing reference to combating climate change, complete with a swipe at Trump, and promoted improvements to parks.

“It’s encouraging to have a mayor who supports the Board of Alders’ legislative agenda, which is affordable housing, public safety, safe streets for all, education,” Ward 27 Alder Richard Furlow, the board’s majority leader, said after the speech.

Early in his remarks, Elicker said his State of the City address last year had been “a little bit long” and pledged to “trim things back a bit tonight — and I emphasize ‘a bit.’” Monday’s speech was around seven minutes shorter than last year’s in speaking time, but a half hour shorter from start to finish, due to the absence of the pro-Palestine protesters that held up the proceedings last year with rowdy calls for a Gaza ceasefire resolution.

This year, the only protest came from the activist and former longshot mayoral candidate Wendy Hamilton, who baselessly yelled out, after a long round of applause following the mayor’s speech, “The FBI will catch you eventually!” Board of Alders President Tyisha Walker-Myers and Police Chief Karl Jacobson each implored her to leave.

Elicker is not known for rousing oratory, and he packed his speech with statistics, including one from a draft report released just last week from the Connecticut Fair Share Housing Study. But, in a personal touch, Elicker also peppered his remarks with individual shout-outs to ten of the 30 alders on the all-Democratic board that will review his impending budget proposal in the coming months.

He reached his rhetorical peak when discussing the progressive ideals that Trump challenges but therefore, in a broadly liberal city like New Haven, brings to the fore.

“While we will be tested and we will have to make difficult decisions, as a community, we will not waver from our values,” Elicker said. “We will proudly stand as one.”

Elicker is seeking a fourth two-year term in the November municipal elections, so far running unopposed.

Elijah Hurewitz-Ravitch contributed reporting.

The post Facing uncertainty, Elicker stresses solidarity in annual speech appeared first on Yale Daily News.

In last year’s address, Mayor Justin Elicker emphasized affordable housing initiatives and his vision for New Haven to grow inclusively into “a city of 150,000 thriving people.” He also called New Haveners “gorge and diverse,” quoting Cosmopolitan magazine, and paused his speech for 25 minutes due to disruptive protests by advocates of a Gaza ceasefire resolution.

Now, Elicker is preparing to deliver his sixth State of the City speech on Monday, after a whirlwind month that included an early push for education investment in the just-started state legislative session and a barrage of local concerns stemming from Trump administration policies. Elicker is running for a fourth two-year term this year, without any announced challengers to date.

The News examined how some of the goals Elicker set out in his Feb. 5, 2024, address have panned out so far. While many initiatives proceeded apace last year, some efforts to increase housing access and contend with homelessness met resistance from alders or criticism from activists.

Affordable housing

Already, Elicker said last February, the city had “approximately 3,500 new housing units in the pipeline, and approximately 1,400 — 40 percent of them — are affordable units.” His spokesperson could not provide updated numbers by the publication time of this article.

“It’s just an idea of what could come,” Board of Alders Majority Leader Richard Furlow, who represents Ward 27, said of those statistics. “That may not come true,” he added, citing stalled developments in his neighborhood of Westville.

In last year’s State of the City, Elicker presented one concrete idea to clear the way for more housing units: expanding eligibility for property owners to build accessory dwelling units, or ADUs. “This new legislation would permit homeowners at 23,000 different properties citywide to, as of right, have the option of adding another residential unit to their property,” Elicker said.

The legislation ran into skepticism from the City Plan Commission and from alders, including Furlow, who opposed extending ADU rights to big landlords. It has rested in limbo in the board’s Legislation Committee since an April committee meeting.

“There are some communities that are saying, ‘Don’t allow people to build ADUs if it’s not owner-occupied property,’” Furlow said. He first wants to regulate short-term rentals like Airbnbs.

City Plan Director Laura Brown said on Thursday that the expanded ADU ordinance amendment was just “one piece of the puzzle and not an end all, be all” for affordable housing. Her office had no plans to modify and resubmit the proposal unless alders act, Brown said, and it has done “early drafting of an Airbnb regulatory structure.”

Other housing-related proposals that Elicker put forward in the speech last February have materialized. Under a new director, the Livable City Initiative has doubled down on enforcing the housing code through fines, leaving affordable housing development to another city department. The city passed legislation to strengthen LCI’s muscle against noncompliant landlords and to let more renters form legally recognized tenants’ unions.

Homelessness

Turning to the rise in homelessness in his speech, Elicker promised “compassion, care and holistic services to individuals experiencing homelessness.” And he highlighted a new shelter in Quinnipiac Meadows, a converted Days Inn on Foxon Boulevard that he said “will have 55 private rooms and serve up to 110 individuals.”

It has 51 rooms, most of them occupied by two people, and the shelter housed a total of 94 people as of Thursday, a spokesperson for Continuum of Care, the nonprofit that operates the facility, told the News. In the coldest winter temperatures, the city’s warming centers are required to be open to all.

But a vocal set of activists, allied with Yale students, has protested Elicker’s approach to the homeless population, criticizing the city’s sweeps of their encampments — most recently in October on the Green — and its legally mandated July move to cut off electricity from a cluster of tiny homes behind the Amistad Catholic Worker House in the Hill.

The New Haven Register reported in November that the city’s homeless population surged to over 600 people in 2024, more than two times the previous year — outpacing a nationwide increase.

Public schools

Last February, Elicker touted a decrease in chronic absenteeism — counting students who have missed at least 10 percent of school days — from a peak of 60 percent during the 2021-22 school year to 33 percent by fall 2023. The number dropped further to 29.5 percent by November 2024, per NHPS spokesperson Justin Harmon.

Elicker’s address also touched on new education projects, such as career training for high schoolers in the 101 College St. biotech building and two “full-service community schools” in Fair Haven with new staff and programming funded by a five-year grant from the Department of Education.

At the Fair Haven School, the initiative’s first year has brought a care coordinator who helps families at home and a popular fencing program, according to Ward 14 Alder Sarah Miller, who previously worked for the nonprofit that manages the program. She said it is on track to expand to the second school, the Family Academy of Multilingual Exploration.

Unmentioned in Elicker’s discussion of education at last year’s State of the City were twin problems that have dogged the district this school year: budget shortfalls and deteriorated facilities. In response to acute needs, he sent New Haven Public Schools $8.5 million and has called for more state funding.

Infrastructure projects

The speech did feature references to several infrastructure projects that have since reached various phases of planning or construction.

Elicker promoted the city’s “most ambitious bike and pedestrian project yet” — connecting the Farmington Canal Trail to the Shoreline Greenway Trail in East Shore. 

“The city is deep in the design phase of the project and engaging with stakeholders, and also finalizing the purchase of a small parcel of property on the trail,” city spokesperson Lenny Speiller wrote to the News on Thursday.

The mayor said last year that the city would in 2024 “begin construction of our newest flagship park”: the Long Wharf Park and Waterfront, a $12.1 million state-funded upgrade of the stretch of land between I-95 and the Long Island Sound. Preliminary work on adjacent Long Wharf Drive started in the fall, Speiller said.

Elicker skipped his written remarks about environmental sustainability last year after the long interruption by pro-Palestine protesters, but the city is sticking with his objective of “new solar resources and canopies atop our schools and even atop our city landfill,” as the official prepared speech read. Those are slated for installation in the coming year.

Looking ahead to 2034

This month, New Haven marked its 241st year as an incorporated city. In last year’s State of the City speech, Elicker set his sights on the upcoming 250th anniversary, asking, “In what type of city do we want to live in 2034?”

The city coordinated its regular ten-year comprehensive planning process to anticipate the milestone, calling the initiative Vision 2034. Residents have weighed in on their top priorities during a series of meetings in the past year.

Staff are currently drafting the plan, City Plan Director Brown told the News, and next month the city will open a survey to collect more feedback on the main goals before presenting the plan to the Board of Alders in May. Among the ideas that have emerged repeatedly during the process, Brown said, are an emphasis on “accessibility in all different forms” and tending to New Haven’s parks. Elicker reestablished a separate Parks Department last year.

“And then also housing, I’d say, was a resounding theme,” Brown said. “How do we address the short-term needs for housing, longer-term needs for housing, and create the kind of housing that residents want throughout the various neighborhoods?”

She hopes that Vision 2034 will prompt an overhaul of the zoning ordinance in line with the city’s priorities — well beyond accessory dwelling units.

Elicker is scheduled to deliver his 2025 State of the City on Monday evening at City Hall.

Zachary Suri contributed reporting.

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