Ex-Harp Aide Jason Bartlett Launches Mayoral Campaign

by Paul Bass

Jason Bartlett has found a new candidate for mayor — himself.

Bartlett — who has managed previous mayoral campaigns for three different Democrats — submitted his own paperwork Thursday to the City Clerk’s office to seek the Democratic nomination in 2027.

He said he’s putting together a “Ground Up” slate of alder candidates to run with him on a platform of ambitious policy changes fueled by grassroots community involvement. Click here to read a paper he released with policy proposals.

“We need a vision,” Bartlett said as he announced his candidacy during an appearance on WNHH FM’s “Dateline New Haven.” “We need to know where we want to go, and we need to do it with community.”

Bartlett, who’s 60, seeks to unseat four-term Democratic incumbent Justin Elicker, who’s seeking reelection. This will be the first election since New Haven changed the mayoral term from two to four years. (Lawyer Alex Taubes and activist Anais Nunez have also submitted paperwork to run for the Democratic nomination.)

Elicker himself unseated Bartlett’s previous boss, Mayor Toni Harp, in 2019. Bartlett served as Harp’s youth director, in which position he crafted a “YouthStat” program that brought teachers, probation officers, and others to focus on day-to-day efforts to help at-risk kids succeed.

Bartlett served as Harp’s campaign manager when she won her first term in 2013. He also managed Jim Newton’s 1999 and Martin Looney’s 2001 campaigns against then-Mayor John DeStefano. (DeStefano won both races.) Prior to that he served as a state representative from Bethel, the nation’s first openly gay Black state legislator; he also served as Connecticut chair of Hillary Clinton’s 2008 presidential campaign.

TIFs & Water Taxis

In launching his 2027 mayoral campaign on “Dateline,” Bartlett offered a range of policy proposals, chief among them rebuilding the waterfront to create new housing, entertainment, and jobs.

He said he’d do that by creating two waterfront districts authorized to issue bonds to pay for infrastructure improvements that will enable developers to build safely. One district would extend from West Haven (which he’d invite as a partner) through City Point and Long Wharf over to Ball Island (where he’d ditch the Elicker administration’s outdoor swimming pool proposal for a mix of energy and other community-proposed ideas). The other would run to Morris Cove and the area around the airport, with a focus on environmental protection and resilience.

Central to the proposal is the use of TIFs — aka tax increment financing. Through TIFs, a city offers to freeze tax collection at a site where developers want to build. The developers would pay increased taxes when they build. But all the new tax revenue (beyond from the old rate) would go into a dedicated fund rather than the city general fund. That fund would pay off the bonds spent on improving the infrastructure.

(Nerd explanation break: An example: Say the authority uses $3 million in TIF funds to shore up the coastline at a building site. Say a plot of land there generates $37,000 a year in taxes. Someone builds atop the reinforced property. The tax bill goes up to $3 million. The builder pays the new tax bill. For the life of the TIF, the city general fund still gets only $37,000 a year; the rest of the tax money goes toward paying down the bonds.)

The TIF money would also enable the city to launch water taxi service. At first it would connect people from the harbor to Morris Cove and Tweed New Haven. Ultimately Bartlett envisions more taxis as well as ferries connecting Long Wharf to New London, Long Island, Milford, and Bridgeport.

Click on the below file to read a seven-page single-spaced paper Bartlett issued detailing the waterfront TIF proposal. It would include a “pipeline” for local workers as well as a dedicated education fund.

new-haven-build-tif-workforce-bartlett-gridDownload

Elicker: Where’s He Been?

Reached for comment on Bartlett’s candidacy, Mayor Elicker said his administration has pursued a clear vision focused on housing, education, and public safety.

He spoke of how New Haven has seen 1,500 new housing units constructed over the past year alone, close to 20 percent of it “affordable and deeply affordable.” He’s pursuing a goal of 10,000 units, 30 percent of them affordable, over the next decade. He spoke of development plans centered on “inclusive growth.” He noted the drop in recorded shootings to the lowest level in 15 years (while “we have more work to do”) and education performance numbers “slowly increasing” amid the creation of new after-school, swimming, and tutoring programs.

“It’s nice that people running for mayor have ideas. It’s another thing to be part of solving the challenges the city is facing,” Elicker remarked.

“All my time as mayor, Mr. Bartlett has not shown up at public meetings, has not been working to implement solutions to the problems we’re facing.”

To which Bartlett responded by citing his decades of public service as a state legislator and city official, as well as his participation in citizen opposition to an Elicker-backed plan to locate an APT Foundation methadone clinic on Long Wharf and to Elicker’s English Station swimming pool plan. He publishes takes on local issues at this website.

Bartlett has also worked on challenge campaigns for ward committee positions since Elicker became mayor.

Other proposals Bartlett floated Thursday included:

• Dedicating a city position to helping tenants buy their apartment buildings and run them as co-ops. The city did that in the 1960s; some of those co-ops eventually went broke — experiences the city could use to make a new wave of co-ops succeed, Bartlett argued. “You learn from your mistakes.”

• Creating a year-round youth conservation corps for the parks.

• Stopping homeless encampment sweeps; creating a city-monitored area where homeless people can live in “tiny houses.”

• Canceling the “bus rapid transit” plan to build dedicated bus lanes on major routes in town. Instead he’d pursue a plan to make all bus rides free and expand service along more routes, in part by purchasing a city fleet of natural-gas buses. He’d like to see routes enable more city people to commute to suburban jobs.

Bartlett is one of those people: He commutes each morning from his City Point home to a UPS warehouse in North Haven where he loads packages onto delivery trucks. There’s no convenient way to do that commute by bus, he said, whereas he can drive to work in 12-15 minutes depending on traffic.

Bartlett said he will unveil his slate in coming months of alder candidates on his “Ground Up” slate as candidates firm up plans. He did mention one slate member: Miguel Pittman, who plans to seek the Ward 3 alder seat again. Pittman confirmed Thursday that he’s running on Bartlett’s slate. “I’ve been working with Jason for over two years. I understand where his passion is. What he believes in falls in line with the direction I’m going in the Hill,” Pittman said.

The last time a team of alders ran on a slate with a policy focus was in 2011, when UNITE HERE-backed candidates won a majority on the Board of Alders seeking more community policing and job-creation efforts.

Click on the below video to watch the full interview with mayoral candidate Jason Bartlett on WNHH FM’s “Dateline New Haven.” Click here to subscribe or here to listen to other episodes of “Dateline New Haven.” Click here to download the WNHH FM app.