Lily Belle Poling, Contributing Photographer

As Mayor Justin Elicker makes his pitch to New Haven voters for a fourth two-year term, he faces an affordable housing shortage, a second go-round with the Trump administration — and Republican challenger Steve Orosco, a businessman and former mixed martial arts fighter.

Elicker, a Democrat, also just hired his campaign manager, Remus Sottile, he told the News Sunday evening. Still, he said that he feels “very confident” about his chances in the November mayoral election.

“Along with my team, we’ve been doing the work,” Elicker said. “And ultimately, New Haven residents, New Haven voters, care about results and care about someone that’s going to be straight with them. And someone that’s going to do everything they possibly can to make the city a better place.”

Elicker said the key issues that he has prioritized over his nearly six years in office — housing, education and public safety — remain his focus.

The mayor said that 4,000 housing units have been constructed in New Haven in the five-and-a-half years of his tenure. And he touted progress in public safety — a new police contract that he said makes it easier to retain officers along with more cameras around the city — and improvements at the public schools like lower absentee numbers and higher scores in math and English literacy.

He characterized his pitch to voters as being rooted in his constituents’ concerns.

“If you knock on any door in the city,” Elicker said, “someone’s probably going to bring up these issues as what’s important to the community.”

Vincent Mauro Jr., the sixth-term chair of the New Haven Democratic Town Committee, said that Elicker’s priorities are the right ones.

“A lot of the things that get overlooked,” Mauro said, “is the competency level that he has brought to the job in things that people don’t think about a lot, but affect daily life — public works and parks, things like that. He’s done a very good job of competency and bringing in the right people and keeping the right people.”

But Leslie Radcliffe, a longtime civic leader and former chair of the City Plan Commission, told the News that she was skeptical about Elicker’s ultimate focus.

“Housing, education and public safety are important, but they’re also buzzwords,” Radcliffe said. “How do you get to those issues? How do you address them?”

Radcliffe suspects that Elicker plans to “move up the political ladder,” she added, whether by running for a state representative role or for governor.

Elicker said he does not have a higher ambition in mind and that he was not sure how many more mayoral terms he hoped to serve.

“I love my job,” he said. “It’s really challenging, but I love it, and I’m planning on continuing to do the work.”

Mauro said that he had not noticed any shift in Elicker’s focus and emphasized that, in his view,  the mayor brings professionalism to the job.

“All politicians, by nature, always look at potential opportunities to bring their talents to a different office,” Mauro said. “But I think this mayor has really focused in on doing the job.”

While he continues to work on day-to-day issues, Elicker is unruffled by the upcoming mayoral race. Asked about his competitor, he criticized what he sees as Orosco’s lack of involvement in New Haven.

“I’ve been mayor for five years and was heavily involved in New Haven before that, and I think I’ve seen Steve Orosco once, maybe twice,” Elicker said. “It seems like Mr. Orosco is just focused on running for things. He ran for alder, he ran for state senator and now he’s running for mayor.”

Orosco wrote in a statement to the News that succeeding in electoral politics as a Republican in New Haven requires just that kind of persistence.

“For five years every single quality of life measure in this city has gone backwards,” he wrote.

“Crime, homelessness, fentanyl overdoses, education, city services and even basic infrastructure have all worsened. Instead of putting the people first, you have chosen to bend the knee to Yale while residents continue to suffer,” Orosco added, addressing the mayor in his statement.

Antagonism with Washington

Elicker was first sworn in in January 2020, with President Donald Trump in his first term in the Oval Office; as mayor, he has since navigated two presidential transitions.

New Haven’s relationship with the federal government has been thrown into chaos: New Haven filed two lawsuits against the Trump administration and joined an amicus brief in a suit against Trump in the spring. 

Many of the city’s public projects in the past few years were enabled by former President Joe Biden’s investment in sweeping legislation that helped to stimulate post-pandemic economic growth, Elicker said.

“That has significantly helped us with everything from building more affordable housing to improving our investments in public parks to even things like paying for police cameras across the city,” Elicker said. “Now we’re seeing a reverse of that trend with Donald Trump, who is actively targeting cities like ours and eviscerating federal support.”

The mayor explained that U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement has largely stopped communicating with New Haven’s police department.

“They historically would give us a heads up if they were doing some law enforcement action in our city, and that communication does not exist anymore, which potentially puts our officers at risk,” Elicker said.

This past summer, at least three New Haveners, including a public school student, were arrested by ICE.

Connecticut’s municipal elections will take place on Nov. 4.

Correction, Sept. 16: A previous version of this article inaccurately described Mayor Justin Elicker’s comments about New Haven’s contact with federal law enforcement agencies under the second Trump administration. He said ICE, not all federal law enforcement agencies, had largely stopped communicating with city police.