Activists challenge city use of COVID-19 relief funding for police SUVs
As alders consider the mayor’s most recent disbursement of $4.5 million of American Rescue Plan funding, some activists question whether the funds are being spent well.
Nathaniel Rosenberg, Contributing Photographer
A historic amount of federal funding has filled New Haven’s coffers since the spring of 2021, spurring disagreement between activists and the city about how to best spend it.
The money is from the American Rescue Plan, a $1.9 trillion federal stimulus package passed in March 2021 which allocated $115.3 million to New Haven. The city has already spent approximately $86 million of those funds on everything from affordable housing to youth engagement to 500 police surveillance cameras.
The most recent conflict is over the next $4.5 million disbursement allocated by Mayor Justin Elicker last month, including $400,000 to buy eight police SUVs and $3.7 million to purchase one fire truck and two fire engines.
“We have elevated violence in the city that we need to address,” Elicker told the News. “And us investing in policing related, public safety related infrastructure is vital to the health and safety of our city.”
Some activists, including Camila Guiza-Chavez ’19, have voiced their disagreement with the city’s funding priorities. Guiza-Chavez is one of the co-executive directors of Havenly, a New Haven nonprofit that works to strengthen the economic and political power of refugee women, as well as a member of the Sisters in Diaspora Collective, a group of migrant and refugee women who have advocated for greater ARPA funding to be directed towards housing in New Haven.
In August, the Sisters in Diaspora Collective was successful in its goal of increasing funding from $10 million to $14 million for affordable housing programs from a previous ARPA disbursement. Even that total was far short of their goals.
Back in April, the collective sent a proposal to the Board of Alders Finance Committee urging them to spend $62 million dollars of the total ARPA funding on access to affordable housing. The group arrived at that number by taking 54 percent of the total $115.8 million dollars New Haven is receiving in federal funding, as the Collective claims that 54 percent of New Haven residents are housing insecure.
“For us, the coming of these funds is an opportunity for the city to cut checks from this money based on its priorities and its values,” Guiza-Chavez said. “And so we saw this as an opportunity to really push for our city to take a stand, and say that housing should be a human right. And so it should be invested in as such and should be prioritized as such.”
Guiza-Chavez described a dire situation in the city, with over half of tenants rent-burdened, and thousands of people on the waiting list for Section 8 vouchers. The $14 million the city had invested in housing may have been a start, but she made it clear that it was not nearly enough for the gravity of the situation.
When asked why the city did not invest more ARPA funding in housing, Elicker spoke of the decision as zero-sum, where a dollar spent on one priority was a dollar not spent on another pressing issue.
“Through the community input process, people called for housing investment, people called for more investment in youth, more investment in jobs, more investment in climate, more investment in early childhood education, the list goes on,” Elicker said. “We had to make a decision of, ‘Do we use a huge portion of this funding in one area? Or do we prioritize five, six different areas.’ And we felt that it was the right decision to spread the funding out into multiple priority areas rather than one or two.”
Guiza-Chavez agreed that the city faced more than just a housing crisis. She argued that one of the benefits of investing in affordable housing was the downstream effects it had on other issues New Haveners were coping with.
“I think that lack of stable housing leads to low school attendance rates, it could lead to just less healthy life outcomes. And so I think that we would see a ripple effect,” Guiza-Chavez said. “[With better housing investment] I think there would be a lot of other areas where we would see healthier life outcomes.”
Chris Schweitzer, a program director with New Haven/Leon Sister City Project, cited the $5 million of ARPA funding that the city had continued to invest in climate initiatives as a positive. Schweitzer did not specifically object to the use of ARPA funds on police and fire, but did emphasize that he still saw a massive underinvestment in protection against the looming climate crisis.
“We are going over a climate change cliff very quickly, and destroying every single ecosystem on Earth, and making it so it’s very possible New Haven will not be livable in 100 years,” Schweitzer told the News. “We’re already in a place where we’ve created massive amounts of expense and destruction from doing something that is not that hard to stop doing, which is basically burning fossil fuels.”
Schweitzer listed numerous investments that he would like to see the city pursue with ARPA funding to make the city greener. He suggested reducing the number of polluting cars by making roads more walkable and bikeable, as well as investing in public transit. He also advocated for funding to electrify the energy sources of every building in the city, and highlighted the need for jobs programs that would train the next generation of engineers who would be doing the electrification.
Schweitzer stressed that he understood that the mayor had to balance different considerations in his funding decisions, but argued that the city could be aimless in its investment planning.
“I don’t really feel like the city has a clear plan, or an investment plan to say, ‘We’re at point A right now, we need to get to point Z in five years to make a radical shift in climate change pollution, what kind of investment needs to happen,’” Schweitzer said.
For Guiza-Chavez, the fact that COVID-19 relief funding is being directed to policing speaks to a limited definition of public safety.
“I want us to get to being a society where public safety is talking about shelter, food, health care, and just basic things,” Guiza-Chavez said. “Right now, we’re seeing a definition of public safety that is really like that of a police state.”
In a Board of Alders Finance Committee meeting on Monday, Westville Alder Adam Marchand also raised concerns about the purchases of a fleet of new gas powered SUVs, noting that New Haven suffered from high asthma rates, and that purchasing more vehicles that used gasoline was bad for the environment.
“There’s this federal money that’s kind of like a wonderful thing that we’re using to make strategic investments that align with our priorities,” Marchand said. “One of our priorities is actually environmental justice so I want to hear more about what actual homework can be done to study the feasibility of electric or hybrid or plug-in vehicles for service as police vehicles. And why not use some of this money to actually get some wheels on the street that have those capabilities to use less gas to pollute the environment with.”
In an interview with the News, New Haven Police Chief Karl Jacobson stressed that using hybrid or electric vehicles, especially for frontline patrols, was not standard practice and not feasible at that time for the department.
“The mayor and I had a discussion today about where we could use electric cars and hybrid cars,” Jacobson said Wednesday. “So we’re definitely talking about it. And, hopefully in the future moving in that direction.”
The $4.5 million funding plan passed the Finance Committee unanimously and now moves to consideration by the full Board of Alders.