Ethan Wolin, Contributing Photographer

Public safety concerns have taken center stage in the truncated run-up to a special Ward 28 alder election, which pits a public school social worker and onetime alder against a retired housing official who won the Democratic endorsement.

Two weeks after the national general election, voters in the Beaver Hills neighborhood will return to the polls on Tuesday, albeit likely in lower numbers, to fill the Board of Alders seat left vacant by Alder Tom Ficklin’s DIV ’75 death last month.

Claudette Robinson-Thorpe, 68, served for six years on the board before losing her 2015 reelection bid to a challenger allied with Yale’s UNITE HERE unions. Gary Hogan, 66, has the support of the Democratic ward committee co-chaired by him and a UNITE HERE organizer — and of Robinson-Thorpe’s 2015 challenger, former Alder Jill Marks.

But while old tensions over UNITE HERE’s political dominance form part of the contest’s backdrop, neither Robinson-Thorpe nor Hogan has sought the union’s endorsement or wants to criticize it. Both candidates told the News they are focused on tackling crime in the neighborhood, especially car thefts, the issue that most worried residents at a pre-election town hall last Monday.

“Public safety is No. 1 for me,” Hogan told a group of supporters gathered in his dining room on Saturday morning before they fanned out to knock on doors. “We’ve all had a variety of instances that happened in the neighborhood,” he added, saying he had encountered stolen cars, gunshots outside his house and an attack on a member of Beaver Hills’ Orthodox Jewish community.

A group dubbed the “Kia Boyz” has attracted particular attention for stealing that make of cars. A coalition of police departments across the New Haven area has cracked down on auto theft in the past month.

Hogan hosted a meeting about neighborhood crime in early October with residents and police officers, including New Haven Police Chief Karl Jacobson. Hogan told the News he would like to see increased police presence in Beaver Hills, more substantial consequences for repeat thieves and potential ways to “hold juveniles’ parents or family responsible for some of the property damage.”

Robinson-Thorpe said the city should turn adolescents away from criminal activity through expanded youth programs, like a paid after-school program she once participated in as a student at Wilbur Cross High School. She also proposed that more offenders be sent to juvenile detention centers to learn from their wrongdoing, an idea that has received support from Mayor Justin Elicker.

“I believe in second chances for these kids, because I think you can’t do better until you know better. But I also believe in consequences,” said Robinson-Thorpe, who recently earned a doctorate in social work and is backed by her own union, the New Haven Federation of Teachers. “Even the kids that I deal with right now — keep letting them get away with stuff is setting them up for failure.”

Public safety was also a priority for Ficklin, who joined the Board of Alders in July 2022 and won reelection last year. His unexpected death on Oct. 9 set off the special election for a new alder to represent Ward 28 through the end of next year.

Hogan and Robinson-Thorpe each said other residents encouraged them to run, and both sought the Democratic endorsement in a process controlled by the ward’s two Democratic co-chairs. Hogan said he left the decision to his fellow co-chair, Jess Corbett, a political organizer for UNITE HERE Local 34, the union of Yale’s clerical and technical workers. Hogan and Corbett handily defended their co-chair positions against a challenger in March.

Corbett, staying in Arizona at the time to campaign for Vice President Kamala Harris, led a Zoom ward committee meeting in which each candidate spoke, he said. An informal straw poll showed an overwhelming preference for endorsing Hogan, who recently retired from a top post at New Haven’s Elm City Communities housing authority and previously worked for the Livable City Initiative.

“It’s just his history in the city, his history in the ward and relationships — I think that’s the reason a lot of people support him coming out of the ward committee discussion,” Corbett said of Hogan. “He’s a good dude.”

Robinson-Thorpe has her own history as Ward 28’s former three-term alder. She first ran in 2009 in cooperation with UNITE HERE organizers but broke from the board’s union-allied coalition in 2014, calling it a “dictatorship” and forming a dissenting “People’s Caucus,” which prompted union-backed Marks to unseat her.

Now, however, Robinson-Thorpe said she has no interest in reviving the dissenting group or any conflict with the dominant union-affiliated alders, whom she said she called as a courtesy before beginning her current campaign.

“I want to work with each and every one of them. I don’t want to be the outcast,” Robinson-Thorpe said. “I’m not trying to have a strained relationship, not at all. You can’t move stuff with strained relationships. That’s a lesson I’ve learned over just maturity and over decisions I made.”

Although he is the Democratic pick and supported by Elicker, Hogan, for his part, said he would be comfortable breaking with the board’s majority to improve the city government’s financial efficiency and keep property taxes in check.

The race’s dynamics differ from New Haven’s other political skirmishes in the past year, which have doubled as referenda on UNITE HERE’s influence. The incumbent slate swept the rare March co-chair elections. And in a September special alder election in the Hill’s Ward 3, a businessman who ran an energetic campaign attacking machine-style “strings-attached politics” lost narrowly to a Democratic co-chair.

Another new factor in the race: the involvement of the New Haven Federation of Teachers. Union president Leslie Blatteau ’97 GRD ’07, who canvassed for Robinson-Thorpe on Saturday, said she wants the union to increase its political advocacy, following UNITE HERE’s model. Blatteau linked her union’s top priority of increasing education funding to the much-discussed problem of juvenile crime.

“If Wilbur Cross is underfunded, and the facilities are clear evidence that that school has been underfunded,” Blatteau said, “that’s what we’re giving our kids. So we shouldn’t be surprised that kids are feeling frustrated and coming out of a pandemic and not feeling like they have a lot of options.”

Early voting for the special election took place from Thursday to Sunday at the Hall of Records downtown. The polls are open on Tuesday from 6 a.m. to 8 p.m. at the Floyd Little Athletic Center adjoining James Hillhouse High School.