Elijah Hurewitz-Ravitch, Contributing Photographer

Mayor Justin Elicker extolled New Haveners’ diversity and their resolve to stick up for undocumented immigrants and other residents who may feel the brunt of President Donald Trump’s policies, in a State of the City address delivered two weeks after Trump returned to the White House.

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fallout, only to be itself paused by a judge while Elicker was denouncing it at a Hartford press conference, and then rescinded.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.