NEWS

City employees fight for fair contract after two years of delay

BY KHUAN-YU HALL STAFF REPORTER

Two dozen members from city employee unions gathered at City Hall last week in a show of support ahead of contract negotiations with the city.

The new contract under negotiation is already two years late. The last agreement between the city and the two unions — Local 3144 and Local 844 — expired in 2020. Local 3144 and Local 844 represent city managers and clerical workers, respectively.

About a dozen librarians were present at last Monday’s rally. Several told the News that they felt underpaid and overworked.

“We just want a fair contract,” said Gilda Herrera, president of Local 3144. “Everybody wants to be treated with respect. Everybody wants fair wages. And everybody wants benefi ts that make you want to stay. That’s all.”

Herrera said her union is focused on reaching fair terms for members’ pensions, healthcare and salaries.

Employee retention has been one of the recent major challenges faced by New Haven libraries and other city departments.

According to Phillip Modeen, Local 3144 representative and a children’s librarian, librarians in New Haven are some of the lowest paid in the state, making between $7,000 and $10,000 less than those in other towns and municipalities.

For Modeen, the goal of these contract negotiations is to create terms that will bring in and retain new talent, so that the New Haven city government does not become a “stepping stone” for workers who quickly move to other municipalities.

In addition to addressing issues of salary, members of Local 3144 hope that ongoing negotiations will produce a contract that reduces their currently unmanageable working hours. According to Herrera, the overload is the result of many employees departing to neighboring municipalities due to low pay in New Haven. She said that the remaining employees have needed to pick up their slack yet have not received overtime.

Additionally, in their budget for the 2022-2023 fi scal year, the city committed to having libraries open on Sundays, which has further burdened librarians.

“We’re really stretched,” Modeen said. “It would be great if we could open seven days a week, but we are stretched as it is.”

Modeen added that covering these extra shifts has been particularly difficult as, due to the low city salary, he and his peers often also have to work multiple jobs to support themselves. To make working Sunday hours mandatory without overtime pay “takes away our opportunity to supplement that income that we’re not receiving.”

Herrera noted that there is a misconception in New Haven that city employees do not do very much. Instead, she described how the IT team that she heads for New Haven Public Schools often cannot meet demand, with their phones constantly ringing o the hook.

“We’re understaffed,” Herrera said. “We are all being tasked with doing additional duties. I don’t know of any department that isn’t su ering some sort of sta shortage. That’s actually why we came together. I wanted them to realize this isn’t just a 3144 issue.”

COURTESY OF GILDA HERRERA

City librarians hope that a new contract will address concerns regarding pay, sta ng and number of hours they are required to work.

Modeen hopes that this contract will allow him and his peers to focus on interacting with the community and their families, no longer worrying about how they will make ends meet.

Mayor Justin Elicker acknowledged the workers’ demands, noting that shortages are present in nearly every department — notably, he said, the police department that has over 100 open positions.

Elicker said that negotiations are moving fast, and he hopes that a new contract will be able to attract and retain employees, citing recent success with the teacher’s union. He added that the city government faces signifi cant fi nancial problems including high and rising pensions, debt and healthcare costs.

“We need to make sure we get those costs under control,” Elicker said. “And those costs are closely tied to our union contracts and the benefits that employees receive and the wages employees are paid. And so, I need to balance ensuring employees are treated respectfully, as far as their salaries and benefi ts, and the fi nancial health of the city.”

Elicker said that though many people believe that the city government itself is the problem, state structures and the restrictions of New Haven’s tax base underpin its fi nancial challenges. Elicker described how in a typical city, wealthier areas on the outskirts — like Woodbridge, Hampton, East Haven and West Haven — would be part of the tax base.

This is not the case in New Haven. Between the limited size of New Haven and the large portion of tax exempt property, the city is in a uniquely precarious economic position.

“We’ve all had a very stressful two years,” Herrera said. “All these things, inflation, COVID, all these things. Emotionally, mentally, people are drained, and then when they look at their paycheck, they’re like, ‘oh my god, we are drained. And I don’t see the return.’”

Local 3144 represents more than 400 municipal employees in New Haven.

Contact KHUAN-YU HALL at khuan.hall@yale.edu .

Unhoused advocates push city to expand winter resources for homeless people

BY HANNAH QU STAFF REPORTER

Tyrell Jackson and Kathy Mire have been living in a tent city in the West River neighborhood for six months. It’s not ideal, they said, and there is the occasional robbery. However, they still found the situation generally better than living on the street, as in the tent city they at least have a place to “gather themselves.”

Now that winter is coming, Jackson and Mire are doing everything they can to stay warm, layering multiple tents for insulation and staying close to preserve body heat. While the tent city residents wait for local warming centers to open, they say that they hope that the city will provide more resources during this harsh winter.

Unhoused people in New Haven are now speaking up about winter resources by joining the Unhoused Activists Community Team, or U-ACT. They are asking Mayor Justin Elicker to change city policies regarding the treatment of low-income people who use public spaces.

“Our current campaign is designed to pressure [the mayor] to make some big real policy around respecting people’s human rights to take refuge in [public space].” Mark Colville of Amistad Catholic Worker House and one of U-ACT’s founders said. “To me, that is the essential change that needs to happen in order for the city to move from the reality that we are in now, which is basically an approach that’s driven by the denial of human rights.”

What is it like to be homelessness in New Haven?

Eric Carrera has been homeless for 14 years. Last year, he said that six people that he personally knew froze to death.

“I’ve had a lot of people die not just because of it being cold, but because of addiction.” Carrera said. “I think I’m no longer in that boat. I am eight months clean as of October 31 this year. It is a struggle and it’s a big hard thing to get rid of and to get done.”

Carrera said he has tried everything he could in order to find housing, but the results have been frustrating. For the past month, he has been living in the West River tent city with his husband.

Their daily routine involves waking up at 5:30 a.m. to go to a health appointment at the APT Foundation. Afterwards, they stay in a public library till 1 p.m., and then go to DESK from 1:30 to 5:30 p.m. for dinner, returning to their tent for the night at around 10 p.m.

“It’s a lot of walking, a lot of stress on my feet.” Carrera said. “And then we do it all over again. It’s recurring every day and every day, but it’s fun, because I have [my husband] to help me.”

Carrera said the couple is close to getting a Section 8 housing voucher.

Jackson and Mire relied on the warming center at Downtown Evening Soup Kitchen to endure through the last winter. According to Mire, the warming center is open from 10 p.m. to 6 a.m., and can accommodate up to 50 people.

“You have to wait in line at night and every day is a shot in the dark.” Jackson said.

Jackson noted that if “there’s a disturbance before everyone gets in,” then the center will stop letting people in. According to Jackson, the warming center does not have a screening process or security, which means sometimes they have to “remove” a few people and be on the watch to make sure they don’t come back.

Jackson recalled that on his fi rst night at the warming center, he had to physically restrain another guest to stop them from attacking an old woman.

“Since I’ve been in warming centers, I would say that I’ve had to regulate at least seven situations, like I personally have had to put my hands on people,” he said.

Mire said that they have received housing vouchers recently, but have struggled to fi nd a landlord who will accept the voucher, leaving them unhoused in the interim.

What does U-ACT demand?

Billy Bromage of Witness to Hunger and Evan Serio of Downtown Evening Soup Kitchen, the co-founder of U-ACT, said he started U-ACT after three colleagues reached out and suggested that he should organize unhoused people to share their stories and push for changes in city policy.

In the meeting last Wednesday, U-ACT summarized their demands, which included access to free public storage lockers and clean restrooms and showers with full-time, year-round hours.

They also demanded an end to discriminatory practices including homeless profi ling in public libraries, evictions from public spaces without due process and the use of police action against the unhoused as anything beyond a last resort.

Lastly, they urged the city to legalize tent cities, as well as to take inventory of and preserve any confi scated personal property.

New Haven community services administrator Mehul Dalal, who oversees the O ce of Housing and Homeless Services, told the News that the city invested one million dollars in homelessness prevention and rapid housing in 2021. Dalal said that the city also opened navigation hubs that provide phone charging stations, showers, laundry and other basic services during evening and weekend hours.

According to Dalal, there have been over 2,000 visits to the navigation hub. In addition, the city also runs One Stop Pop-up, a mobile initiative that provides mobile shower services, health care, harm reduction services and access to case management services for unsheltered individuals.

Bromage said he personally thinks the navigation hubs are fantastic, but their function is limited by their operation hours.

“That really is something that should be available to people when they need it. Rather than at the time that’s convenient for a social service provider.” Bromage said.

As to the question of tent city legalization, Dalal said that though the city has not legalized tent cities, the city wants to work with them instead of relocating them, and it’s “accommodating to the best of [their ability] right now.”

Colville said that the West River tent city was created in 2019 when the city closed all shelters and the homeless population doubled during the winter. Colville claimed that shelter bed shortages among local social service agencies have sent more people to tent cities.

There are approximately 30 to 35 people living in the tent city by Ella T Grasso Blvd in West River. Colville has also turned his backyard and his neighboring daughter’s backyard into a tent city, which currently hosts approximately eight people.

According to Colville, tent cities are a very e ective means of transitional housing. Having worked with homeless people for decades, Colville explained to the News that homelessness often places people in a situation where they feel that they must compete with others instead of cooperating, because “they are thrown on the street without rights.”

“The main problem that homeless people deal with is how to secure their things, their material possessions.” Colville said. “When you don’t give people land or a place to be the only thing they really have to carry [their belongings] with them all the time … So people, combined with mental health issues, are always paranoid about their stu being stolen. And then whenever they misplace something, they almost always blame somebody else.”

Colville said that these “lifestyle problems” make it di cult for unhoused people to transition once they acquire an apartment of their own. In contrast, he believes that tent cities can combat this issue by fostering a valuable network of support.

“We believe that when you do tent city in a supportive way, and you give people their own piece of land, and independent living, that they will, they will take care of the property and they will take care of themselves much better,” Colville said.

Colville said that the problem with not legalizing tent cities is that people can still be arrested and evicted on a whim. Meanwhile, Colville found it concerning that homeless people who live in tent cities do not have access to running water and are not allowed to make fi res, which would help them stay warm during the winter.

Since June of 2022, Colville and those who live in his backyard have been cooking breakfast and bringing it to the tent city every Tuesday, encouraging them to join U-ACT and speak up.

According to the Greater New Haven Regional Alliance to End Homelessness, there were 1,922 evictions in the New Haven area in 2021.

NEWS

KNUTE ROCKNE COLLEGE FOOTBALL COACH

Yale public health students respond to water crisis in Jackson, Mississippi

BY KAYLA YUP STAFF REPORTER

To Maame-Owusua Boateng SPH ’23, on-the-ground work is the only way to get things done in public health.

Boateng was recently in Jackson, Mississippi, where she and five other public health students saw first-hand the devastating effects of the country’s worst water crisis in recent history. Floods in October damaged the city’s already-troubled water treatment system, leaving as many as 150,000 residents without safe drinking water for over two months.

“It made me cry a little bit listening to other people who were volunteers in the community, and then meeting new people and seeing their life perspectives,” Boateng said. “How they came to be and how they’re impacted by these issues [including] the water crisis and incarceration.”

Research alone, Boateng explained, cannot address a population’s immediate, individual needs — community engagement is key.

That’s the ethos Rukia Lumumba, a prominent community activist from Jackson, flew in for the Yale School of Public Health’s first Change Talk by activist-in-residence Angelo Pinto. After speaking with students at the event, Lumumba felt it was necessary for students to “see with their own eyes” what was happening in communities affected by the water crisis. Lumumba, on behalf of the Mississippi Rapid Response Coalition, arranged for six students to visit Jackson on Nov. 1, accompanied by Pinto and the School of Public Health assistant professor of social and behavioral sciences Ijeoma Opara.

“I think that this was a great opportunity for the university to do something different, to show up and participate in the process of recovery and not just write about it,” Lumumba said.

Lumumba leads the Mississippi Rapid Response Coalition, which was started in 2020 and encompasses over 30 organizations. These organizations work together to respond to disasters caused by issues such as failing infrastructure and climate change.

The water crisis in Jackson has left over 150,000 residents under boil advisories, with water line breaks, contamination hazards and low water pressure threatening access to clean water in an 82 percent Black city.

“Unfortunately, it is often the urban, predominantly Black and Brown cities that are impacted by something as simple as access to clean water,” Opara said. “It shouldn’t be happening in America. We need to uplift this more so that our politicians who have the power to fund this stuff can actually take this seriously.”

Opara noted that activism is not just protesting — it encompasses campaigning and highlighting the importance of social change. She handpicked most of the students based on their participation in her Community-Based Participatory Research class or their attendance at the Change Talk. The students included Boateng, Nassim Ashford SPH ’23, Rosa Gonzalez Juarez SPH ’23, Katie Soden SPH ’24, Eryn Pawluk SPH ’24 and postdoctoral researcher Sitara Weerakoon.

Her goal for this trip was to work closely with the Jackson community to devise solutions as public health researchers, students and activists.

“When the community members saw us coming, they were extremely excited,” Ashford said. “They were like ‘Yale’s here!’ It shows them that other people actually care about what’s going on, and it gives them the fight to keep going.”

Knocking door-to-door

The coalition conducts “wellness checks,” which consist of calling residents and performing doorto-door surveys to assess peoples’ needs. Last year alone, they performed 10,000 wellness checks. The first wellness checks were implemented in 2021, during which the city was struck by a winter storm and had been without water for nearly six weeks.

Students conducted wellness checks at a senior home which had 152 units and was government-run, inhabited mainly by people over 65 on Medicare. According to Opara, many of the seniors had comorbidities, including diseases like cancer, diabetes or heart disease which put them in an especially vulnerable population.

The students surveyed residents, asking how they were dealing with the water crisis, what their needs were and how they felt about the government’s response. Based on their needs, the students offered water filters, water tests and basic necessities like cleaning supplies.

Sitara Weerakoon, a postdoc in Opara’s lab, asked one woman how she was coping with the water crisis. The first thing the woman said was that she was hungry and dying of cancer. All she wanted was for someone to get her food. She was on a breathing machine, had medications to take and did not have the strength to cook. After talking with Weerakoon, Pinto and Opara brought food to her doorstep.

“If we hadn’t knocked on her door and asked her that question, we would have never known that she needed that,” Weerakoon said. “She might not have gotten food that day, who knows what could have happened. To me, the biggest takeaway from this was how important it is to be in the community and figure out what their individual needs are.”

Weerakoon is a self-professed “quantitative person” used to the process of analyzing data, writing reports and then publishing them. Her public health research naturally falls at the population level. Compared to canvassing, she felt that research could not help individuals or have impact in the short term because of the years it takes for research to be translated into practice.

Community involvement contextualizes research, and reveals the larger story of which publications are “just one tiny fraction,” Weerakoon explained. While these crises often point to a systemic cause, she viewed empowerment at an individual level as key to propelling long term systemic change.

“If you look at public health as promoting the health of the public, research is really insignificant, and that is because it takes 10, 20, 30 years to translate research into practice,” Weerakoon stated. “So to really do public health, you need to be in the community, fighting for change to make sure that everybody has equitable health in every possible way.”

Ashford emphasized the need to understand lived experiences when conducting research to figure out “what it is that you’re doing” and avoid bias.

Opara conducts and teaches community-based participatory research, which seeks to bridge the gap between academic institutions and community members. While the community teaches researchers about their experiences, the researchers teach them how to understand data on their situation and utilize the research for their benefit.

“It’s a co-learning process that allows researchers to come into a community and remain humble,” Opara said. “People in Jackson are the experts of their lived realities. I may be an expert on health disparities and health equities and using research to inform practices and policy, but I’m not the expert of their lived experiences — they are — so I’m learning from them.”

According to Opara, when they met with residents in Jackson, almost all of them said that the water crisis was not their biggest issue. Some people were dealing with food insecurity and did not have access to healthy food. Others needed access to doctors who could address their comorbidities.

Opara also noticed a rift between the local and state government, with residents unsure where to direct their frustration. While blame would often target the local government, there was also the issue of the state controlling the distribution of funding necessary to address the water crisis.

“The water crisis exacerbates all the other issues that Jackson residents are facing,” Opara said. “If we’re not working with policymakers to figure out how to get more funding to low income people in the community that need it, the water crisis is an added issue that’s going to further push them into multiple states of crisis.”

The status of the crisis

Pinto found that many people use an average of 16 to 20 bottles of water a day. While people are beginning to use the water again for bathing, they still do not trust it for drinking, cooking or even brushing their teeth. Conscious of the hazards, Lumumba likewise chooses not to drink water from the pipes in Jackson.

“They’ve never trusted the water,” Pinto said. “They continuously boil their water or they use water bottles to shower or to brush their teeth. They’ve been forced to kind of have that be their everyday reality, but it doesn’t hide the fact that there’s so many other things that are compounded.”

The students continued their day by volunteering at one of the coalition’s six water distribution sites. The coalition distributes water five days a week to areas all over Jackson. Lumumba wanted the students to experience the act of passing out water “in a massive way,” to people who had lined up for hours to get bottled water to drink.

“A lot of times you’re sending in all this money or you’re saying people need water, but to actively be there and to put water in somebody’s car, and know that this person actually needs water is a really humbling experience,” Ashford said.

According to Lumumba, while water is largely restored and flowing through pipes in Jackson, boil water notices remain in many parts of the city. Though the EPA claims that the water is safe to drink, the issue lies in the infrastructure. Water coming out of processing plants may start out safe, but many homes still have pipes made out of lead, copper and other contaminants that mix with water as it travels from the plants to homes. Many pipes across Jackson still need to be replaced, but the funding is sparse and the problem is widespread.

Residents may not even know that their property’s pipes require replacement, according to Lumumba. Many homes in Jackson were built in the 1960s, with private pipes that the city does not track. The coalition handed out water tests and water filters to help residents diagnose their own water for potential contamination.

Opara spoke to coalition volunteers who worked at the water distribution site ‘day and night.’ Many expressed their love for the city of Jackson, a community that raised them. Bringing their “full selves” to the site every day, they put aside their own struggles to serve their community. Opara called them the real heroes of Jackson.

“It’s not easy work,” Opara reflected. “When you’re distributing water and canvassing, you’re hearing really hard stories. You’re seeing people that are struggling, that are literally depending on you to give them free water and free supplies […] I commend them for doing this work.”

Reflections

Pinto admitted to being surprised by “how good” the students were at administering surveys and navigating the needs and challenges of the residents they encountered. But all of them had some type of experience working on-the-ground in communities. A nontraditional student, Rosa Gonzalez Juarez spent ten years doing community organizing work before coming to Yale.

“I miss being back in community, I miss working with them, I miss hearing their stories,” Gonzalez Jaurez said. “I miss being an advocate for them and with them, and teaching them about their rights.”

From her last two years as a student, Gonzalez Juarez said she merely learned the academic, professional terms for what she had already been doing as an organizer. One term was “community-based participatory research,” Opara’s field of research. It is a process Gonzalez Juarez loved doing as a community advocate, conducting needs assessments and collecting data directly from people. This process, observed too in the canvassing done in Jackson, was important to build trust and partnerships within communities.

Through the academic knowledge of public health work, Gonzalez Juarez envisions shifting her advocacy work to focus on project proposals and project funding in support of disadvantaged communities. Opara hopes that this experience was life-changing for the students, and that it inspired them to be more engaged in community-level work as they graduate and move on in their careers.

The students ended their trip at city hall, meeting policy decision makers and municipal government members, including Chief of Staff Safiya Omari, who Zoomed into the previous Change Talk. Omari gave the students historical context on the city of Jackson.

While Ashford’s coursework typically involved reading studies and research that were decades or years old, he valued having an activist show the urgency of current issues and the need for an active team of researchers to figure out how to remediate specific situations.

“As a Black man from the South … and also a political activist, one of the most impactful things for me was just being in the presence of people like Rukia and hearing the history behind the fight and the struggle for rights in Mississippi,” Ashford said.

Lumumba’s coalition is aiming to complete wellness checks on at least 60,000 residents this year. They are also requesting that the state and federal government fully fund a rebuild of Jackson’s water and sewage infrastructure, which Lumumba estimates will cost close to $1.5 billion.

Boateng recommended that public health students connect with local community members and use their academic knowledge to write op-eds. Using Yale’s name could help attract public attention to these issues and create better funding opportunities for them.

“Water is important, infrastructure is critical,” Lumumba said. “We hope that from the experience of the students that came that they will be inspired to find some way big or small to help heal us here in Jackson to overcome this water crisis and our water infrastructure issues.”

Pinto and Opara hope that future trips can be arranged to bring students to other states, or even inspire work within the local New Haven community. Ashford wants the master’s program to create an ‘activism’ track, similar to the tracks dedicated to Global Health and U.S. Health Justice, because “public health is activism.”

Donations to the Mississippi Rapid Response Coalition can be made here.