Female Ex-Cons Band Together

Jackie Lucibello (Paul Bass photo)

Friday, December 8, 2017 - 

Jackie Lucibello was serving a three-year sentence at the York Correctional Institution when she found out that her mother was dying from complications related to AIDS.

If Lucibello wanted to visit her mother in the hospital, she first had to be “blackboxed.”

A high-strength plastic box was placed over the key hole to her handcuffs to keep her from trying to pick the lock.

Chains running from her ankles to her waist to her wrists all intersected in that black box, rendering her practically immobile.

At the hospital, she was pushed in a wheelchair through the corridors, was not allowed to see any other visiting family members, and was watched by two guards with the hospital bedroom door open as she spent her final moments with her mother.

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Mid-Year Car Tax Increase Coming

Alders prez Walker-Myers breaks news to neighbors Tuesday night.

Wednesday, December 6, 2017 - 

New Haveners will receive a slightly higher mid-year car tax bill in January 2018 as the city looks to stay within budget without cutting social services, in the face of reduced state aid.

Board of Alders President and West River Alder Tyisha Walker-Myers revealed that news to neighbors at Tuesday night’s Dwight Community Management Team meeting, which was held at its regular monthly location in the gymnasium of Amistad Academy on Edgewood Avenue.

Walker-Myers told the two dozen attendees that the city will send out semi-annual car tax bills in January 2018 that will reflect a mid-year increase in the local motor vehicle mill rate from 32 to 37 mills. That means that residents will pay $37, rather than $32, for every $1,000 worth of assessed value for their cars.

That’s a mid-year adjustment for the fiscal year that began July 1. Taxpayers have already paid a car tax bill for the first half of the fiscal year based on the 32 mill rate.

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Alt-Transiteers Map Attack On “Anarchy”

Rob Rocke, Nadine Horton lead infrastructure session.

Tuesday, December 5, 2017 - 

More people biking in protected lanes, paying tolls, surviving crosswalks — and running, for office.

Advocates promoted that vision for safer streets and, with the running suggestion, how to realize it, at a strategy session Monday night.

The occasion was the latest edition of Transportation on Tap, a semi-regular conversation series organized by the local alternative transportation advocacy group GoNewHavenGo.

The series, started in 2015, connects transportation experts with community members every few months to talk about how to achieve improved pedestrian, cyclist and public transit infrastructure and access throughout the city.

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City Prepares To Clear Mill River Homeless Camp

Monday night’s East Rock Community Management Team meeting.

Tuesday, November 28, 2017 - 

The city is planning to clear a large Mill River homeless encampment near the Ralph Walker Skating Rink sometime before the beginning of the new year.

Livable City Initiative (LCI) neighborhood specialist Linda Davis delivered that message to the East Rock Community Management Team (ERCMT) on Monday night during the team’s regular monthly meeting at the mActivity Gym on Nicoll Street.

Davis told the team that the city’s Homeless Outreach Task Force plans to clear out a homeless encampment that has been active for months under the I-91 overpass sometime “before the first snowfall.”

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In Rock Doc, A Song Is Born

Local filmmaker Gorman Bechard.

Monday, Nov. 27, 2017 - 

How does a song come to life on screen? In New Haven filmmaker Gorman Bechard’s latest rock documentary Who Is Lydia Loveless?, the magic lies in the editing.

Bechard’s movie follows Lydia Loveless, a 24-year-old country rocker from rural Ohio, as she and her band tour across the Midwest in 2014 and 2015.

Bechard, who has made a name for himself in recent years as a consummate chronicler of the passion, restlessness and unpredictability of those devoted to rock ‘n’ roll, finds in Loveless a case study for the expressive potential and logistical difficulties of trying to make a living as a full-time musician.

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LEAD Launches

Lt. O’Neill at Tuesday night’s meeting.

Friday, Nov. 24, 2017 - 

The city’s new prospective start date for a pilot program that diverts prostitutes and low-level drug offenders from the criminal justice system and towards social services is this coming Wednesday, Nov. 29.

At Tuesday night’s Downtown-Wooster Square Community Management Team (DWSCMT) meeting on the second floor of City Hall, Lt. Mark O’Neill, who is the district commander for the neighborhood, updated residents on the latest schedule for the city’s new Law Enforcement Assisted Diversion (LEAD) program.

The city is preparing to begin a two-year, federally-funded pilot next week in the Hill and Downtown neighborhoods.

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“Super Block” Revival Ready

City transit chief Doug Hausladen (right) and city engineer Giovanni zinn (left).

Wednesday, November 22, 2017 - 

A developer is just about ready to put shovels in the ground to start construction on 269 new market-rate apartments that will replace a four-acre surface parking lot on a “super block” at Audubon and Orange — and to help the city add a traffic-calming “speed table” there.

Matthew Edvardsen of South Nowarlk-based Spinnaker Real Estate Partners offered that update at Tuesday night’s monthly meeting of the Downtown-Wooster Square Community Management Team (DWSCMT) on the second floor of City Hall.

Edvardsen told neighbors that his firm should have all necessary building permits, construction funding and subcontractor agreements in place by the end of the year for the new “Audubon Square” mixed-use development.

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German-Inspired Reform Calms Prison

Scott Semple (Yale Law School photo)

Monday, November 20, 2017 - 

Young inmates are getting direction — not just detention — in one corner of Connecticut’s prison system, and they’re straightening out as a result.

State Department of Correction Commissioner Scott Semple created the experiment called the TRUE program (which stands for Truthfulness, Respectfulness, Understanding and Elevating) — to help 18-to-25-year-old inmates mature into responsible adults behind bars, and prepare for successful and productive lives after they have been released from prison.

The program, inspired by a fact-finding visit Semple took to Germany with the governor in June 2015, is currently in place in one 70-bed unit at the Cheshire Correctional Institution. Because of its early success, Semple is looking to expand it to other units at Cheshire, as well as to the York Correctional Institution for Women.

Through the TRUE program, the young inmates are paired up with mentors who are older, fellow inmates serving life sentences for crimes that they committed while they were young.

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Film Fest Brings Latin American Directors To Town

Latin American filmmakers come to town for LIFFY. From left to right: Juan Gomez, Carlos Barba Salva, Luis Alberto García, Deyma D’Atri, and Jean Jean.

Friday, November 17, 2017 - 

After decades of cool antagonism, the United States restores full diplomatic relations with Cuba, and a New Yorker returns to the island nation of her birth to look after her ailing father.

Cut to four men playing dominos as they speculate on the political future of Cuba. Or to the story of the first transgender woman to be elected to Venezuela’s National Assembly. Or to the challenges faced by a Haitian woman who has lived in the Dominican Republic for 30 years, but still falls between the cracks as a “non-resident.”

These are just a few of the stories on display this weekend at the Latino and Iberian Film Festival at Yale (LIFFY), an annual celebration of contemporary Spanish and Portuguese-language cinema that takes place in downtown New Haven, at the Whitney Humanities Center at 53 Wall St.

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Next Stop: Springfield! 12 Times A Day

A DOT staffer explains the proposed schedule for the new Hartford Line train service at Monday night’s hearing.

Tuesday, November 14, 2017 - 

New Haveners appeared so pumped to start taking more trains to Hartford and Springfield — that no one showed up to complain about the fares.

At least that could be one takeaway from a public meeting Connecticut Department of Transportation (CT DOT) staffers held Monday night at New Haven’s Hall of Records at 200 Orange St.

The DOT didn’t end up hearing much public feedback. But what it did hear was that New Haven is ready to start taking advantage of increased rail service to the north.

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Transgender Life And Movies Celebrated

Staklo and Dunn at the WNHH studio.

Friday, November 10, 2017 - 

New Haven transgender rights activist IV Staklo didn’t know how much a country could support the identity, rights and healthcare of its transgender citizens until they saw a movie about Cuba’s first transgender woman to receive sex reassignment surgery.

For Staklo, En el cuerpo equivocado (The Wrong Body) is not just about the exceptional life of Mavi Susel, who in 1988 became the first transgender person in Cuba to receive surgery to help her realize her female gender identity.

The 2010 documentary is also about the impact that a national educational initiative, like Cuba’s National Center for Sex Education (CENESEX), can have in helping shift a country’s attitude toward LGBTQ people over time from one of homophobia and transphobia to one of tolerance, legal protection and institutional support.

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Son’s Arrest Helped Shape Porter’s Politics

Robyn Porter (Markeshia Ricks photo)

Monday, November 7, 2017 - 

Robyn Porter was cleaning out a cluttered back room in her home when she first learned that her son had been arrested.

She was listening to gospel music, dancing, and chatting on the phone with a girlfriend when her mom walked into the kitchen. Tears streaming down her face, she told Porter that Porter’s 20-year-old son, who had had no previous criminal record, was being held at the police station.

“It’s that call that no mother, especially a black woman in America, wants to get,” Porter recalled on an interview on WNHH FM’s “Criminal Justice Insider” program. “I was devastated. But I was also rooted and grounded in my relationship with God.”

Ten years after the experience, Porter now helps make laws governing when people get arrested and how the criminal justice system handles them, as a Democratic state representative from Newhallville’s 94th General Assembly District.

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Vote For ... What?

Candidate Graves gives his phone number to Monterey Place’s Jeanette Britt.

Monday, November 6, 2017 - 

Jeanette Britt told the candidate knocking on her door that she had been tricked.

A man came to her house a few years ago selling life insurance, and she had bought it, assuming that it was a permanent plan that could be cashed out if she were ever in financial trouble.

She later learned that the policy was for term life insurance, which has no cash value and only pays a beneficiary if the owner dies within a specific period of time.

She told this story to Clifton Graves on Saturday when Graves knocked on her door seeking her vote this coming Tuesday in the election for a new probate judge. Graves, a Democrat, is running against Republican Melissa Papantones. (Click here to read a previous story detailing the issues in the race and the two candidates’ biographies, and to watch or listen to a joint radio appearance they made. Or click on the Facebook Live video at the bottom of this story.)

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Cross Helps 11 Starting Over From Maria

NHPS social work supervisor Johanna Samberg-Champion, Wilbur Cross Principal Edith Johnson, and Wilbur Cross social worker Lissette Agosto.

Friday, November 3, 2017 - 

Two weeks ago, Daisha Rivera was living on Puerto Rico’s north-central coast, where her family had trouble finding clean water a month after Hurricane Maria.

Thursday night Rivera joined other new students for a communal embrace at Wilbur Cross High, the new academic home for 10 other hurricane evacuees as well.

Rivera, who is 17, is a senior at Cross. She now lives with relatives in the Hill and is working on applying to colleges like Yale and University of Connecticut, where she hopes to study nursing.

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Friday Flicks: Knightriders

KNIGHTRIDERS (1981)

Friday, October 27, 2017 - 

George A. Romero, the legendary horror director who died this summer at age 77, made a movie in the early 1980s about a troupe of medieval reenactors who dress up as knights, perform tricks on motorcycles, and joust with wooden lances and rubber axes.

For a filmmaker best known for reintroducing the zombie as a staple of the American cultural imagination through such movies as Night of the Living Dead (1968), Dawn of the Dead (1978) and Day of the Dead (1985), the Renaissance Fair-acrobatics of Knightriders(1981) may on its surface seem like quite the thematic departure.

And yet, no movie in his filmography better captures the stubborn idealism, artistic ambition, fierce independence, and persistent social criticism that defined Romero’s five decades as a filmmaker.

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“Debate” Features Call For Democracy

Paca, Ganong show up.

Wednesday, October 25, 2017 - 

At a mayoral “debate” Tuesday night where no active mayoral candidates debated each other, two policy proposals did surface: creating a hybrid elected-appointed Board of Police Commissioners and expanding public financing for city elections.

The New Haven Democracy Fund organized a mayoral debate on Tuesday night in the library of the Benjamin Jepson Magnet School on Lexington Avenue in Fair Haven Heights.

The Democracy Fund is a city program that provides public matching dollars for New Haven mayoral candidates who abide by certain fundraising restrictions, including limiting individual campaign contributions to no more than $370 each.

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Plan For Ex-Factory Breaks Condo Barrier

The old Lehman Brothers Inc. printing company, which has been empty for almost 10 years.

Tuesday, October 24, 2017 - 

With a plan to renovate a shuttered Goatville factory printing plant, a fast-growing New Haven real estate company is betting that New Haven’s housing boom is ready for condominiums, not just high-end rental apartments.

The testing ground for this condo experiment will be the former Lehman Brothers printing plant at Foster and Canner streets, which has been closed and derelict for almost a decade.

During Monday night’s East Rock Community Management Team meeting at the mActivity Gym on Nicoll Street, property manager Mendy Paris, architect Wayne Garrick, and lawyer Kenneth Rozich of the company Ocean Management presented their prospective plan for converting the building into a 30-unit condominium complex. New Haven is awash in new high-end housing construction, but other developers report they have been able to obtain financing only for rentals, not condos. Ocean gets private financing from out-of-state investors and doesn’t need to rely on banks.

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Challenger Defeats 4-Term Union Prez

New AFSCME Local 3144 President Malinda Figueroa hugs supporter Sally Brown after union election results are announced early Saturday morning.

Saturday, October 21, 2017 - A challenge slate of public employees calling for more democratic, transparent union leadership came into power on Friday night after a municipal union election saw an end to the current president’s eight-year tenure.

That was the result of AFSCME Local 3144 elections, held from 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. on Friday at the New Haven Central Labor Council at 267 Chapel St. in Fair Haven.

Malinda Figueroa, an executive assistant in the Engineering Department who has worked for the city for 18 years, defeated current union President Cherlyn Poindexter by 10 votes to become the next leader of Local 3144.

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Ping Pong Bests Piano, Bikes

The five finalists.

Friday, October 20, 2017 - Wooster Square will soon be home to two public ping pong tables after neighbors voted in a spirited election to spend part of their annual citizen-controlled allotment of the city budget on tabletop tennis.

Such was the result of the most recent Downtown-Wooster Square Community Management Team (DWSCMT) meeting, which was held on the second floor of City Hall.

The meeting featured a “ranked choice”-style election — not over personalities seeking public office, but rather over how a community should allot public money. Advocates for public bikes and a kiosk and a piano competed with the ping pong proponent for the public’s support.

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Hundreds Rally Against Student’s Dad’s Deportation

Demonstrators march through Downtown and Yale’s campus on Tuesday night in support of a Yale undergraduate’s father who is facing deportation.

Wednesday, October 18, 2017 - Hundreds of Yale students, immigrant rights activists, and community allies rallied through the streets of downtown New Haven on Tuesday night in support of a Yale undergraduate’s father who has been detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in Colorado and faces deportation to Mexico.

Wrapped in scarves, coats, bullhorns, and posters, around 400 demonstrators marched and chanted along Crown Street, High Street, and Elm Street from 8:30 to 9 p.m. on Tuesday in opposition to an immigration enforcement system that they said unjustly tears families apart.

The protesters then gathered on the quad outside of Yale’s Sterling Memorial Library for another hour to listen to speakers pledge their support for the immediate release of Melecio Andazola Morales, a 41-year-old construction worker who has been held for the past week at the ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) Denver Contract Detention Facility in Aurora, Colorado.

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