New Haveners cannot
help but notice, as did Bass in his report, that Carter’s resignation “comes at a
time when City Hall has been buffeted by bad news, from
a wave of over 100 K2 overdoses in several days on the Green, to controversy over
city budget deficits, credit
ratings agencies, education
cuts, employee
theft with a city credit card,
and the purchase
of $4,000 [worth] of uniforms for mayoral staffers.”
There seems to be a
lot of beef on that plate. And yet, Harp will survive the buffeting, largely
because the Democrat Party has had a lock on New Haven since 1953. The last
Republican chief executive of New Haven was William Celentano, the city’s first
Italian mayor, a funeral director.
New Haven’s first
mayor was Roger Sherman, still a star in the political heavens for those who
are serious students of history. Sherman was the only founding father of the
new nation to have signed all four great state papers of the United States:
the Continental Association, the Declaration of Independence,
the Articles of Confederation, and the U.S. Constitution.
In addition to his
many duties and responsibilities, Sherman was also treasurer of Yale
College, and for many years a professor of religion who engaged in lengthy
correspondences with some of the more prominent theologians of his day. The New
Haven Green used to be the portal to Yale College.
In a word, Sherman
was no Toni Harp. One needn’t wonder what the first Mayor of New Haven might
have done to clean the green of its unsavory elements. Harp seems content to
pass on to others her own political responsibilities.
When nearly a
hundred druggies imbibing Fubinaca, a synthetic cannabinoid, suddenly dropped
in their tracks on the New Haven Green, ambulances were summoned, followed by
politicians, nearly all of whom handed off the problem to someone else. Harp
handed it off to U.S. Senator Dick Blumenthal who, never camera-shy, showed up
in New Haven accompanied
by Jim Carroll, Trump’s pick to
lead the Office of National Drug Control Policy, and vowed to get from
President Donald Trump more money to solve the opioid crisis, apparently
before Blumenthal
assembles a bill of impeachment that
may be presented surreptitiously to the New York Times.
So then, money is
the problem is it?
The
New Haven Register tells us,
“According to the DEA , AB-FUBINACA was introduced as a Pfizer patent in 2009,
but there are no medical or commercial uses for the drug. It is listed as
a Schedule 1 drug, as are cocaine, heroin and marijuana, according to the DEA.”
Perhaps Blumenthal
or Harp can tell us how a shelved Pfizer drug made its way into the
bloodstreams of 100 drug users encamped on the New Haven Green, laid out in
1638, one of the oldest in New England, now a national park that use to be, in
pre-Sherman colonial days, a seat of government in Connecticut. The paper
reports that many of the druggies went to the hospital, were treated and
released, and then returned to the Green for additional doses, supplied by
Felix Melendez and John Parker, both of New Haven.
The
New Haven Patch notes, “As of
Monday afternoon there were 47 people who overdosed on K2. Several went back
for seconds or more and subsequently overdosed for a total of 108 ambulance
transports to hospitals.” And, Harp will be distressed to discover, “This is
Melendez' thirty-eighth arrest,” according to his rather lengthy rap sheet.
Melendez has had, in other words, 19 second chances, which may not render him
ineligible for Malloy’s Second Chance program.
The druggies who
inhabit the New Haven Green are unmolested by the police for political reasons,
and Harp’s pretense that she lacks resources to handle the problem suggests she
is not prepared to be Mayor of New Haven.
Just clean the Green
– no excuses. When a young mother strolling through the Green with her baby is
no longer forced to map a path around druggies, Harp’s job will have been done,
but at some point she must choose between unwanted publicity in confronting the
problem and assigning just punishment to drug dealers who leap like
grasshoppers over prior arrests and find themselves back on the job poisoning
their clients after their 38th arrest.
Clean the Green.
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