The three Working Families candidates for Hartford’s City Council–Dr. Larry Deutsch, Urania Petit, and Luis Cotto–were endorsed yesterday by the Greater Hartford Labor Council. The GHLC has over 5000 members in the city. In Tuesday’s primary, only two candidates on the primay ballot received over 5000 votes–Ritter and Kennedy.

While the Democrats running for (and to retain their) council seats have been using crime as their big issue, with some mention of property tax and education, the Working Families party have named jobs, health care, housing, arts, and the environment as their top concerns.
Yesterday, Working Families candidates announced how they planned to develop jobs for Hartford residents:

  • A “Green Jobs” public works program to retrofit existing public buildings and utilities for energy efficiency. The plan would create jobs and also produce long-term savings for the city.
  • Stronger enforcement of local hiring requirements on city funded projects.
  • Working with the Board of Education to develop a specialty school focused on training youth for construction industry jobs.
  • Expanding the city’s Living Wage law to cover a broader number of jobs and projects, ensuring that more Hartford residents receive living wages and health benefits, not just poverty-wage jobs.

Their choices for how to foster job growth are interesting because they seem focused on the long term effects that such jobs might have in Hartford. This, at least on paper, sounds like an effort to do more than just attract young urban professionals into Hartford to grow the grand list with.