Group Celebrates Defiance Of Perez

March 8, 2006
By OSHRAT CARMIEL, Courant Staff Writer

A brazen caravan of honking cars - some bearing photos of state Rep. Minnie Gonzalez, one carrying Gonzalez herself - wound down Park Street Tuesday night to deliver, through cheers and the waving of Puerto Rican flags, a message to Hartford Mayor Eddie A. Perez: You lost.

The caravan was a response to the results of a Democratic town committee race Tuesday, a neighborhood contest in the 3rd District that pitted Gonzalez and her slate against a slate of 12 challengers assembled and backed by the mayor.

Unofficial results show that Gonzalez's slate, a group of veterans who made door-to-door appeals to voters, bested the challenge slate, which relied on television advertising, by a significant margin.

Gonzalez and her supporters celebrated with a late-night parade down Park Street, the city's Latino commercial center, past the headquarters of the Perez-backed slate.

The 3rd District race, and its results, have highlighted the acrimony between Gonzalez and Perez and, judging from the Gonzalez camp's victory, is a sign of Latino opposition to Perez as he seeks re-election next year.

"We kicked his butt today," said Ramon Arroyo, Gonzalez's husband, who wore a T-shirt referring to Perez as "The Puerto Rican Exterminator."

"And," Arroyo said, "we're waiting for him in 2007."

Gonzalez's 3rd District, covering Parkville and Frog Hollow, is just 12 members of the overall 70 on the Democratic town committee that takes office this month. The committee will decide whether to endorse Perez for re-election next year, and the mayor appears to have enough support in other districts to get the endorsement.

Perez was victorious elsewhere in the city Tuesday when it came to the two other contested town committee races.

In the 4th District, covering the heavily Latino South Green neighborhood, a slate made up of Perez allies won handily over a challenge slate of relative unknowns believed to be affiliated with Gonzalez. In the 5th District, covering the North End and downtown, a slate led by state Rep. Marie Kirkley-Bey and newfound Perez ally Abraham L. Gilesbested a slate of challengers.

But back to the 3rd District.

Perez was at a meeting Tuesday night of the board of education, which he heads as chairman. But Matt Hennessy, the mayor's chief of staff, and the mayor's brother William, who ran on the losing slate, were on hand to provide pep talks. They said the slate had a respectable showing considering it was assembled in haste and was going up against a slate led by a 10-year legislator entrenched in the neighborhood.

"Don't hang your head," William Perez said, raising his hand in a toast. "Compared to the machine she's got, I think we did damn good."

"We didn't make it all the way," Hennessy began. "But we scared 'em" William Perez said.

The battle between the Perez and Gonzalez camps is far from over. Members of Perez's slate are expected to file a complaint with the state Elections Enforcement Commission this week over an unusually high number of absentee ballots filed from an apartment building at 25 Laurel St., in the 3rd District.

About 80 ballot applications from that apartment building were distributed by Gonzalez. The mayor's slate is saying that most of the residents whom Gonzalez helped to vote absentee were in town and able-bodied, and had no reason not to vote at the polls.

"Many of the people were not aware that they had voted," said Hennessy, who with members of the mayor's slate was at the building Tuesday morning questioning those who cast absentee ballots. "These were not people who were out of town or very seriously ill or anything like that."

Gonzalez said that everyone to whom she gave an absentee ballot application needed one. The mayor's slate, she said, is trying to compensate for not getting absentee ballot applications to those voters first.

"Yes," Hennessy said. "If that was her version of working [absentee ballots], she did better than us."

Gonzalez shrugged off talk of an election enforcement complaint. Amid the raucous atmosphere of the ground floor of her house that doubled as her party headquarters, there was more talk of how to give Perez his due.

"We got you elected," Gonzalez said of Perez. "We worked every single day for you. We thought you were best for Hartford.

"You know what? We regret it."