Horton Sheff Exits Green Party City Councilwoman Chooses Unaffiliated Status By OSHRAT CARMIEL Courant Staff Writer
Elizabeth Horton Sheff, the city councilwoman who was the first African American Green Party member in the country to be elected to office on a municipal level, has resigned from the party.
Though she made headlines in 1999 when she was first elected to the Hartford City Council on the Green Party line, Horton Sheff renounced her affiliation with the group on a much quieter note:
She contacted the registrars of voters' office this month and declared herself "unaffiliated."
"Our priorities are just too different," Horton Sheff said of her now former party.
She said the party's agenda was not reflective of the issues that her constituents in Hartford find important.
"I'm working on grandparents raising grandchildren. They're working on `runoff voting.' I'm working on civil rights, their focus is Palestinian rights," she said Wednesday.
"With all that's going on in the city, I need to concentrate on answering the needs of the constituents."
Horton Sheff also said she was disenchanted with fellow members' insistence on supporting the Green Party's presidential candidate, David Cobb, in a year when the race for president among the two major party candidates is so close.
"This is not the time" to back a third-party candidate, she said.
She said she was tired of having to explain her support for Democrat John Kerry to those who asked.
"I was expending too much energy trying to explain why it's important to get Bush out of office," she said of the president.
She said she still plans to work with the state Green Party and parted ways amicably.
"This was her decision, and we wish her well," said Mike DeRosa, the co-chairman of the Connecticut Green Party.
Horton Sheff, a former Democrat, was an icon to the local and national Green Party, a symbol that the party was making inroads in a nation wedded to a two-party system, members said at the time.
As of Wednesday afternoon, the state party website still had a photo of Horton Sheff displayed at the center of its main page.
With Horton Sheff no longer a Green, there are only three other Green Party municipal officeholders in Connecticut. DeRosa, who is running for state Senate in Hartford and Wethersfield as a Green Party candidate, said her departure will not affect the appeal of the party.
"The rumors of the early demise of the Hartford Green Party are extremely exaggerated," DeRosa said.
Elected as a Green, Horton Sheff holds one of the council's three "minority party" seats - seats that, in Hartford, are reserved for anyone who is not a Democrat.
She said she has no plans to rejoin the Democratic Party and will remain "unaffiliated" for the remainder of her four-year term.
"It's really disappointing," she said of her departure.
"Because I had real high hopes that the Green Party in Connecticut would do great things. I'm not so certain about that now."