Buzaid fears some small businesses may not survive pandemic

By Scott Benjamin

DANBURY – After spending 14 years in the General Assembly, David Cappiello of Danbury told The Litchfield County Times in December 2008 that the Connecticut Legislature suffers from having “very few” members who have ever owned their own business.

There are now two small business owners vying for the 138th District state House seat that Cappiello held from 1995 to 1999.

Republican challenger Emile Buzaid Jr. has been in small business for 50 years, currently running a piano exchange store and a gun shop, while first-term Democratic incumbent Ken Gucker owns a car restoration business.

Regarding the impact on small businesses from the pandemic, Buzaid, a Danbury City Council member at large, said, “You look at the Amber Room [catering hall in Danbury]. They can’t book any engagements and their employees are idle. You have Chuck’s Steak House, where they can’t use the bar, or the salad bar or the private meeting rooms. Your overhead is the same. You can only keep doing this for so long.”

“What we’ve been going through the last four months, I have never seen before with the unintended consequences,” he declared in an interview.

“Small businessmen are struggling for their own existence,” Buzaid said. “It’s a fine line between keeping people safe and also not killing your economy.”

Gucker, a former vice chairman of the Danbury Democratic Town Committee, recently told Patch.com that more federal stimulus will be need, since additional “help is needed for small businesses.”

The district includes parts of New Fairfield, Ridgefield and Danbury.

Republican President Donald Trump recently told Fox News Sunday that he supports a payroll tax suspension to provide additional stimulus. That would temporarily eliminate the 7.65 percent paid by employees and 7.65 percent paid by employers to help fund Social Security and Medicaid.

Buzaid said, “I think that would be good. But sometimes the legislation gets lost in translation. The devil is in the details.”

Gucker recently told Patch.com, "I agree and disagree" with the payroll tax suspension.

He explained, "I do have some concerns about people saying, 'Why do I need to go back to work when I'm getting unemployment and stimulus.' That's making it tough to motivate them to come back. And at some point we need to end that. When that comes, I'm not sure."

“Directionally, it’s not a crazy answer,” Jesse Rothstein, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley and a former Labor Department chief economist during the Obama administration, told The Wall Street Journal. “There’s just no scenario where the tens of millions who are on unemployment insurance right now would have jobs if it were a couple of percentage points cheaper to hire them.”

The Washington Post reported on July 23 that the U.S. Senate Republicans were scrapping Trump’s proposal for payroll tax suspension.

Buzaid earlier served for more than eight years on the Danbury City Council as a Democrat. A second cousin, the late Norman Buzaid, was a powerful Danbury Democratic Town Committee chairman for many years and was considered a potential candidate, according to The New York Times, for the Democratic State Central Committee chairmanship in 1975. Norman Buzaid later served as a state Superior Court Judge.

Emile Buzaid, who describes himself as “a moderate,” said he changed his registration to Republican in 2016 because of “the way the Democrats wanted all these large spending proposals and their lack of focus on small business.”

According to Patch.com he was the highest vote-getter last November among the at-large candidates for the Danbury City Council.

Danbury Republican Town Committee Chairman Mike Safranek, who recruited Buzaid to run in the November 3 election, said in a phone interview, “I think he has support across party lines more than most candidates. Plus, people from New Fairfield and Ridgefield, not just those in Danbury, know him through his businesses.”

On other issues, Buzaid said he opposes installing toll gantries to generate money for infrastructure improvements, a plan that Gov. Ned Lamont (D-Greenwich) proposed last year but abandoned this last February when it had insufficient support.

Most legislators from the metro Danbury area have opposed tolls. The governor has announced that he will seek to fund improvements through bond appropriations. A 2015 ad-hoc committee appointed by former Gov. Dannel Malloy (D-Essex) and chaired by former state Rep. Cameron Staples (D-New Haven) called for $100 billion in improvements over 30 years.

Buzaid said he believes that the commercial real estate market will be altered as a result of the large volume of work at home assignments during the pandemic.

“I think this just speeded up the process by about 10 years,” he said in an apparent reference to the influence of digitization.

Buzaid said Connecticut needs to trim its state spending.

“A lot of my friends are leaving, and it is heartbreaking,” Buzaid said. “There are people who can’t afford to stay in the state.”

He said there are ways to control expenses.

“The state is sending money to families for free lunches who don’t need it,” said Buzaid.

When asked if the pensions for the public school teachers in kindergarten through 12th grade classes, which the state has paid since 1939, should be partially funded by the municipalities, as Malloy had recommended, Buzaid said. “I’d have to look into it.”

Since the current general boundaries were established in 1992, the Republicans have dominated the 138th district. Their all-star roster includes Danbury Mayor Mark Boughton, who held the seat for three years; Cappiello, who is now a lobbyist at the State Capitol and managed Linda McMahon’s 2010 U.S. Senate campaign; attorney Mark Nielsen, who was twice the Republican nominee in the Fifth Congressional Distric and served as legal counsel to Mitt Romeny when he was governor of Massachusetts; and Danbury Town Clerk Jan Giegler, who held the seat for 14 years.

Gucker, a former state Senate candidate, was elected in 2018 with 51 percent of the vote over former Danbury Board of Education member Michael Ferguson, who was only 25 years old when he captured the legislative seat in 2016.

When Trump was on the ticket in 2016, Republicans added seats in the General Assembly, reaching an 18-all stalemate in the Senate with the Democrats and reducing the Democratic majority in the House to 79 to 72.

That evaporated in 2018, as the Democrats built a 22-14 edge in the Senate and 91-60 in the House.

Sacred Heart University Government Department Chairman Gary Rose, who has authored several books on Connecticut politics, has told Patch.com that even though Trump wasn’t on the ballot in 2018, his low approval ratings in Connecticut, in part, resulted in the GOP losing ground in what should have been “a change election” with Malloy departing with low poll numbers.

Rose said that partly due to Trump, suburban women, who used to be equally divided between Republicans and Democrats in Connecticut, have started to trend more toward the Democrats.

During the 2018 election, Democrats Raghib Allie-Brennan of Bethel annexed the state House seat in the Second District, which includes a part of Danbury, and Julie Kushner of Danbury captured the state Senate seat in the 24th District, which encompasses all of the Hat City.

Safranek said, “I don’t think that people are going to be concerned in the legislative races this year with what is happening at the national level. It’s going to be the messages from the candidates and making the phone calls and putting up the lawn signs.”

Buzaid said he has been overwhelmed with support since entering the race this spring.

He said he has qualified for the Citizens Election Program in which a state House candidate needs to raise $5,300 in contributions ranging from $5 to $270 from residents in the district to receive a state grant of $30,575.

“We have achieved more than that in record time,” Buzaid exclaimed. “We have people who want to give even more money.”