Carter contends legislators of both parties should socialize more

By Scott Benjamin

BETHEL – Dan Carter believes the answer to Connecticut’s fiscal and transportation woes is for Democratic and Republican lawmakers to share anecdotes over 7-ounce sirloin cooked medium, garden salad, Cole Slaw, Coca Cola and a choice of cheese cake or apple pie over a white table cloth.

Carter, who nearly 30 years ago was piloting Air Force helicopters during Operation Desert Storm, represented the Second District in the state House of Representatives for six years before his ambitions extended to running for the U.S. Senate in a state that hasn’t elected a Republican to that esteemed body since Rubik’s Cube became popular.

The Bethel Republican is seeking his former state House seat and said in an interview that veteran legislators have told him that years ago, prior to his initial election in 2010, members of both parties used to “go out to dinner together.”

“Those are the days that we need to get back to,” he added.

“That bipartisanship is slowly deteriorating,” Carter said regarding the scuffles not only between the two major parties but within the Democratic Party.

Former state Comptroller and two-time Democratic gubernatorial nominee Bill Curry of Farmington wrote in CT Mirror in January 2019 that there wouldn’t be any partisan gridlock during the upcoming cycle because Connecticut was one of 14 states with a Democratic governor and Democratic majorities in both chambers of the General Assembly. After the 2018 election, the Senate, which had been even at 18-all was now 22 to 14 Democrat and the Democrats’ majority in the House had increased from 79 to 72 to 91 to 60.

The House Democratic roster has almost as many members as the three other caucuses – House and Senate Republicans and Senate Democrats – combined.

However, there appears to be intra-party gridlock – most notably on not getting any of the raft of electronic tolls proposals - Gov. Ned Lamont’s (D-Greenwich) signature issue - to a vote in either chamber

State Rep. Stephen Harding (R-107) of Brookfield has told Patch.com that he thought immediately following the 2018 results that the Democrats would be able to approve both tolls and recreational marijuana during the 2019 regular session.

After several delays Lamont announced in February that he would no longer pursue his revised tolls plan for just tractor trailers, and instead would reluctantly allocate funds through bond appropriations to upgrade what, according to a 2017 engineering study, is the worst road network in the country. The marijuana legislation is still under consideration.

Said Carter, “He’s fighting a two-front war.”

He explained that there is “a growing divide” in the Democratic Party in the state that is similar to the Democratic presidential factions of the Joe Biden moderates clashing with the Bernie Sanders progressives.

“This is not a time where we should play a game of partisanship,” said Carter. “There are a lot of things that we agree on and there were years when I and other Republicans voted 96 percent of the time with the Democrats. But we are apart on some important things and we’re not resolving them.”

He said, for example, that after defeating two-term Democrat Jason Bartlett of Bethel in 2010 in the Second District they continued to speak substantively to each other, and he hopes that the upcoming campaign against first-term Democrat Raghib Allie-Brennan of Bethel, a member of the Legislature’s Progressive Caucus, takes on a similar tone.

Allie-Brennan, a former congressional aide who had run unsuccessfully for the seat in 2016 when Carter vacated it, has been given an award from the Humane Society for his work on animal welfare.

The Progressive Caucus is apparently having an impact at the State Capitol.

With relative ease the Democrats increased the minimum wage last year and enacted paid family medical leave, which were Progressive Caucus priorities.

Gary Rose, the chairman of the Government Department at Sacred heart University in Fairfield, told Patch.com last August, "I thought the Progressive Caucus was going to get the best of him. I think his inclination is in that direction. Ned Lamont is a liberal Democrat. I'm not sure that he is a far left Democrat."

Carter said, “I have yet to see totally progressive taxes not hurt the middle class.”

He pointed, for example, to Connecticut’s decision in 1996 to change from the flat income tax, which had been adopted in 1991, to a progressive income tax.

A report on the Illinois Policy web site that was written by Orphe Divounguy, Bryce Hill and Suman Chattopadhyay stated that Connecticut is the only state in the last 30 years that “has adopted a progressive income tax.”

They wrote that, “everyday taxpayers have been hit with recurring income and property tax hikes. . . The typical Connecticut household has seen its income tax rates increase more than 13 percent since 1999. At the same time, property tax hikes (property taxes as a share of income) have risen more than 35 percent.”

Carter said in general he supports Lamont’s debt diet, which had been designed to slash $700 million a year off of bond appropriations. He said he objected to using it as “weapon” by delaying funding until there was some consideration of a tolls package, and then releasing the aid for municipalities after he finally gave up on installing the electronic gantries.

Carter, who became an Eagle Scout while growing up in Ohio, was elected in 2010 to the first of three terms in the Second District, which includes parts of Danbury, Newtown, Bethel and Redding.

Since the current general boundaries for the district were established in 2002, the Republicans have won six of the nine elections. However, some of those victories have been by narrow margins in what is considered a swing district.

Former Republican state House Speaker Fran Collins, a former Brookfield resident who represented part of Bethel in the 107^th District more than a generation ago, has said, “In politics, It is difficult to get back to a job that you once had.”

Regarding his decision to seek his former seat, Carter said, “It is rare for state a representative to be the nominee for the U.S. Senate.”

Launching his campaign in April 2016, only about five weeks before the nominating convention, Carter easily got the GOP nod, but garnered only about 34 percent of the vote in the general election against incumbent Democrat Richard Blumenthal of Greenwich, who over the last 40 years has been on statewide television more than anyone this side of Al Terzi.

Wikipedia.org has reported that Blumenthal, who had served as state attorney general from 1991 to 2011, collected 1,008,714 votes, the most that anyone has in Connecticut - breaking the record that Barack Obama set in 2008 with 997,773 ballots.

What did Carter learn from that race that will help him if he returns to the Legislature?

He said that by traveling across the state he now has “a broader perspective” of Connecticut, particularly its businesses.

Some reporters said he was better versed on the issues than Linda McMahon of Greenwich, who was the GOP nominee against Blumenthal in 2010 and again versus U.S. Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Old Lyme) in 2012. The WWE executive later served as the director of the Small Business Administration under President Donald Trump and is now chairing America First Action, the Super PAC raising money for the president’s re-election.

On the economy, Connecticut is mired in a fiscal crisis in which, according to the 2018 report from the state Commission on Fiscal Stability & Economic Competitiveness, the state employee pensions are only 29 percent funded.

CT Mirror budget reporter Keith Phaneuf told a League of Women Voters forum in Wilton last April that the state employee pensions and those for the public school teachers were underfunded each year from 1939 through 2010.

In 2017 the state, under former Gov. Dannel Malloy (D-Essex) approved a revised agreement, which will place new employees in a less expensive hybrid system.

Carter said he would have preferred a “defined contribution” plan, but acknowledged that there have been improvements.

However, with “so many state employees set to retire in the next 20 years,” Carter said, “I don’t know that we have options right now. If we’re so far down that path it is very difficult to do something without the unions. I don’t know that we have a good way out of it.”

Larry Dorman, the public affairs coordinator for the American Federation of State, Municipal Employees Council 4, which represents about 15,000 state workers, told Patch.com in August 2018 that according to a consultant for the state Office of Management & Budget, the governor’s fiscal arm, the 2017 agreement with the state employees will save Connecticut $24 billion over 20 years.

On another topic, during Carter’s first year in the Legislature the Board of Regents was established, which eliminated the separate Board of Trustees for the 12 state community colleges and the four Connecticut State University campuses and placed them in a 17-school configuration along with Charter Oak College.

Patch.com has reported that Gregory Gray, who was the president of the Board of Regents from 2013 to 2015, said during a 2014 talk in Danbury that the consolidation saved about $4 million annually in administrative costs, but that he would “tell Gov. Malloy that there had been very little thinking about what would come next.”

The potential answer to the question was the Transform 2020 program that Gary began developing in 2013 and which was presented to faculty members in the fall 2014 after a $1.83 million study had been completed by the Boston Consulting Group.

The proposal would have, among other things, tried to make it easier for state community college students to transfer to state four-year schools and complete their education promptly; eliminated some staff positions; added smart classrooms for distance learning; and extensively expanded online course offerings.

The faculty eventually took votes of “No Confidence” against Gray and he departed by the fall 2015.

If Transform 2020 had been adopted would Connecticut be better off?

“Probably,” said Carter, who has a bachelor’s degree from Bowling Green in Ohio and a master’s degree from Embry Riddle Aeronautical University in Florida.

“There were a lot of good parts to that,” he declared.

Carter said, “I think the online capacity needs to be improved in the state.”

However, some faculty in the Board of Regents system have been resistant to offering more online classes.

The Hartford Courant reported in 2013 that Gary had said that Charter Oak had not developed an online division similar to Excelsior in New York State and Thomas Edison in New Jersey, which had established their programs in the early 1970s, about the same time as Charter Oak.

Carter said that, in effect, Connecticut is ceding some of its potential students to ambitious online programs, such as those at Southern New Hampshire University, a private school, which has broadcast cable television commercials for years as its enrollment has climbed.

Gray’s successor, Mark Ojakian, the former chief of staff to Malloy, has tried to consolidate the presidencies of the 12 community colleges into the Board of Regents office under a proposed Students First plan that he is trying to develop with the New England Association of Schools and Colleges.

Over the last year, multiple campuses in the system have taken “No Confidence” votes against Ojakian and also the Board of Regents.

Carter said if the Board of Regents can obtain accreditation, he would support installing Students First.

He remarked, “People have been very afraid of the merging and of changing operations. It’s very difficult for faculty, but we have to look at the long-term viability, and financially something has got to give.”

“We have the faculty standing in the way of changes,” Carter said. “We have the unions standing in the way of changes. At some point something has to give, because people need to be able to afford to live in Connecticut.”

However, if the state has a 29 percent funded pension system for its workers, its roads are rated as the worst of any state in the nation and the middle class doesn’t find Connecticut affordable, then why haven’t the Republicans taken a majority of the seats at least once in the last one-third of a century?

It has been since the 1984 election that they’ve had control of the lower chamber.

“I don’t entirely understand it,” Carter said.

“But if you look at the demographics, the Democrats have an edge in the cities. Rowland and Rell spent tons of money in the cities, but at the end of the day they go Democratic,” he added, making reference to some of the efforts of the two most recent Republican governors – John Rowland of Middlebury and M. Jodi Rell of Brookfield.

In 2010 the GOP gubernatorial ticket of Tom Foley of Greenwich and Danbury Mayor Mark Boughton captured 128 of the 169 municipalities, yet they still lost the election by 6,400 votes.

On a separate subject, Carter had told Patch.com during his U.S. Senate campaign in 2016 that Connecticut needed more advanced manufacturing and aerospace.

He said that advanced manufacturing “is now going in the right direction” in Connecticut.

Carter said the expected merger later this year between defense manufacturers United Technologies and Raytheon will hurt the Farmington area in particular, since about 100 executive positions from United Technologies headquarters will be transferred to near Boston. The merger would make the combined company the second largest defense manufacturer.

He said it is not clear whether the Carrier air conditioner and Otis elevator divisions will remain in Connecticut after they are spun off of United Technologies.

The Second District is diverse – ranging from Redding in the northern tip of the Fairfield County Gold Coast, which provides large financial resources for Connecticut - to Danbury, which, other than Stamford, is the only major city growing in the state, but one that has about 50 percent of its public school students on reduced lunch.

However, Carter said that regardless of the municipality, the 22,600 residents “want the same thing” - good jobs and safe and vibrant communities.