Curry credits Lamont with building a consensus during pandemic

By Scott Benjamin

Former gubernatorial contender Bill Curry says over "the last few weeks" Gov. Ned Lamont (D-Greenwich) "has been doing well" in addressing what is considered to be the biggest crisis since the Great Depression.

Curry - who has twice been the Democratic nominee for governor, worked in the Bill Clinton White House aide, served as state comptroller and in the state Senate and run for Congress - applauded Lamont for his commitment to saving lives and helping to coordinate a regional response with other northeast governors to the ongoing pandemic.

"He has shown his innate empathy and that he is a good person," he said in a phone interview. "He also has demonstrated that he is a consensus builder."

On another subject, Curry praised Lamont's "debt diet," in which the governor has tried to trim about $700 million a year from state's bond appropriations.

Curry said, "He's done even more than Weicker" to reduce expenditures, a reference to the former governor who was in office from 1991 to 1995, the same tenure in which Curry was serving as state comptroller during the first of his two runs as the Democratic nominee for governor.

Patch.com has reported that even former Trumbull First Selectman Tim Herbst, who ran for the 2018 Republican gubernatorial nomination, has said that Weicker, a former Republican who was elected on the A Connecticut Party ticket, was the last governor to hold the line on bond appropriations.

Tom Dudchik, the host of the Capitol Report on WTNH Television Ch. 8-New Haven and a former deputy chief of staff to Weicker, has said that stating under Weicker's successor, former Gov. John Rowland (R-Middlebury) more pet projects - such as funding to help pay for press boxes at high school football fields - were being approved by the 10-member Bond Commission, which the governor chairs.

During 2019, his first year in office, Lamont only held four meetings when the commission was accustomed to monthly sessions.

However, Curry said it is time is stop "making bribes" to attract and keep businesses in Connecticut.

Under Lamont's immediate predecessor, Dannel Malloy (D-Essex), the state embarked on the ambitious First Five program that provided money to such corporate giants as ESPN in Bristol, Cigna in Bloomfield and Bridgewater Associates in Westport if they remained in the state and added to their work force.

Additionally, the state paid $292 million in incentives to lure Jackson Labs to leave Maine and build a research center in Farmington near the University of Connecticut Health Center, and also provided funds to keep the three major defense manufacturers - Igor Sikorsky in Stratford, Electric Boat in Groton and Francis Pratt & Amos Whitney in East Hartford.

Patch.com reported last May the state Department of Economic & Community Development Director David Lehmann of Greenwich had said his research indicated that Connecticut was the only state that was providing those kind of incentives up front.

"In Connecticut, they won't be given out on day one anymore, but they will be given as the company increases jobs in the state," Lehman told Patch.com at the time.

This last January CT Mirror stated that under the revised program, Lehman estimated that the incentives, which had cost $16,000 per job under Malloy, would be sliced to $5,000 to $10,000 per job.

Said Curry, "We shouldn't be in that business at all. That model is a failure. We shouldn't be bribing these big companies."

However, CT Mirror reported this last January that according to the Pew Charitable Trust, Connecticut is a top group of 16 states in getting a good return on those investments.

Said Curry, "Without property tax reform, economic development won't work for us," making reference to a prime platform staple from his two bids for governor.

The Connecticut Conference of Municipalities (CCM) announced last year that property tax reform would be one of its priorities for the General Assembly's 2020 session.

CCM stated that property taxes are about twice as much in Connecticut as the national average and are the third highest in the country.

During his 2002 gubernatorial campaign Curry said his 1994 campaign plan "would have cut property taxes by more than $1 billion, a proposal that would have cut your taxes by 25 percent or more."

In 1996, then-New Haven Mayor John DeStefano, who would go on to be the Democratic nominee in 2006, was described by The New York Times as "a leading spokesman for a growing number of people who believe that Connecticut's reliance on the property tax is harming not just the state's cities, but it's entire economy."

In 2002, Robert Jackson, then the town manager in Plainville, told The New Britain Herald that, "It's one of the most unfair taxes. It doesn't have anything to do with ability to pay." The Herald reported that other municipal leaders that were interviewed had echoed Jackson's sentiments.

In 2018, Patch.com reported that Curry said, "Property taxes are the biggest taxes that small businesses pay."

It has been 26 years since Curry helped propel property tax reform into a high-profile issue. So why hasn't it been approved by a General Assembly and a governor?

"The business lobbies are not that united about it," Curry explained. "CBIA [the Connecticut Business & Industry Association] has been nominally for it. I think that they see that kind of tax cut as a zero sum game. The labor unions have not been strongly for it."

"I don't think Malloy ever had a meeting on property tax reform," he said. "At least Lamont is talking about property tax reform."

Gary Rose, the chairman of the Government Department and the author in 2019 of Connecticut In Crisis" Academica Press, 302 pages) on the state's fiscal obstacles and the 2018 gubernatorial campaign, told Patch.com in January that Lamont has been criticized on not enacting property tax reform since it was one of his priorities when he was running for office.

He had pledged to restore a property tax credit that had shrank under Malloy. However, during the 2018 campaign, CT NewsJunkie columnist Susan Bigelow wrote that Lamont's proposed funding path to restore the funding represented "magical thinking" and his plan was "not going to happen."

Regarding job creation, Curry said he agrees with Lamont's efforts to appoint Colin Cooper, a former aerospace engineering executive, as Connecticut's first chief manufacturing officer and to establish a Work Force Council as steps to address the long-term problem of having thousands of jobs that are advertised with no qualified applicants.

"I would mostly agree," he said, with Connecticut potentially enacting a plan similar to the the Real Jobs Rhode Island plan that its governor., Gina Raimondo, has enacted.

Fred Hochberg, the chairman and president of the Export-Import Bank under former President Barack Obama, wrote in his recent book, "Trade Is Not A Four Letter Word" (Avid Reader Press, 299 pages), that Raimondo has helped create new job training programs tailored toward the skills that businesses report as being the business needs.

Hochberg stated that the state has benefited by explicitly pairing up education and training programs with jobs that actually exist today and that companies expect to need very soon.

He wrote that in 2014, the year that Raimondo was initially elected as governor, the state had the second highest rate of employment in the nation. In five years it went from 49th to 27th as it slashed the joblessness rate almost in half. One of the biggest factors was strategic training.

"In the seaside town of Westerly, the state worked with a century-old submarine manufacturer General Dynamics Electric Boat to coordinate resources; Rhode Island build a job center nearby, and worked with the company to develop a curriculum that would meet both the physical needs of General Dynamics - such as pipe-fitting and welding - as well as the advanced IT needs that accompany modern vessels," he added. "In less than three years 1,800 locals have studied at the training center and been hired by General Dynamics."

Overall, Curry said that based on the early returns, "Lamont is a better governor than Malloy."

However, he said the current governor made a serious error in his effort to reinstall tolls to raise money for infrastructure improvements. The last toll plazas were dismantled in the late 1980s.

During the 2018 campaign, Lamont told Patch,com in February of that year that he would toll all vehicles. Then before the convention in May he vowed to only toll tractor trailer trucks.

He reversed himself in February 2019, about a month after taking office, and No Tolls protests ensued.

"He never would have won the election if that had been in his platform," said Curry of the tolls for all vehicles. "That promise was key. And then to make the tolls on all vehicles your top priority. It was never going to happen and he got burned by it, especially when he couldn't sell his policy that well."

Last summer, Lamont set out for a revised plan with a limited number of gantries and other funds that would come from federal low-interest loans. By mid-Autumn when there weren't enough votes for that initiative in the state Senate Democratic caucus, he reverted to back to the tolls being placed only on tractor trailer trucks.

After Democratic legislative leaders kept delaying a vote on that proposal, in February Lamont took it off the table and said he would reluctantly seek about $200 million in additional funding per year through bond appropriations.

Some observers have lauded Lamont for revising his plans after his proposal for the tolls on all vehicles met stiff resistance.

Said Curry, "The problem was that change didn't happen in week two" following the announcement of the comprehensive tolls plan and the immediate uproar of disapproval.

Curry added, "It reminds me of the time that [former Gov.. John] Rowland flip-flopped on an issue and some obtuse Rowland Administration spokesman told the reporters, 'It was just a campaign promise.' "