Curry says Malloy didn't address what needed to be repaired

By Scott Benjamin

FARMINGTON – Since taking office on January 5, 2011, the 88^th governor of Connecticut has:

-- Reduced the full-time state work force by 12.6 percent.

-- Been the first governor in a generation to fully fund the pensions annually for the state employees.

-- Been praised for his criminal justice reforms which have helped lower the prison population to its lowest level in more than 20 years.

-- Signed bold gun violence prevention legislation.

-- Provided financial incentives for two major defense contractors to help revive Connecticut’s manufacturing.

-- Helped bring the Jackson Labs bioscience center to Farmington, which is now conducting research for a number of Connecticut companies and might establish an innovation hub in the central part of the state

-- Been a national leader in increasing the minimum wage.

-- Increased affordable housing, which his supporters say has been an economic driver for Connecticut.

-- Held public forums on policy issues in the 17 municipalities where there is a daily newspaper.

-- Has had the best rapport with his lieutenant governor, Nancy Wyman, of any tandem since Bill O’Neill and Joe Fauliso 30 years ago.

So how come, according to Morning Consult, Dannel Malloy (D-Stamford) is the most unpopular governor in the country?

Is it simply because the economy has been in decline continuously since the 2008 financial crisis and Connecticut?

“Some of it has to do with her personal style,” said former two-time Democratic nominee Bill Curry of Farmington. “He brings fewer social skills than you would expect.”

“But a lot of it is substantive,” he added.

“This smart, well-intentioned man, did a good job,” said Curry. “He just didn’t do the things to fix our cities, our middle class, our small businesses.”

Curry, who is currently writing a book on former President Barack Obama, said Connecticut ranks “first or second” in the nation in wealth and a few years ago a 4.6 unemployment rate would have been a relief.

“Our economy has some problems,” he said in an interview. “But it is actually doing fairly well. Our government is a public policy disaster. The fact that our economy is doing at least this well attests to its underlying strength.”

Curry, who was a domestic policy aide for former President Bill Clinton, said what Malloy failed to do was reform property taxes, help small businesses, maintain ethics standards and lower the health care costs for state workers.

“The things that he needed to do, he didn’t do” he said. “I don’t think he knew how badly we needed them.”

Property tax reform has been a staple of Curry’s platform since he first ran for governor in 1994, when he lost in a four-way race.

Hartford, which has been facing bankruptcy, is about to get a $50 million economic rescue from the state government.

Middletown Mayor Dan Drew, who withdrew from the gubernatorial race, has said some Connecticut cities are constrained financially because they have considerable land held by colleges and state agencies that don’t pay property taxes.

“We have to bet on solving the structural problems of our cities,” said Curry. “You can’t cure Hartford with a ballpark or a bail out.”

“We need property tax reform,” he added. “Property taxes are the biggest taxes that small businesses pay.”

On that score, Curry said Malloy made a mistake by putting too many apples in the corporate headquarters cart.

“We can’t compete with Boston and New York,” Curry declared in reference to Malloy’s First Five/Next Five program, which has provided financial incentives for such companies as ESPN, Cigna and Infosys if they create additional jobs over the coming years.

However, in 1994 former Gov. Lowell Weicker (ACP-Essex) signed a $165 million package to attract UBS to Stamford, where it built a trading floor the size of two football fields. About a decade ago, Stamford ranked fourth in the world in financial services.

“You can’t go after the big guys,” Curry explained, noting, for example, that Pfizer, the pharmaceutical company with a headquarters in Groton, “was given the sun, the moon and stars” and the Connecticut operation is now a skeleton of what it once was.

“We have to grow our own companies,” he said. “Small businesses that grow end up staying,” he said. “Big businesses can leave overnight.”

Regarding state employee fringe benefits, Curry, who was state comptroller in 1993 when the Pension Commission was established, said the governor didn’t seek to reform excessive overtime during the final years of a career and didn’t address why some state college administrators have lucrative salaries and pensions.

“He did not ask anyone to make a major sacrifice on pensions,” he declared.

The leaders of the state employee collective bargaining units contend that the agreement signed last summer will save $24 billion over the next 20 years, partly due to higher employee contributions to their pensions.

“The biggest problem is not pensions, but health care,” Curry said. “It’s the part that goes up the fastest, but it also is the one with lowest hanging fruit.”

“Health care savings bring costs down for everyone except the administrative piece,” said Curry, who speaks by phone regularly with NPR host Colin MeEnroe and New York Times columnist Gail Collins.

“You just fought a two-year battle over the budget that and because the leaders are so much a part of the system no one brings up health care savings,” he said.

On another subject, Curry said he is upset that Malloy scaled back some ethics reforms.

“The first reform that he did was try to turn every watchdog agency in the post-Watergate reforms and put their staff directly under him,” he said. “He got away with about half of it.”

“[His immediate predecessor], Jodi Rell [(R-Brookfield)] did a fabulous job of pushing for campaign finance reform and ethics reform,” he said. “She made this a more honest state” after former Gov John Rowland (R-Middlebury) left office and went to prison.

“Under Malloy, it went in the opposite direction,” Curry declared. “There are fewer ethics standards, there are more special interests. People underestimate what that has cost the state.”

“It is hard to get information from the state government,” he said. “It has become less transparent.”

“I don’t think that [Malloy] took things that didn’t belong to him,” Curry said. “I don’t think that he handed out things that weren’t his to hand out.”

However, he acknowledged that the state Democratic Party paid a $325,000 settlement with the State Elections Enforcement Commission in 2016 regarding was has been reported to be campaign contributions to Malloy’s 2014 re-election campaign that violated the regulations in Connecticut’s Citizen Election Program.

“It was the largest ethics fine in the history of the state,” Curry said.

He said Malloy has been one of Connecticut’s hardest working governors, but questions how well he has “apportioned his time.”

“Malloy spent a lot of his second term running around the country getting more for the Democratic Governors Association, which he chaired for two years,” Curry said. “He was raising money almost exclusively from corporate lobbyists.”

He said he supports the governor’s criminal justice reforms and called him “heroic” in seeking stricter gun laws following the 2012 killings of 26 people at Newtown’s Sandy Hook Elementary School.

However, Curry said the two people who might most influence the election this November in the Nutmeg State – President Donald Trump and Malloy – won’t be on the ballot.

He added, “Connecticut will probably be the one state that doesn’t have a blue wave.”