DuPont wants congressmen to spend more days in Washington

By Scott Benjamin

WATERTOWN – Business executive Rich DuPont says that if he’s elected to Congress he’ll make the case that the representatives should spend more time in Washington and less in their districts, which runs counter to the way it’s been for at least 30 years.

“I think it’s important to be in touch with your constituents, but I think they [your constituents] would appreciate your spending more time in Washington to get more expertise,” said DuPont - the president of Resource Development Associates, an energy management company based in Watertown.

He is running in a three-way race for the Republican nomination in the sprawling Fifth Congressional District.

U.S. Rep. John Delaney (D-Md.), who is running for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2020, wrote in his recent book, “The Right Answer,” that, “We have persuaded our constituencies that they should expect us to function like mayors, going to one event after another, shaking hands, giving speeches and cutting ribbons. But that ought to be the province of local government officials.”

“Would you rather have your U.S. representative spend time shaking hands at the country fair or working in Washington to gain grants for community colleges and secure funding for improving highways?” Delaney stated. “These days our time is so limited that all we can do is pop in and out of meetings.”

Said DuPont, “I have heard from others in Congress and I’ve talked to a number of them, that that is a problem. That you never get to dig in to issues and to feel confident enough about them. In Connecticut, right now we’re a point where the time spent there would be better than here.”

The Nutmeg State is the only one in New England that hasn’t recaptured all of the jobs it lost in the 2008 recession.

DuPont of Watertown faces former Meriden Mayor Manny Santos, the convention-endorsed candidate, and former college psychology instructor Ruby Corby O’Neill of Southbury in the August 14 primary. The district, has 41 municipalities, stretching from Salisbury to Newtown.

The Democratic primary that same day pits former Simsbury First Selectman Mary Glassman, who narrowly won the convention nomination in May, against former national teacher of the year Jahana Hayes of Wolcott.

Plumber John Pistone of Brookfield is collecting signatures to run as a petitioning candidate.

U.S. Rep. Elizabeth Esty (D-5) of Cheshire, who is vacating the seat after three terms following the negative reaction to how she handled a sexual harassment case involving her former chief of staff, has called it one of “the most diverse” congressional districts in the country.

DuPont, who has a collection of framed certificates and plaques in his business office from government and civic leaders, has been endorsed by former U.S. Rep. Nancy Johnson (R-5) of New Britain, who has the second longest tenure in the U.S. House of anyone from Connecticut, and Litchfield developer Mark Greenberg, who was the GOP nominee in the district in 2014.

On the issues, candidates ranging from Democratic gubernatorial convention nominee Ned Lamont, a pro-labor progressive, of Greenwich to GOP U.S. Senate hopeful Dominic Rapini, a Trump populist, of Branford have said it’s not that Connecticut hasn’t recaptured the jobs it lost from the great recession, but that too many positions remain unfilled because companies can’t find qualified applicants.

DuPont said there are currently 15,000 manufacturing jobs that are vacant and that number could grow to 30,000 in five years as the retirements increase.

He said a “significant” part of that demand is due to the state’s long-term commitments with the Lockheed Martin operation at Igor Sikorsky Aircraft in Stratford, Francis Pratt & Amos Whitney in East Hartford and Electric Boat in Groton, all major defense manufacturers for decades.

DuPont said there also will be growth in the non-defense manufacturing sector, including bio-tech.

However, all sectors of manufacturing look different than 50 years ago when in the Fifth District there were labor-intensive facilities with hundreds of workers and Waterbury was the Brass City, Danbury was the Hat City and Meriden was the Silver City.

“Automation is a big part of manufacturing because it increases capacity,” DuPont said. “However, it also creates other manufacturing opportunities not available years ago.” He said that there are, for example, applications for 3-D printing “that have never been done before.”

DuPont said that the increase in automation also has created opportunities for “thousands of” engineering technicians and service people to keep the “equipment up and running.”

The candidate, who has been developing new community college programs, said Connecticut has put too little emphasis “on skills-based jobs in manufacturing” over the last 30 years.

Former U.S. Rep. Jim Maloney (D-5) of Danbury had said during his tenure, which went from 1997 to 2003, that between the early 1980s and the early 2000s the number of manufacturing jobs in Connecticut had been reduced almost in half.

“You need to be making something,” DuPont said. “You cannot survive on just a service economy.”

He said he has worked with the state community colleges to increase their offerings and establish a faculty system similar to that of the state technical high schools in which experienced manufacturing workers can teach at the schools as long as they take college courses on classroom instruction and student management to become certified.

DuPont said, “Now we can search out the Connecticut Chapter of AARP” and get retired and retiring people with experience in manufacturing into the classroom.

He said he hopes the technical high schools will offer more night adult education programs so that their machinery gets maximum use.

It appears that Waterbury, the largest city in the district and the fifth largest in Connecticut, will not have the resources to become a financial and innovation hub such as Stamford, a little more than an hour away, which, according the University of California-Berkeley economist Enrico Moretti’s 2012 book, “The New Geography Of Jobs,” had the highest rate of college-educated workers in the nation, at 56 percent, while the metro Waterbury area ranks 12^th from the bottom nationally.

However, DuPont said Waterbury could attract significant high-end manufacturing, lowering its 7.1 percent unemployment rate, which is nearly three points higher than the state average.

“What manufacturing means to our inner cities and the opportunities it provides to our unemployed and under-employed are valuable,” he said.

DuPont said he supports making more robotics programs available to middle school students.

However, he said with the decline in enrollment at the public two- and four-year colleges and universities in Connecticut, it would probably be ill-advised to follow the recommendation of the state Commission on Fiscal Stability and Economic Competitiveness and build a college devoted to STEM education. He said it would be more efficient to make STEM education a larger part of the curriculum at the existing campuses, which are under a financial strain and have empty seats.

In another area, for decades, elected officials have not be able to resolve Connecticut’s high electricity costs, which reportedly have deterred some companies from coming to the state.

Former Gov. Ella Grasso (D-Windsor Locks) campaigned on a platform in 1974 to lower those costs and was criticized by her opponents while seeking a second term in 1978 when she hadn't achieved that goal.

Gov. Dannel Malloy (D-Stamford), who is not seeking a third term this year, said during his 2010 campaign that Connecticut had the second highest electricity costs in the country.

“The answer is not to build more generation plants,” said DuPont. “For six to eight months a year we have relatively high demand because we’re cooling buildings in the summer and heating them in the winter. We can’t build new plants that are basically going to sit idle for four or five months a year and extract a cost that is needed.”

He said Connecticut should install more solar, fuel cell and wind applications.

On another topic, DuPont said he has received mixed reviews from business executives regarding Republican President Donald Trump’s decision to impose tariffs on foreign steel and aluminum.

“Depending on who you talk to, some are very worried,” he said. “Some are adjusting to an issue that has long been unaddressed.”

DuPont said he believes the president is using the tariffs as a negotiating tool.

He said that, “Congress was working 15 years ago on the same issue: free trade and fair trade. Nothing really has been done. Currencies are still being manipulated.”

Trump’s aggressive embrace of tariffs is largely a different policy than has been pursued by every president from Franklin Roosevelt through Barack Obama.

The United States has not had a trade surplus since 1975.

DuPont said he supports the president’s $1.5 trillion, 10-year tax cut, which was signed seven months ago.

“I see this country moving forward at a pace that I haven’t seen in many years,” he said. “If you ask business people now how they feel, they find it very encouraging. People are investing in their companies again. We haven’t seen that for many years.”

However, Harvard economist Jason Furman, who was chairman of the Council of Economic Advisors under Obama, told CNBC earlier this month that while the economy is strong the nation faces huge projected budget deficits.

“I have not given enough thought to that question,” DuPont said.

The Congressional Budget Office reported this spring that the accumulated annual deficits over the next 10 years would equal $12.4 trillion.

“In the last 30 or 40 years, without exception, Democratic presidents have cleaned up the budget messes left by their Republican predecessors,” U.S. Rep. Jim Himes (D-4) of Greenwich said recently in an apparent reference to the large tax cuts signed by former Republican presidents Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush.

He noted that the budget deficit had contracted over Obama’s eight years in office.

On foreign policy, DuPont said he supports Trump’s recent call to have members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization increase their defense spending to four percent of their country’s gross domestic product than the current goal of two percent.

The United States has long spent far more than its allies on military operations.

DuPont said he was “shocked” at Trump’s comments during the recent summit with Russian President Vladimir Putin in which he initially indicated that Russia did not interfere in the 2016 presidential election. Critics - including Himes, a member of the House Intelligence Committee - have said it is apparent that the Russians did interfere.

“He made a big mistake,” DuPont said of the president’s comments with Putin at the recent joint news conference in Helsinki.

Trump has invited Putin to resume talks in Washington in September.

“I don’t know how well that’s going to be viewed by the public and the parties,” said DuPont.

However, he said in most instances it is better for leaders to talk.

On November 6, voters in the district will elect their ninth congressman since 1972, making it one of the most competitive districts in the country.

None of the last eight congressmen have served as the representative of the Fifth District for more than six years, although Johnson represented the now-defunct Sixth District for 20 years before being elected over Maloney in the Fifth District in 2002. She was defeated in 2006.

U.S. Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Cheshire) has said the Fifth District, which he represented from 2007 to 2013, is so diverse you can travel from Salisbury to Waterbury to Simsbury and think that you’re in “three different regions of the country.”

In DuPont’s community, Watertown, for example, it borders both Waterbury and Litchfield – appears to largely have a culture that is a mixture of those two neighboring municipalities – but it also has an elite prep school in Taft and the neighborhoods near the Thomaston border resemble Roxbury.

“There’s a lot of things I’ve learned in this campaign about cities and town in the district that I didn’t know,” said DuPont, who was active in Johnson’s congressional campaigns slightly more than a decade ago.

He acknowledged that the eventual Republican nominee will face an obstacle in winning in a district in which Democrats have carried collective pluralities of more than 15,000 votes in the five cities – Waterbury, Danbury, New Britain, Meriden and Torrington – in each of the last six elections.

However, DuPont said he has done business in each of the 41 municipalities over the last 30 years and has “been recognized for my accomplishments” by civic leaders and elected officials.