Gevanter Endorses Lowering Connecticut State Taxes

By Scott Benjamin

GREENWICH – Democratic state Senate candidate Alexis Gevanter says she and Gov. Ned Lamont (D-Greenwich) “are completely aligned” on fiscal policy and she would have supported the $46.3 billion two-year budget that he signed in June which included no tax increases.

“I’m in favor of lowering taxes,” Gevanter said in an interview with Patch.com.

“I’m also in favor of repealing the estate tax,” she added. “I think that is what is going to encourage families to move here to retire here and create an environment where jobs come here and if children go away to college to come back here. I think lower taxes are going to be important to make Connecticut competitive.”

Gevanter said the estate tax in Connecticut has aligned its income threshold with that of the federal government's, at $5 million. She said that she favors a full repeal.

Gevanter, 39, who is running in the special election on August 17 in the 36th District, said, “I’m so proud to be standing with Ned Lamont and {Lt. Gov.] Susan Bysiewicz [D-Middletown] with a common-sense moderate approach.”

The state has $4.5 billion in its rainy day fund and finished the fiscal year that ended in June with a $470 million surplus. However, it is the only New England state prior to the pandemic that did not recapture all of the jobs it had lost in the 2008 Great Recession.

The district encompasses all of Greenwich, part of New Canaan and the northern section of Stamford. Lamont and Bysiewicz have done canvassing with Gevanter, as has U.S. Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Greenwich). U.S. Rep. Jim Himes (D-4) of Greenwich formally endorsed her campaign at the Stamford Democratic headquarters.

The Sacred Heart Poll reported in May that Lamont has a 56 percent approval rating.

In May a Wall Street Journal editorial stated, “Connecticut used to be the low-tax haven with a quick ride to Manhattan, but decades of tax-and-spend policies have eroded its comparative advantage.”

In July Lamont told the CT Hearst editorial board, “Every governor since Bill O’Neill [in the 1980s] has raised taxes. It didn’t result in lower property taxes. It didn’t result in any efficiencies. I’m not sure it really resulted in better services for folks.”

Said Gevanter, “Most people are coming from a centrist, moderate prospective where they want to have [economic] growth.”

Gevanter – a state leader for Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America, a firearms violence prevention organization – faces Republican Ryan Fazio, who was the GOP nominee in the general election last November and currently serves on the Greenwich Representative Town Meeting, and petitioning candidate John Blankley in the special election. If Gevanter wins, the Democrats would retain a 24-12 super-majority in the state Senate. All three candidates live in Greenwich. Blankley was the Democratic nominee in the district in 2016.

The Greenwich Time has reported that there will be three forums between the candidates – the first of which will be held on August 3 at the Greenwich Town Hall. Voters can attend in person or through a Zoom link.

Gevanter said that many voters she has spoken with recognize that “this is an important election.”

Hartford Courant political columnist Kevin Rennie has stated that the vacant seat “has given Republicans a promising opportunity to demonstrate that further decline is not their inevitable fate.”

Fazio took more than 48 percent of the vote last year against second-term state Sen. Alexandra Kasser (D-Greenwich) while running well ahead of Republican President Donald Trump in all three municipalities in the district.

Kasser vacated the seat in June, citing ongoing divorce proceedings.

The Republicans were even at 18 seats all with the Democrats in the state Senate entering the 2018 election and had been adding seats through the 2010’s.

During the 2018 campaign, Kasser, a former attorney, held 100 living room conversations with voters in the district and wrote a column in support of highway tolls for the Stamford Advocate and co-authored a shared-risk plan to address the state employee pension liabilities that was published by Bloomberg.

Gevanter said she opposes adding highway tolls. That issue dominated Lamont’s first year in office as he sought different tolls plans to try to finance highway improvements.

Kasser’s election represented the first Democratic victory in the district since 1930. Lamont was the Democratic nominee in 1990 and lost, when it was an open seat, to Greenwich Republican William Nickerson, who would stay in office for 18 years. Greenwich Republican Scott Frantz succeeded him in the 2008 election and continued until Kasser defeated him 10 years later.

Gevanter said that she “was shocked.” when Kasser announced her resignation. “No one had seen it coming,”

“I have worked with people to get things done, so I raised my hand,” she said of her interest in getting the Democratic nomination. “I’ve been a collaborator.”

She was endorsed by Kasser in late June and nominated by acclimation by the 48 delegates at the Democratic convention on July 6. She reached the fund-raising dollar and donor thresholds for the state Citizen Election Program grant within 24 hours of accepting the nomination.

Gevanter remarked, “As a moderate member of the Democratic Party. I’m willing to have a seat at the table. I’m not going to be complaining from the sidelines. I’m going to have the opportunity to chair a committee [as a member of the majority party].”

As an attorney, Gevanter said she hopes that one of her assignments will be to serve on the Judiciary Committee.

She said her experience as a lawyer working with businesses would be an asset for the district, since she is familiar with such issues as “job skills,” “remaining successful,” “fair wages,” “tax preparation” and “non-discrimination.”

“This is how I know how to bring jobs to Connecticut,” Gevanter exclaimed.

Connecticut has fewer people employed now than it did in 1989.

Gevanter praised Lamont for his work during the pandemic, adding, “I think people are really happy with the way the recovery is going. Over 70 percent of the residents are vaccinated.”

She noted that Stamford has three Fortune 500 companies with another, Philip Morris International, on the way. Lamont announced in June that iCapital – a global financial technology firm – will open an office in Greenwich.

Gevanter said the two companies combined would add “500 jobs.”

She also said that as a result of the work at home model that emerged during the pandemic, the real estate market in the district has busy over the last year with people moving from New York City and Westchester County.

“Because of lower taxes, people are choosing Connecticut over Westchester,” Gevanter said.

She said she supported the legislation on sports betting and online casino games and lottery sales that was approved this spring by the General Assembly. It was billed also as an economic development initiative as supporters said it would help the Native American casinos in the southeastern part of the state rebound and also boost state revenues.

Gevanter said the legislation made sense since, among other things, “revenue was going to other states” that had sports betting. She also said it is imperative that the sports betting be “properly regulated.”

CT Mirror reported in May that Lamont’s administration “broke a deadlock with the tribes, who have exclusive rights to casino gambling, and negotiated a framework for the first significant expansion of gambling since the casinos opened in the 1990s. For better or worse, the legalization will be central to Lamont’s legacy and, most likely, a re-election campaign next year.”

On another topic, The Wall Street Journal reported in an editorial last November that Connecticut’s pension system for its state employees is the second worst funded in the country, after Illinois, according to Fitch Ratings.

CT Mirror budget reported Keith Phaneuf told a Wilton League of Women Voters forum in 2019 that the state employee pension system was structurally under-funded each year from 1939 through 2010.

Gevanter said she doesn’t support raising taxes or taking legal action to reduce the pension liability burden.

“I think we’re moving in the right direction,” she said in an apparent reference to Lamont’s efforts to fully fund the pension obligations since taking office and spending $1.5 billion during the last fiscal year to pay down future obligations. The governor recently told the CT Hearst editorial board that was the first time that had happened in Connecticut.

For four years Gevanter has been active in Moms Demand Action, serving in such roles as Federal Legislation Leader and Spokesperson and Connecticut Chapter Leader.

The organization’s mission statement indicates that, “Moms Demand Action is a grassroots movement of Americans fighting for public safety measures that can protect people from gun violence. We pass stronger gun laws and work to close the loopholes that jeopardize the safety of our families.”

According to its web site, Moms Demand Action was founded by Shannon Watts, a mother of five, who began a Facebook group the day following the December 2012 shootings at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown.

State Rep. Bob Godfrey (D-110) of Danbury has introduced gun responsibility legislation that was signed into law by six different governors since 1989, his first year in the General Assembly.

He told Patch.com in 2019 that he felt most of the loopholes in the state laws on gun responsibility had been closed.

However, Gevanter said more has been done since then and further action needs to be taken.

During the most recent session the General Assembly approved an update to Connecticut’s red flag laws and a law that allows Medicaid reimbursement of trauma care provided to victims of violence.

She said that state Sen. Will Haskell (D-30) has proposed that people can only buy one firearm a month to “make sure that people are not buying a hundred guns in one night.”

Gevanter said “there has been a surge in gun buying since the pandemic began. People are scared.”

She said she hopes that the government will further encourage community violence intervention programs, “which have been really successful.”

At the national level, Gevanter said that polls indicate that 90 percent of the public support “federal universal background checks.”

What did she learn at William & Mary, where he majored in Government and minored in Women’s Studies that has helped her in her career?

“I learned how government can help people,” Gevanter said. “I’ve always believed in the importance of public service and building coalitions.”

After graduating, she worked for a year as a legislative aide to former U.S. Rep. Steven Rothman (D-N.J.) and then graduated from law school.

Wall Street Journal columnist Joseph C. Sternberg - who was born in 1982, near the start of the Millennial age bracket - wrote in his 2019 book, “The Theft of a Decade,” (Public Affairs, 288 pages), that voters under age 40 are telling the pollsters that they are less likely than previous generations to affiliate with the Democratic Party or the Republican Party.

“People are tired of partisanship,” Gevanter said. “They don’t want to hear about obstructionism.”