Oz took a full swing

By Scott Benjamin

Oz Griebel was once asked if he thought that since he played Ivy League baseball for Dartmouth and a year in the minors that he expected to have the support of both the Yankees and the Red Sox fans in the primary.

“And the Mets fans too,” he replied.

Griebel’s baseball statistics weren’t enough to get him to the coveted second floor office at the State Capitol.

Or maybe it was because he didn’t hold enough campaign rallies at Bobby Valentine’s Sports Gallery Cafes in Stamford and Windsor Locks.

The Hartford resident finished a distant third in the 2010 Republican primary for governor and garnered just 3.9 percent vote as an independent candidate for governor in 2018.

It was one year ago this month that I last interviewed Griebel, who died in July from a running accident in Pennsylvania.

We met in the restaurant at the Goodwin Hotel in downtown Hartford, which Cheapism recently rated as the most enchanting historic hotel in Connecticut.

It is where J.P Morgan stayed when it was an apartment building, and it was where Griebel, who lived in the Insurance City, started his day with coffee and a bagel.

It was nearly a year after his loss as a third-party candidate for governor and he had begun discussions to establish a Connecticut component of the Serve America Movement (SAM) Party.

He acknowledged that he had made numerous errors in his independent run in 2018, including not formally entering the contest until about 10 months before the voting. But he felt confident that Connecticut – mired in unfunded pension obligations and making little progress on repairing or expanding its road network – might embrace an alternative to the two major parties.

He insisted that the Nutmeg State had considerable assets but it was a public policy disaster.

Griebel, who was the former chief executive officer of the MetroHartford Alliance, had said during his gubernatorial campaign that “the erosion of private sector confidence is something I believe is at the heart of the lack of growth in the state.”

Plus, young people are more interested in living in major cities with mass transit than in suburban Connecticut.

Yet despite the stagnant economy and net loss of residents, the state remains appealing.

Last November Wall Street 24/7 rated it as the fifth best state to live in and this spring Kiplinger reported that it has the third largest concentration of millionaires of any state.

Griebel said that although the millennials were interested in the innovation hubs – such as the Route 128 corridor near Boston – he noted that the state was competing against expensive locations – New York City and Boston – instead of the Twin Cities, where the real estate prices were lower.

He insisted that New Haven had become a better city over the previous 20 years –largely due to former Yale President Rick Levin and former New Haven Mayor John DeStefano teaming to expand the university’s economic outreach in the Elm City.

Griebel added, "You can't ignore that people move to Stamford," which boasts such companies as Henkel, NBC Sports, Pitney-Bowes and Indeed.

Perhaps Valentine, a Stamford native, provided the answer for Connecticut’s economic woes when in 2019 he said, “The reason that the state is stuck in the mud is that it hasn’t been willing to adjust. When you don’t adjust, you fail.”

Critics say the problems are identified but the governor and the General Assembly never take any action on such high profile issues –as unfunded liabilities, transportation infrastructure, higher education reform and nominating candidates.

The state Commission on Fiscal Stability & Economic Competitiveness reported in March 2018 that the state employees pensions were only 29 percent funded.

During the 2018 campaign a range of candidates said the next governor and the General Assembly would have to devote considerable attention to this topic in early 2019. Patch.com reported that Danbury Mayor Mark Boughton, who had been the Republican convention-endorsed nominee for governor had said it might require legal action to reach a resolution. Republican gubernatorial contender David Stemerman, the former Greenwich hedge fund manager, predicted that the state might have to seek to invoke the 11th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution to resolve its pension woes.

Griebel said last year that he would support a surcharge on the state’s billionaires if the collective bargaining units would agree to be more aggressive in defined contributions programs for their employees.

This appeared to be a Third Way approach from former British Prime Minister Tony Blair’s play book. Blair insisted that the people making the luxury cars should believe that they had something in common with the people buying the luxury cars.

CT Mirror has reported that Lamont has been reluctant to tax the wealthy, which has been advocated by the leaders of the collective bargaining units and the General Assembly’s Progressive Caucus. The leaders of the collective bargaining units have said that they have done their part – pointing to a study by a consultant to the Office of Policy & Management, the governor’s budget arm, that the 2017 labor agreement will save the taxpayers $24 billion over 20 years through employee concessions.

A 2017 national engineering report said that Connecticut had the worst road network of any state in the country.

Griebel was advocating tolls as at least part of the solution for transportation improvements before Ned Lamont launched his Ned Roots campaign for the U.S. Senate in 2006.

Griebel chaired the state Transportation Strategy Board under former Gov. John Rowland (R-Middlebury) and was a member of the ad-hoc panel that former Gov. Dannel Malloy (D-Essex) appointed in 2015 that created a 30-year, $100 billion plan.

Little progress has been made.

A year ago, Griebel said, "Nothing came out this [2019] session, that I'm aware of, that increases the special transportation fund.”

Last August he could foresee the future.

Griebel said a year ago that he didn’t believe that Lamont would call for a vote on the tolls since all Republicans legislators are resolutely against them and there are enough Democrats in opposition because tolls are "an anathema" in their districts.

Lamont never got a vote on the measure and instead announced in February that he would seek about $200 million in bond appropriations for transportation improvements.

Former Democratic President Barack Obama announced in 2013 that higher education was in a crisis as students were accumulating debt as tuition costs continued to surge.

The CSCU 2020 program that was produced after the state spent nearly $2 million on a study from the Boston Consulting Group never came to fruition after ‘no confidence’ votes by faculty led to the departure of Gregory Gray, who had become president of the Board of Regents in 2013.

Patch.com reported that during a talk in Danbury in 2014, Gray insisted that CSCU could not afford to continue operating under its current formula. He had advocated trimming personnel, changing the curriculums at the community colleges so students could transfer more easily to the four-year schools in the system and promoting online learning.

Mark Ojakian, the former chief of staff to Malloy, succeeded Gray in 2015 and he met resistance in his efforts to establish the Students First plan for the 12 community colleges in the system. Under his proposal, the Regents would seek approval from the New England Association of Schools & Colleges to eliminate the position at president at the schools and save money by placing those administrative positions in the central office in Hartford.

Faculty groups have delivered votes of ‘no confidence’ in Ojakian and the Board of Regents.

Griebel said the Students First initiative is "a step in the right direction."

"Throughout the Board of Regents and UConn we have ask how much of the funding is going toward the classroom?" he added last year.

"The administration has to be looked at," remarked Griebel. "How many presidents, CFOs and human resources people do we need? You can’t run government like a business, but there are certain business practices that you can bring to the process.”

Regarding how candidates are chosen, last year, Griebel also said that it is "not my place" to tell the major parties whether they should have conventions. However, he said that format forces candidates to spend more than a year primarily communicating with slightly more than 1,000 delegates who will vote at the convention.

Boughton and former Republican U.S. Senate hopeful Dominic Rapini have expressed similar concerns.

Griebel noted that neither of the major parties allow unaffiliated voters – the largest bloc - to participate in their primaries.

He complained that candidates for governor have to play to the party’s base. A Republican wins the nomination by vowing to abolish the state income tax and a Democrat insists that he will support the state employees.

"The public is frustrated that throughout the nominating process so few people participate," he said.

Stemerman has said Connecticut is only one of four states that nominates candidates at a state convention.

In 2018, Republican gubernatorial candidates used television commercials to target Malloy, who had one of the lowest approval rates for any governor in the country. Democrats didn’t invoke Malloy’s name into their speeches.

In some areas, Griebel praised Malloy, such as for reducing the full-time state work force by 13.1 percent and his criminal justice reforms, which provided a second chance for offenders and also lowered Connecticut’s prison population to its lowest point since 1994.

Griebel had started to initiate discussions last fall on developing a SAM operation in Connecticut.

Was he planning another bid for governor?

“We’ll cross that bridge when we get to it,” Griebel said one year ago.

Unfortunately, he won’t be the one to cross that bridge.

Perhaps the people at 41 Seaver Way, Monument Park and the Green Monster could have agreed that Griebel’s Third Way message might resonate with the electorate.