Santos Says Connecticut, Fifth District Are A Tale Of The Cities

By Scott Benjamin

WATERBURY – For a mostly suburban state Connecticut’s cities make a lot of noise.

“The cities are the heartbeat of the state,” says former Meriden Mayor Manny Santos, who is favored to win the Republican nomination in the Fifth Congressional District.

“They translate to the fiscal condition of the state and the state economy has been terrible,” added the Marine veteran who served in the 1991 Operation Desert Storm.

“The only successful city in Connecticut is Danbury,” said Santos of the second largest city in the Fifth District.

He is supporting Danbury Mayor Mark Boughton in his bid for the Republican gubernatorial nomination.

The Hat City, largely due to the Danbury Fair Mall, leads the state in sales tax revenue and ranks first, per capita, in restaurants. Economist Donald Klepper-Smith of DataCore Partners in New Haven, has called Danbury one of the few bright lights in a state economy that hasn’t recaptured all of the jobs lost from the 2008 Great Recession.

Some people might add Stamford, which is located in the Fourth Congressional District, since it has a growing population, substantial financial services and television networks.

The Boston Globe reported in December 2016 that Connecticut’s suburban landscape, which once was attractive to bringing companies such as Boehringer Ingelheim to Ridgefield and UBS to Stamford, are now on a tier behind the innovation hubs, such as the Route 128 corridor in Massachusetts, which has a large population base that attracts the Millennials.

Connecticut has been in a dire fiscal condition since the 2008 financial crisis. Between 2007 and 2016, according the recent report from the Commission on Fiscal Stability and Economic Competitiveness, the state’s economy shrank by eight percent while the national economy grew by 11 percent over that same period

“A lot of elected officials in the cities see [federal] low income tax credits as a way to stimulate the economy,” said Santos. “But there aren’t enough jobs for the people who live in that housing and they don’t have the disposable income to support the surrounding businesses. There used to be a balance. Plus there isn’t enough public transportation to get some of these people, who in some cases don’t have cars, to jobs outside of the city. Better public transportation is a recipe for economic growth.”

“In a lot of the Connecticut cities you have high unemployment, low median incomes and high crime,” he explained. “It’s all because they lack jobs.”

However, attracting large companies to the northern cities in the Fifth Congressional District might be a challenge since they don’t fit the profile that innovation hubs covet.

University of California at Berkeley economist Enrico Moretti reported in his 2012 book, “The New Geography Of Jobs,” that the Stamford metro area led the country with 56 percent of its workers holding college degrees while in Waterbury it is only 15 percent, which ranks it among the lowest in the country. The average annual salary for a college graduate in Stamford was $133,479 while in Waterbury it was $54,651.

A little more than a decade ago, Stamford ranked fifth in the state in population, but now it is third, having surpassed Waterbury and then Hartford.

“We need more manufacturing in the cities in the Fifth District and it needs to be more relevant,” Santos said in an interview.

He said with better public transportation, more people in the cities in the district could be employed at defense manufacturers Francis Pratt and Amos Whitney in East Hartford, a first district city that is within an easy commute, and at the Lockheed Martin operation at Igor Sikorsky in Stratford, which is in the Third District.

Middletown Democratic Mayor Dan Drew, who entered and then withdrew from the gubernatorial race over the last year, has complained that his city and others in Connecticut have some of the highest mill rates because of large tracts of non-taxable property – such as colleges, hospitals and state operations.

“It’s a problem that many don’t want to tackle, so that is the reason that they give: That they are land poor,” said Santos who was mayor of Meriden from 2013 to 2015. “In almost every city you will find abandoned buildings. Why aren’t you redeveloping them?”

Since the restructuring of the Fifth District in 2002 into 41 municipalities stretching from Salisbury to Newtown, the five cities – Waterbury, Danbury, New Britain, Meriden and Torrington – have played a huge role in determining who represents the district in Washington.

In each of the last eight elections, a Democrat has not been able to win the seat unless they annexed a plurality of at least 15,000 votes combined in the cities.

U.S. Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Cheshire) did that in three straight campaigns and incumbent Democrat Elizabeth Esty of Cheshire has done it the last three cycles. She posted a plurality of more than 40,000 votes in those cities against former Sherman First Selectman Clay Cope in 2016.

Former state Sen. Andrew Roraback of Goshen, the Republican nominee in 2012, captured 31 of the 41 municipalities, yet he still lost the election by about 7,800 votes, largely because of Esty’s pluralities in Waterbury, New Britain and Meriden.

Former New Britain Alderman Craig Diangelo, who had been seeking the GOP nomination since last summer before recently terminating his campaign, has said the Democrats’ edge in the cities is the biggest hurdle that Republican challengers face in the district.

“The Republicans have allowed [the Democrats] to define them in the cities,” Santos explained.

Esty has added some of the suburbs to her victory list in the last two congressional elections.

One of them is Newtown, where she devoted considerable attention following the killing of 26 people in December 2012 at Sandy Hook Elementary School.

Following the recent shootings at a high school in Parkland, Florida Republican President Donald Trump has said he would give “a lot of consideration” to raising the age of purchase to 21 for people to buy assault weapons during a White House meeting that included Murphy and Esty.

Santos said he doesn’t support that policy.

“It doesn’t make sense,” he added. “At age 18, I signed up to the military and was trained to use weapons even more lethal than these so-called assault weapons.”

However, Santos said he would support stricter federal background check on gun purchasers “if it is done constitutionally and properly.”

On economic policy, he expressed reservations about Trump’s decision to impose tariffs of 25 percent on steel and 10 percent on aluminum for many American trade partners.

“I’m not generally in favor of excessive tariffs,” Santos said.

The Wall Street Journal wrote in an editorial that the domestic steel makers will raise their prices to just under the f prices for the foreign companies and it will hurt the transportation industry, in particular, which is dependent on steel-made products.

The newspaper stated that there 6.5 million people in the United States employed by companies that use steel products and only 140,000 people that make steel.

“If the president can effectively communicate that you can’t continue to undercut us, then it may bring some balance to trade agreements,” Santos said. “However, I’m not sure it’s the right move.”

However, he said he strongly supports Trump’s goal of renegotiating the North American Free Trade Agreement with Canada and Mexico and the 12-nation Trans Pacific Partnership, which includes Japan.

Santos said he lost his job some years ago at an automotive parts manufacturer in Cheshire after it was shifted to Mexico.

“I’m not opposed to trade agreements,” he explained. “But they have to be fair.”

Santos said he also agrees with the president’s $1.5 trillion tax cut, noting, for example, that the stock market is well above where it was when Trump was elected in November 2016.

“Implemented properly, tax cuts create economic activity,” he said. “The increase in activity more than offsets the loss in revenue. The problem is that Congress does not restrain itself from additional spending.”

However, CNBC’s John Harwood has reported that Columbia University economist Glenn Hubbard, who worked for former Republican President George W. Bush, has said that tax cuts for individuals will usually cover 30 percent of lost revenue and those for corporations 50 percent of lost revenue.

Critics have said the tax cut has hurt Connecticut, a state with many high-priced homes, because of the lower mortgage deduction.

Santos said a local accountant has told him that 60 percent of his clients will benefit and 40 percent will be hurt by the lower threshold.

The congressional candidate said he hopes that the state will revise its tax structure to address those that will be hurt.

Santos said he experienced polarization similar to the logjams in Congress in his relations as mayor with the Democratically-controlled 12-member City Council in Meriden.

He said he doesn’t think the city manager-council government works best there. He said he would prefer a strong mayor government where a central elected leader is accountable to the voters.

About 80 percent of the municipalities in Texas, for example, have the council-manager form of government. In Connecticut, only a handful of municipalities have that format, including West Hartford, Southington and Farmington.

Regarding the campaign, Santos noted that Esty has a large advantage since her most recent campaign finance report indicates that she has $1.4 million cash on hand.

“It takes an obscene amount of money to run for Congress,” he declared.

If elected to a fourth term on November 6, Esty would become the first congressman in the Fifth District to reach that plateau since Democrat John Monagan of Waterbury who was elected to seven terms before he lost in 1972. Republican Nancy Johnson of New Britain was in office for 24 years, but the first 20 were as the congressman from the now-defunct Sixth District. She lost to Murphy in 2006.

“I’m calling for term limits,” said Santos. “I don’t have a particular number.”

He said he believes that long-term incumbents start to pay less attention to their constituents.

There apparently has been only limited support for congressional term limits since the issue took a higher profile in 1994 when it was part of the Republican Contract With America under former House Speaker Newt Gingrich. Former U.S. Rep. Jim Maloney (D-5) of Danbury signed a pledge during his first term to serve only four terms but was ousted by Johnson in the 2002 election as he was in his third term. Maloney said following the race that his internal polling showed that a slight majority of voters supported his decision on term limits.

Said Santos, “I think term limits would be best for the country.”