Visconti aims to lower state public worker costs

By Scott Benjamin

SOUTHINGTON -- Republican gubernatorial contender Joe Visconti says his top issue is reforming the costs for public employees, which under present agreements will force the state to increase taxes and slash municipal aid.

Visconti, who was a petitioning candidate for governor in 2014, said the contract narrowly ratified last month by the General Assembly is not sustainable because it doesn’t do enough to reduce large unfunded obligations for pension and health care costs.

CTNewsJunkie reported earlier this year that the state’s pensions were only 35.5 percent funded, even though Gov. Dannel Malloy (D-Stamford) had increased state payments since he took office in 2011.

“That’s largely from decades of neglect,” Visconti said in an interview.

The candidate said Malloy, who will not seek a third term next year, and the General Assembly were wrong in agreeing to no layoffs of state employees over the next four years and extending the agreement on their benefits from 2022 to 2027.

“They’re a protected class,” Visconti declared.

He also said the state employees should be paying more than four percent into their pensions, which was also part of the new agreement, and the 35-hour work week should be extended to 40 hours.

Proponents of the new contract with the state employee collective bargaining units insist it will save $1.57 billion over the current two-year budget cycle and $24 billion over the next 20 years. They note that the bargaining units had earlier agreed to concessions in 2009 under former Gov. M. Jodi Rell (R-Brookfield) and under Malloy in 2011.

Visconti said his goal is to trim the state work force from 45,000 to 32,000 employees and suspend binding arbitration.

Telecom executive Steve Obsitnik of Westport, another of the GOP gubernatorial hopefuls, has stated that per capita Connecticut’s state work force is 21 percent higher than in Massachusetts and 18 percent higher than in New York state.

Visconti predicted the General Assembly, which is still determining how to close the remaining $3.5 billion of the projected deficit for the two-year cycle that began last month, will increase the sales tax and reduce spending to municipalities.

He said taxes will have to increase, but that he would instead boost the income tax levies on the top-end earners. Malloy has been resistant to take that step, apparently because it might force wealthy residents to leave Connecticut.

Visconti, a former West Hartford Town Council member and the 2008 Republican candidate in the First Congressional District, collected about 11,000 signatures in 2008 to get on the gubernatorial ballot after he had unsuccessfully sought the GOP nod at the convention that spring, taking just 1.79 percent of the delegates.

He said that collecting the signatures that summer was “the hardest thing I’ve ever done. If you can go through that and get on the ballot, you are a bono fide candidate, even if you are a jerk.”

Visconti, who is noted for his candor, said what he learned while collecting the signatures was that “the public didn’t like Tom Foley or Dan Malloy. They were the lesser of two evils.”

He said he told Malloy, “ ‘You’re tough love and mean. If you smiled more, you would go up 15 points in the polls.’ ”

He said neither Malloy nor Foley addressed the state’s unfunded pension and health care obligations.

Visconti, a construction contractor, said he was in effect helping Foley since he was taking away some of the middle class Democrats who otherwise would vote for Malloy.

Foley persistently called to seek Visconti’s endorsement, and two days before the election he suspended his campaign and announced his support for the GOP nominee. Visconti had been at nine percent in the Quinnipiac University poll distributed 13 days before the election.

Visconti collected about 11,000 votes, which was less than Malloy’s plurality in annexing a second term, so he couldn’t be called a spoiler. In their first race in 2010, Malloy defeated Foley by just 6,400 ballots.

Visconti said he will likely skip seeking support at the Republican state nominating convention next May and instead starting earlier that month will collect signatures from at least two percent of the registered GOP members – about 8,900 voters – over a seven-week window to be on the ballot for the primary in August.

He said if an anti-gun candidate seems likely to win the GOP nod, he might also collect signatures to again to be a petitioning candidate in the November election. He said he would make his income tax returns public following the GOP primary.

Visconti said the party should not have a convention and instead determine the nomination at a primary in June or earlier.

He said under the current system, candidates spend more than a year largely meeting with town committees and potential delegates and then devote about three months after that canvassing the party’s rank and file statewide. He said it would be better to focus the whole time on the GOP rank and file.

Supporters of the system point to poor turnouts in the primaries and the value of having town committee members who represent the views of the party members in their municipality.

“Almost no town Committee member, Republican or Democrat, walks the neighborhood that they live in,” Visconti counters.

Foley captured 128 of the 169 municipalities in 2010, but still narrowly lost – which underscores the Republican’s inability to be competitive in such large cities as Bridgeport, New Haven and Hartford.

“What can get us a victory is getting the people who aren’t voting,” Visconti said. “In going door-to-door I found that you would ask people why they didn’t vote in the last election and they would say it wasn’t going to make a difference. They think that there are only 10,000 or 20,000 people like them – when it actually is one million. If we could cherry pick 50,000 or 100,000 of those people, then we can win.”

On another issue, he said to help rebuild Connecticut’s infrastructure, the state should install border tolls and put a scoreboard at the toll plaza to report how much money if being generated. Additionally, he said transponders should be placed on every bridge and place a charge for every truck that exceeds a certain weight and put the proceeds toward repairing that bridge of a nearby infrastructure project.

Visconti said Stamford, which had been ranked as the fourth largest in the world in financial services, should rebound since under Republican President Donald Trump since Wall Street has confidence in his administration and is about to advance further from “hedging to even more investing.”

He said the banks have been stymied following the approval of the Chris Dodd- Barney Frank regulations in 2010 – which is named after a former Democratic U.S. senator from East Haddam and a former U.S. representative from Massachusetts.

Visconti said the small banks, in particular, are burdened by the need for more compliance personnel. He said the better option would be to repeal Dodd-Frank and instead re-install the 1933 congressional Carter Glass-Henry Steagall Act, which separates the banks’ investment and commercial portfolios. The legislation was repealed in 1999. That action may have been a factor in the 2008 financial crisis.

He said that since Stamford is a financial center, he believes there is more potential for the city to attract more technology firms since those two components “go hand and hand.”

Visconti said he believes that state could also attract more distribution centers such as the 885,000-square-foot Amazon facility that is being built in North Haven.

During the 2016 presidential race, he traveled out of state to campaign for Trump and believes that the president will become even more effective “after he moves out of campaign mode.”

“He’s his worst enemy,” Visconti said. “He’s a polarizing figure. But I think there will be a turning point.”