Third-party gubernatorial hopeful Jonathan Pelto says that Gov. Dannel Malloy’s (D-Stamford) 2011 shared sacrifice plan has not put Connecticut on solid financial footing.
He pointed to the report from the nonpartisan Office Of Fiscal Analysis, the Legislature’s budget arm, which has projected a $1.4 billion deficit for the fiscal year that began July 1.
“That is 40 percent the size of the deficit that was there when he took office,” said Mr. Pelto of Mansfield, who is heading the Education and Democracy Party, said in a July 22, 2014 phone interview.
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The governor, who was the mayor of Stamford from 1995 to 2009, used a “shared sacrifice” plan of tax increases and concessions from state employees to close a $3.7 billion budget deficit that was looming when he took office in January 2011.
He has called it the largest per-capita deficit at that time of any state in the country.
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The Hartford Courant reported in June that the governor said the state doesn’t have a budget deficit for the current fiscal year since the figures are predicated on a seven percent spending increase, which will not occur.
Mr. Malloy ran on a platform of fiscal discipline during his 2010 campaign.
As the state economy began to recover from the volatile national recession, former two-time Democratic gubernatorial candidate Bill Curry of Farmington told The New York Times in February 2012 that the state’s fiscal health would be tantamount to how the public would evaluate Mr. Malloy’s administration.
“The budget is everything to Malloy,” said Mr. Curry, who served as a White House aide to former President Bill Clinton. “The last thing you want is a sequel to a fiscal crisis.”
To address the projected shortfall, Mr. Pelto said he supports raising the top marginal income tax rate, which only increased from 6.5 to 6.7 percent during the 2011 budget crisis. He said that in both New York state and New Jersey the income tax rate for the wealthiest residents is just under nine percent.
The gubernatorial hopeful said Connecticut’s richest citizens won’t flee to nearby states if those rates are increased.
Cornell University economist Robert Frank, who writes a column in the business section of The New York Times, has said most wealthy people are willing to pay more taxes if they are still well ahead of the middle class. Billionaire Warren Buffett has said that partly as a result of globalization and the tax structure, wealth has become more concentrated in the United States.
However, state Rep. David Scribner (R-107) of Brookfield has said Connecticut has a tax structure that is unfriendly to businesses and its higher-income residents.
Mr. Malloy and Greenwich equity manager and former U.S. ambassador to Ireland Tom Foley, the Republican nominee, each had 43 percent of the vote in the Quinnipiac University poll that was released May 9. Mr. Malloy defeated Mr. Foley by a scant 6,404 votes in the 2010 election.
Mr. Foley captured 128 of the state’s 169 municipalities. However, Mr. Malloy garnered at least 60 percent of the voters in 16 municipalities, including huge pluralities in Bridgeport, New Haven and Hartford, the state’s three largest cities.
Mr. Foley is favored to defeat state Sen. John McKinney (R-Fairfield), the minority leader, in the Aug. 12 GOP primary.
CTNewsJunkie.com columnist Susan Bigelow wrote July 4 that due to several factors, including the potential that Mr. Pelto, 53, might attract several voters who might otherwise support Mr. Malloy, the 2014 election is now Mr. Foley’s “to lose.”
State Rep. Bob Godfrey (D-110) of Danbury has said Mr. Malloy “governs more” and has been the hardest working governor of any of the five state chief executives that he has served under since 1989.
Mr. Pelto was once the young turk of Connecticut Democratic politics, having guided presidential contender Gary Hart to victory in the 1984 state primary while he was finishing his undergraduate studies at the University of Connecticut at Storrs. Then in 1986, while he was in his first term in the state House, he was political director on then-Gov. William O’Neill’s (D-East Hampton) landslide re-election to a second full term.
In June he began collecting the 7,500 signatures needed to put him on the Nov. 4 election ballot.
Chester First Selectman Tom Marsh, a Republican, ran as a third-party candidate in 2010, collecting about 17,000 votes, many of which might have otherwise gone to Mr. Foley and provided him with a narrow victory.
Former West Hartford Town Council member and First District congressional candidate Joe Visconti also is collecting signatures for a third-party challenge. He initially ran for the Republican nomination earlier this year but didn’t annex the 15 percent of the convention delegates needed to automatically qualify for the primary.
On job creation, Mr. Pelto opposes the governor’s First Five/Next Five program which has provided state assistance to such major employers as ESPN, Cigna and NBC Sports. He said those companies were not going to leave Connecticut and could easily expand operations on their own.
Mr. Malloy has said his efforts, for example, have led to the development of ESPN’s new digital center and helped keep United Technologies, the state’s largest private employer, firmly entrenched in Connecticut.
He told the Connecticut Hearst newspapers in 2011 that the public money to help foster the Jackson Labs biosciences center in Farmington is similar to the efforts that launched the Research Triangle in North Carolina.
However, Mr. Pelto said he does support the governor’s Small Business Express program in which similar aid has been provided to smaller firms.
“As an economic development strategy, it makes much more sense to help the small businesses, which make up a majority of the jobs and will add one or two or maybe more workers in the short term than to give money to a large company that would already add workers even if it didn’t get money from the First Five program,” the gubernatorial hopeful said.
Mr. Malloy has said the Small Business Express program has assisted more than 1,000 firms and generated 14,000 additional jobs.
Regarding education, Mr. Pelto said Connecticut’s state government shouldn’t be funneling money to charter schools when a recent report stated that over the last 24 years child poverty has increased by 50 percent.
“Public money shouldn’t be diverted to charter schools at the expense of the public schools,” said the former state representative, referring to Mr. Malloy’s efforts to develop more charter schools.
“In the urban school districts in Connecticut, for example, you don’t have enough money to properly provide instructional assistants for special education students the way they are in the suburban and rural districts,” said Mr. Pelto, who has been collecting signatures since June to be on the Nov. 4 ballot.
“Private schools should be privately funded,” said Mr. Pelto of Mansfield, who is running with the ticket’s lieutenant governor candidate Ebony Murphy, a teacher form Hartford,
Danbury Mayor Mark Boughton, a former high school social studies teacher who suspended his campaign June 18 for the Republican gubernatorial nomination, has said some of the most “fascinating and exciting things” that he has seen in education have been in the charter schools that he has toured.
He has said they have a longer school day, the students go to school on alternating Saturdays and the principal maintains a classroom and teachers a class each day. He said they also post higher test scores than the conventional public schools.
Mr. Boughton has said he wants to have more charter school options, since, for example, Danbury could benefit from having schools linked to the local hospital and airport to help train students for careers in those professions.
Mr. Pelto said none of Connecticut’s charter schools are as diverse as the municipalities where they are located and they take a much lower percentage of special education students.
“They also pay their teachers significantly less,” he said.
“There’s nothing wrong with having longer school days or principals that teach classes, but let’s not do it with public money that could be used to benefit our public schools,” Mr. Pelto said.
He said also said the state-developed standardized tests that were established a generation ago should be continued instead of implementing the Common Core exams.
Mr. Pelto said the Connecticut Mastery Test (CMT) and the Connecticut Academic Performance Test (CAPT) were developed by teachers in Connecticut and were effective in measuring higher-order thinking skills.
He was in the state House when Mr. O’Neill signed that landmark measure, which created the standardized tests, raised teacher salaries and the standards to enter that profession and obtain tenure.
Mr. Pelto said that is partly because they are geared to the Connecticut curriculums while the Common Core tests are being used nationally.
“We shouldn’t have the same standards for Kansas as Louisiana and Connecticut,” he said of the tests that were developed by the National Governors Association, the Council of Chief School Officers and Achieve Inc.
Mr. Pelto said the CMT and CAPT exams are better at measuring the skills that students will need to acquire a job or proceed to college.
However, he said the testing system was better when the CMT was confined to just fourth, sixth and eighth grade students. Following the establishment of the federal No Child Left Behind Act in 2002, the CMT was administered to thirdthrough eighth grade students.
“There should be some mechanism for testing,” Mr. Pelto said. “But the United States is the only country where there are annual tests.”
However, some school assistant superintendents have said the increased testing was of benefit because the annual data provided teachers with more insight on how to improve each student’s performance.
Mr. Pelto said that although he has been critical of many of Mr. Malloy’s education policies on his “Wait, What” blog, he supports his boost in state funding for more early childhood education seats.
“It’s a small step in the right direction,” he said.
Mr. Malloy has said that his administration has added more than 1,000 seats for pre-kindergarten students.
Regarding higher education, Mr. Pelto said that state Board of Regents system, which oversees Western Connecticut State University and the other three state universities, the 12 community colleges and the online Charter Oak State College, should be abolished.
Mr. Malloy and the General Assembly approved the merger during 2011, his first year in office, in part, to save money on administrative costs and make it easier for students to move from various parts of the system, such as community college graduates matriculating to the four-year campuses.
“Saying that it is unwieldy is understating it,” Mr. Pelto said. “The community colleges and the Connecticut State University schools have very different audiences.”
“There were two attempts at consolidation [of higher education] while I was in the Legislature [from 1985 to 1993] and both of them were scuttled,” he said. “We do need to turn back the clock and not have a Board of Regents with 17 schools under it.”
He is critical of the $42.1 million Transform 2020 program approved this year by the Legislature and Mr. Malloy, which he said doesn’t represent a long-term commitment to the Board of Regents system.
“I think it is a public relations gimmick,” Mr. Pelto said, noting that CTMirror.org reported last February that the system would face a $42 million operating deficit for the coming fiscal year even with a two percent increase in tuition. The online news Web site questioned in its story whether the program was a transformation or a bailout.
The program features the Go Back To Get Ahead initiative, which provides students who have been out of the system for at least 18 months the chance to get a free course for each of the first three courses that they take upon returning to school. The program is expected to, in particular, attract non-traditional students and provide a large increase in Charter Oak State College’s online enrollment.
The General Assembly also has approved $80 million in bond funding for the current fiscal year and $23.5 million for the next fiscal year to upgrade information technology and building maintenance, which reportedly has been deferred over the last five years due to budget constraints.
“I question how much bond money will actually go to the campuses because the state has a projected $1.4 million deficit for next year and it will have to address bonded debt that will have to be repaid as well as increased pension and benefit costs,” Mr. Pelto said. “I don’t think that Malloy has a long-term plan for the Board of Regents.”
On another topic, the gubernatorial hopeful said he doesn’t think that the Board of Regents should mandate that students take at least two online classes to graduate, as some higher education leaders have suggested.
“Students are not well-served by doing that,” Mr. Pelto said. “They should have the online classes but I don’t think it should be mandated, because students need to primarily be in a classroom getting direct instruction from a professor.”
However, the 2012 Sloan C study reported that 77 percent of the academic leaders surveyed indicated that online courses were the same or superior to face to face classes.
On a related topic, Mr. Pelto said he supports requiring students to take at least two or three credits in Cooperative Education work-study in jobs related to their major since it can provide valuable practical experience.
