Scribner Wants To Resolve State Budget Deficit

• David Scribner’s State House Re-election Campaign
• By Scott Benjamin

State Rep. David Scribner (R-107) said the projected $2.8 billion state budget deficit for the two-year cycle starting next year has resulted from Gov. Dannel Malloy’s higher taxes, corporate welfare and fiscal gimmickry.

“It’s relatively insurmountable,” the Brookfield legislator said of the gap, which represents more than five percent of a roughly $40 billion state budget.

“This governor has had ample opportunity to improve the direction of our state economy,” Scribner said during a recent interview near the Bethel Republican Town Committee headquarters. “The results are showing over and over again that hasn’t happened.”

For example, he said Connecticut lost a net 3,600 jobs in August during the dawdling economic recovery.

The state’s unemployment rate declined to 6.4 percent in September, the lowest in six years.

WashingtonPost.com economics columnist Robert Samuelson has written that nationwide the recovery has been hampered by a current loss of confidence among businesses and consumers after an unprecedented era in which there were only two mild recessions from 1982 to 2007 that lasted a combined 16 months.

He wrote that in the years leading to the 2008 financial crisis, bankers made “dumb loans,” people “borrowed too much” and “regulators got out of the way.”

“We believed we had a basic control over our economic environment; now we acknowledge a loss of control, Samuelson has stated. “The first emboldened people to spend, the second deters them. This shift is a fundamental reality of our time.”

However, critics, including Scribner, have said the $1.8 million in tax increases signed by Malloy have hindered Connecticut’s recovery.

Scribner has said the $248 million surplus for the fiscal year that ended last June was phony since it partly built on borrowed money raiding special funds, For example, he said $120 million has been siphoned off from the special transportation fund, a practice that will end next July as a result of legislation that Scribner authored.

State Comptroller Kevin Lembo of Guilford has projected a $300 million surplus for the fiscal year that will conclude next June.

Scribner said he won’t support tax increases to balance the new two-year budget, which the General Assembly will start crafting this winter.

He said he wants to reduce spending, but declined to say how many state employees would have to be laid off.

“There are a lot of ways to reduce spending,” Scribner said

He said, for example, the state work force has been reduced from 60,000 to 52,000 over the recent years, partly through attrition.

“There may be a need to do negotiations with the state employee unions to perhaps do things that might make sense for the long haul,” he said.

However, Malloy, a Democrat who served as mayor of Stamford for 14 years, has said he won’t ask for further employee concessions after they agreed to $1.6 million in reductions in 2011 in return for a pledge that he wouldn’t lay off any employees over the next four years. His immediate predecessor, Republican M. Jodi Rell of Brookfield, negotiated a smaller amount of concessions in 2009 in return for a pledge of no layoffs for two years.

Some observers have said has been difficult to annex concessions from the powerful state public employee bargaining units since at least former Gov. Ella Grasso’s administration in the mid-1970s.

“It doesn’t mean you stop trying,” Scribner said.

Regarding business expansion, the state representative, who serves as a Republican House Whip, said Malloy’s corporate assistance “is not going to turn the state around.”

He joins other critics in saying the state should not have invested $291 million in the recently-opened Jackson Labs bioscience facility in Farmington, which has pledged to create just 300 jobs over the next 10 years.

However, Hartford Courant columnist Colin McEnroe has stated that although the Jackson Labs project has risks it “may turn out to be Malloy’s home run if it creates a bioscience hub.”

University of California-Berkeley economist Enrico Moretti has stated the 15 to 20 metro areas that have companies paying high salaries have innovation hubs. He has written that this usually results in up to five additional service sector jobs for every innovation-hub worker.

Moretti has stated that innovation companies usually attract additional businesses. In Seattle, for example, MicroSoft, which moved there from Albuquerque in 1979, helped attract Amazon. Seattle was not considered to be a desirable site for an innovation before Microsoft founders Bill Gates and Paul Allen moved operations there. Now there are 4,000 Microsoft alumni that operate small businesses in the metro Seattle area.

Scribner is being challenged by Dan Smolnik, a tax attorney and former chairman of the Brookfield Democratic Town Committee, in the Nov.4 election in the district, which includes all of Brookfield and parts of Danbury and Bethel.

Scribner, who has been Brookfield’s town treasurer since 1995, has won more elections and collected more votes in that town than anyone over the last 19 years.

Since being established in 1966, Republicans have held the the 107th District for all but two years.

Malloy faces Republican Tom Foley of Greenwich and independent Joe Visconti of West Hartford in his bid to become the first Democratic governor since William O’Neill in 1986 to capture a second term.

On another topic, CT Mirror recently posted a three-part series on the need for infrastructure improvements to boost the state’s economy.

Scribner, who is the ranking Republican House member on the General Assembly’s Transportation Committee, said he believes that the lockbox legislation that he wrote for the special transportation fund and the continued flow of federal money, which pays for 80 percent of most projects, will foster more construction.

He said Congress has been approving quarterly extensions in recent years after previously approving five-year funding authorizations.

“I do think that it is a legitimate concern,” Scribner said of the shorter-term commitments. “I don’t think that it should be used as an excuse to do nothing.”

He praised the state Department of Transportation, noting that it completed the $105 million Brookfield Route 7 bypass on schedule in 2009 and recently approved $2 million to make more parking available at the Bethel train station.

“They have lot of challenges and lot of restrictions imposed upon them and they have good programs in place,” Scribner said.

Politically, the state legislator has reportedly encountered friction with some members of the Brookfield Republican Town Committee. He was challenged for the party’s nomination for town treasurer at the GOP caucus three years ago and then faced longtime Brookfield Board of Education member Harry Shaker in a primary a year later for the GOP nomination in the 107th District.

However, it appears that relations have improved.

Brookfield Republican Town Committee Chairman Matt Grimes said there had been concern that Scribner didn’t attend the local party’s social functions over the most recent years, but in July he was at its Summer Social. His campaign lawn signs have recently been posted at the Brookfield Republican headquarters on Federal Road.

“His voting record reflects his district,” Grimes said of Scribner.

Scribner is considered the leading champion of graduated licensing for 16- and 17-year-old drivers, which includes restrictions on overnight driving and on passengers and has increased requirements for driver education training.

“The teen auto fatalities rates have declined [since that legislation] was signed by Rell in 2005, the legislator said.

Regarding local issues, Scribner noted that Danbury already is considered the “economic engine” of Connecticut with its high sales tax revenues, which mostly emanate from the Danbury Fair Mall and the surrounding restaurants on the city’s west side.

He indicated that lower businesses taxes and fewer regulations might foster more business activity throughout Connecticut.

Scribner said he believes 198-acre Brookfield Town Center District center, near the Four Corners intersection, will look considerably different within four years.

Scribner, who helped secure state Small Town Economic Assistance Program grants to develop the Town District Center, said additional housing has been built there over the recent years and there are now plans for an additional 500 units in the vicinity.

He said that factor is critical since a town district center usually attracts most of its customers from a short radius.

Smolnik said in August that Scribner hadn’t explained to his constituents why he voted in early 2013 against Malloy’s gun control legislation, which was largely a response to the deaths of 26 people at Newtown’s Sandy Hook Elementary School in December 2012.

Scribner said the bill was hastily voted on at 2:30 a.m. after it was “crafted behind closed doors.”

“I’m most proud of the fact that I did my homework,” he said. “I read it thoroughly and saw that there were flaws. I also thought that it was wrong that we didn’t have a public hearing on a piece of legislation that should be so important.”

Scribner said the gun control legislation had to be revised “60 days later” after the flaws were discovered.

“I voted for that piece of legislation,” he said. “You don’t hear about that.”

However, he said he felt that even the revised version “was a missed opportunity” on how to address mental health issues related to gun violence.

Regarding the legalization of marijuana, Scribner said, “I think there is a lot of evidence that marijuana is an entry level drug that leads to much more destructive drugs.”

He said that the legalization of medical marijuana, which the General Assembly and Malloy approved in 2012, “has opened the door to allowing for marijuana refineries to crop up. I’m not convinced that we have adequate enforcement measures in place.”

The state’s first medical marijuana refinery opened in August in South Windsor.

A recent Quinnipiac Poll indicated that 52 percent of those surveyed supported legalizing personal use amounts of marijuana.