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State Trooper Timothy Haroian “has been placed on administrative duty with an internal affairs investigation pending.” Troopers were notified Friday afternoon that Haroian’s police powers are suspended.

Haroian was until yesterday the school resources officer at Vinal Technical High School, a state vocational school in Middletown. The suspension and Haroian’s assignment at the high school is raising concerns about the cause of his suspension. The Vinal school community will need to know more than it has been told since the dramatic reassignment on Thursday.

Earlier today, Connecticut State Police Media Relations Unit told Daily Ructions in response to an inquiry about Haroian’s status that “our office has not been made aware of any action beyond a temporary re-assignment to Troop F at this time. We can confirm that this re-assignment occurred yesterday, 1/16/25.”

A spokesman for the State Police wrote to Daily Ructions that “this is a very serious matter.”

Trooper Haroian’s wife sued him for dissolution of their marriage earlier this month.

Published January 17, 2025.

Well, this is embarrassing. Secretary of the State Stephanie Thomas incorrectly stated the oath of office when she administered it to members of the Senate on January 8th.

Members are making their way to Thomas’s office by the Hall of Flags Thursday afternoon to have the proper oath administered by Thomas. The error has raised doubts that the joint rules were properly adopted and committees legitimately organized in the past eight days.

The oath does not change from term to term. The popular Thomas has people. This was an easily avoidable mistake. That oath must be needlepointed on a pillow somewhere in the SOTS office or in one of the many offices senators enjoy in the Capitol and Legislative Office Building.

Published January 16, 2025.

David Collins explains in The Day how the closed system of filling legislative vacancies will work in replacing Christine Conley, the Groton Democrat from the 40th House District. Conley asked voters to re-elect her in November but decided soon after she’d rather not represent Groton and part of New London, after all. She will instead become a Workers’ Compensation Commissioner.

Tonight, the 11 Democrats who nominated Conley last spring will convene to choose a nominee for the February special election. Groton has eight delegates, New London three. As of Wednesday evening there was no consensus on a candidate. Former Groton mayor Juan Melendez and Groton council member Dan Gaiewski, who is a Conley loyalist are vying for the nomination in the Democratic-leaning district.

Melendez seems like the obvious choice but experience and other virtues are not always persuasive when 11 politicos gather to pick a candidate.

There is an intentional democracy deficit in choosing candidates for a special election. Connecticut is among the states with the worst ballot access laws in the nation. For legislative special elections, there are no primaries. Legislative leaders, who do not like primaries, would argue that the compressed schedule for a special election at the start of a legislative session is necessary for the residents of a district to be represented in this regular session of the legislature. There is an alternative. Parties could hold daylong votes at one polling place in each town in the district for party members to cast a ballot for any qualified candidate. In the 40th that would certainly attract more than 11 local Democrats.

Republicans are expected to nominate Robert Boris. The Groton Republican lost in a House race in the 41st House District in 2022. He was defeated by Democrat Aundre Bumgardner by a wide margin, 6,538 to 3,841.

Published January 16, 2025.

State Senator Heather Somers (R-Groton) wants state taxpayers bilked out of more money for Shore Line East. The fifth term senator and former mayor supports squandering more public funds on what is often the rail service with the highest per passenger subsidy in the nation.

She introduced a bill “[t]o increase the Shore Line East rail service between the city of New Haven and the town of Mystic in order to ease traffic congestion on Interstate Route 95 and promote tourism along the Connecticut shoreline during the summer.” Shore Line East is so expensive it would be cheaper to hire cabs for its passengers. The state per passenger subsidy this year is estimates at $150.

No prudent steward of public funds can argue with a straight face that Shore Line East is a wise or efficient use of taxpayer money.

Somers has proposed sixty bills, including one for state taxpayers to fund the Chamber of Commerce in Mystic.

The Somers political action committee (Somers PAC) spent much of its money by making contributions to Republican Town Committees last year. The original purpose was to support Republican women running for office but the Somers PAC made most of its contributions to town committees supporting incumbent Republican men in the Senate. The towns represented by Republican Lisa Seminara, the only other woman in the Senate Republican caucus, appears to have received nothing from Somers PAC, which appears to have solicited many lobbyists for money last winter. In the summer of 2024, builder Michael Di Gioia provided Somers PAC with $1,000 of the $1,200 it raised between July 1st and September 30th. Di Gioia also gave the maximum contribution to Somers PAC in 2023. Di Gioia lives in North Haven but has had a construction project in Groton.

Published January 15, 2025.

State police troopers and others at Troop H in Hartford marked the retirement of a dispatcher on the last day of 2024 by setting a chair on fire in the parking lot.

The dispatcher, according to spokesman Rick Green, purchased the chair herself. On her final day, colleagues took the chair into the parking lot, appear to have applied an accelerant and lit the fire. The reckless event was memorialized by a photo as state law enforcement officials looked on.

The state does have a law prohibiting open burning without a permit, but that is for other people. Furniture often contains hazardous chemicals. Reckless burning is a class D felony. Small fires, as we have been reminded in the last week, can grow into horrifically destructive ones.

This seems to a civilian a reckless and pointless act, but people with the power to arrest take a different view.

Published January 14, 2025.

East Lyme Democrat Nick Menapace was only a day into his first term when he committed a violation of state rules by promoting a Working Families Party (WFP) fundraiser on his General Assebly webpage.

Technology allows legislators to link their legislative Facebook page to their official state webpage with a widget. The content on the Facebook page appears on the state page. Menapace’s promotion of the January 16th WFP fundraiser on Facebook appeared on his new state page until Daily Ructions pointed out the violation Monday morning.

Menapace, a teacher, told Daily Ructions that it was an error committed as he sorts out the system and the rules.

Note to legislators: it’s your name on these sites. It can be a risk to hand over control of content to staff members.

Published January 13, 2025.

Representative Mitch Bolinsky (R-Newtown) wants to apply the heavy hand of state government to your vehicle’s GPS. Luddite Bolinsky has proposed legislation to prohibit “global positioning systems and other navigation applications from proposing routes of travel that direct heavy motor vehicle traffic onto local roads.”

The Newtown Republican represents a district that has frequent severe traffic jams on I-84, causing rational drivers to leave the infuriating highway to follow alternate routes provided by the miracle of WAZE and other remarkable navigation technology. GPS has been a lifeline to drivers able to do what state government has routlinely failed to accomplish: drive forward on roads.

As the Emperor Canute commanded the sea to retreat from the shore, Bolinsky demands technology stop providing helpful informaiton to motorists. There is another solution, Canute Bolinsky. You could rally your colleagues and get the highway fixed.

Published January 13, 2025.   

He is not done yet. State Senator Saud Anwar (D-South Windsor) has proposed a resolution to limit debate in the Senate

to including (1) a maximum of three hours of

debate time for each political party’s members to discuss a single issue

after which a vote shall be called, (2) a prohibition on any individual

member speaking for more than one hour on a single topic during a

debate, and (3) a prohibition on an individual member deviating from

the relevant subject of the bill or resolution being debated, violation of

which shall initially result in a verbal warning, and continued violation

of which may result in the forfeiture of the member’s allotted time to

debate.

It appears not to have occurred to Anwar, a partisan with narrow political vision, that sometimes support and opposition forms along something other than party lines. Though Anwar is unlikely to be one of them, there are members who possess enough knowledge to need to speak for more than an hour on an issue. And who is to decide under the third prong of this poisonous proposal what a deviation is?

Legislators may safely conclude what I have known for nearly five years. Saud Anwar despises our tradition of free speech in the Constitution State. Two years ago, he wanted to fine people who exercised their right not to vote. This year, he wants to penalize Senate colleagues who embrace debate and the vigorous exchange of ideas. He also wants to limit introducing visitors to the Senate and members with announcements.

This resolution reveals more than Anwar may have intended. Colleagues should take note.

January 10, 2025.

The authoritarian instinct is never far from the top of state Senator Saud Anwar’s intentions. The South Windsor Democrat has taken an unusual step of proposing a resolution to prohibit moments of personal privilege by his 35 colleagues during the last week of a legislative session.

Anwar, serving his fourth term in the upper chamber, may not have realized that on Wednesday, the opening day of the session, he could have proposed an amendment to the rules adopted by the Senate and the House to silence members from welcoming school students from their districts, thanking staff members or announcing their retirement.

Anwar may not realize that the points of personal privilege are helpful to the members and staffers engaged in the fraught business of negotiating and cobbling together consent calendars and agreements on which bills will be called and debated. Since Anwar is not involved in leadership decisions, he is oblivious to the role points of personal privilege play in getting things done.

Those moments that Anwar disdains can also be poignant milestones. Last year, Marilyn Moore, who started as a committee staffer and rose to become a senator, announced as the session came to a close that she would not seek re-election. Two years before, Mary Abrams, a respected member of the Senate with many affectionate friendships, announced she would not run again. Mary Abrams died recently. These important moments appeared to have irked Anwar.

Anwar may not be aware that any member may object to a point of personal privilege and request that the chamber vote on allowing it to proceed. Using that rule would make him no less popular among his colleagues.

The points of personal privilege are not the reason many of Anwar’s proposals die when each session ends. In his first campaign for the legislature, a 2016 bid for the House, Anwar cast the race as a choice between excellence and mediocrity. In the fullness of time, it has become clearer that Anwar did not represent the attribute in that pairing.

If the Government Administration and Elections Committee declines to hold a public hearing and then send Anwar’s proposal to the Senate, it will have cast its own ballot on his effectiveness.

Published January 10, 2025.

Must they torture us so soon after the promise of a new year dawned?

Lieutenant Governor Susan Bysiewicz posted battling cringe-inducing videos last week. So did Mayor Erin Stewart. Bysiewicz used a pair of socks as a prop. Stewart used and bleeped the c-word. On Wednesday, Attorney General William Tong joined the competition with what appears to be a monumental waste of state resources. What is the point of these 25 seconds of General Tong, as he prefers to be addressed and poses as an environmentalist, emerging from a gas guzzling, emissions belching SUV?

He climbs the stairs at the Capitol on the opening day of the legislature, mounts the dias to observe Governor Lamont’s address and hopes in two years to be standing in the place the Greenwich aristocrat makes his way through his speech.

The Hall of the House is the site of Tong’s lowest moment. It was there that he gave aid and comfort to anti-semites when he spiked the renomination of a Superior Court judge, Jane Emons, a Jew. Tong was co-chair of the Judiciary Committee (or as some of Emons critics would say, the Jewdiciary.

You will see no reference to Tong’s 2018 act in his video in which a jumped up GMC SUV sets the not-so-subtle tone.

Tong’s pawing-at-the-paddock candidacy continues today. His strange video will do nothing to clear the field.

Published January 9, 2025.