An alliance to raise taxes in nine states will add to the bad economic news buffeting Governor Ned Lamont this week–and it’s only Wednesday. The Wall Street Journal editorial page shines a light today on a growing coalition of Democratic legislators from nine states intent on imposing a wealth tax on their most affluent residents.

Connecticut governors have long been sensitive to the state’s coverage in The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal. Ned Lamont, a Greenwich Democrat with deep roots in the world of finance, pays close attention to the Journal’s influential editorial page. Lamont refers to the 2018 Journal opinion piece headline “What’s the Matter With Connecticut?” in his freeform public remarks emphasizing his stewardship of the state’s finances. Today’s editorial raises a threat to Lamont’s efforts to reassure business leaders that it’s a new world in Connecticut with one of their own in charge and resolute.

The Journal wrote:

Democrats finally have a strategy to stop billionaires from fleeing high tax states: Block the escape routes. That’s the logic behind coordinated moves in progressive states to tax wealth. The reforms aren’t likely to pass immediately, but they illustrate the increasingly open socialist goals of progressives and their public-union backers.

The confiscatory tax alliance emerged late last week when lawmakers from eight states unveiled plans to target wealthy residents. California, New York, Illinois, Maryland, Hawaii, Minnesota, Connecticut and Washington state are all represented, and several of the sponsors have already released bills. “We are here today to put billionaires and multimillionaires on notice,” said Washington state Sen. Noel Frame on a Zoom call. “They will pay what they owe.”

Fund Our Future is coordinating the movement. Read more about it here.

Tuesday brought more immediate bad news for jobs and opportunity in Connecticut. Lego, the toy buying block maker, announced it will move its headquarters from Enfield to Boston. The global company will begin packing up in 2025. The company’s American headquarters employs more than 700 workers in Enfield.

Lego signaled its commitment to Connecticut was fading when it announced last summer that it would build a $1 billion, 1.7 million-square-foot manufacturing plant in Virginia. The facility will provide more than 1,700 jobs.

Economist Don Klepper-Smith provided more grim news Tuesday. The number of people moving to the state is outstripped by the leavers. Connecticut suffered a net loss of 13,547 our neighbors between July 2021 and July 2022. See the numbers at the top of this posting.

Published January 25, 2023.

State Representative Cara Pavalock-D’Amato (R-Bristol) has proposed legislation to close the Alice Bruno loophole in state statutes. Pavalock-D’Amato’s bill would amend state statutes to “allow for the forfeiture of the vested right to a retirement salary in the event an individual takes an extended period of unauthorized absence from duty that results in the individual being subject to an administrative disciplinary hearing.”

Bruno was the Superior Court judge who left her chambers in November 2019 and never returned. She continued to be paid by judicial branch administrators until last spring. Bruno had claimed a short illness when she left her Waterbury assignment in 2019. Her absence grew longer as explanations became more terse.

In 2020, Bruno claimed on the attendance records she submitted at the end of that year that she had been sick every work day. The 2015 Malloy appointee told the Supreme Court in a special 2022 proceeding that she could return to work under more congenial conditions than she found in Waterbury–where Bruno was distress when her colleague in that courthouse, Judge Anna M. Ficeto, did not greet her when they passed in the hallway.

Bruno, under investigation by a designee of the Supreme Court, applied to the Judicial Review Council for a disability pension. That proceeding was held in secret. Her application was granted in October. Bruno, who served as the executive director of the Connecticut Bar Association for a year and a half before eventually becoming a judge, is receiving a full judicial pension. This year that will be more than $120,000. She was paid more than $400,000 for the more than two years she did not work.

Pavalock-D’Amato serves on the judiciary committee, where her bill will first be considered.

Published January 23, 2023.

The Department of Administrative Services (DAS) released not long before 4 p.m. Friday a limited number of copies of a school construction grant program audit. The release many months after Commissioner Michelle Gilman pledged regular updates would be provided to legislators. 

The multi-billion dollar program has been the subject of a federal criminal investigation. Audit updates were not provided last year, protecting Governor Ned Lamont from having sunshine cast on an embarrassing failure of oversight by his administration during his and Lieutenant Governor Susan Bysiewicz’s re-election campaign.

The limited release of the interim report comes three days before the legislature’s School Construction Project Priority Review Committee meets Monday afternoon. The status of the audit is likely to be a top interest of legislators. 

Calls to Gilman’s office went to voicemail Friday afternoon. Its website continues to list Lora Rae Anderson as the head of communications. She’s now the chief of staff at Department of Transportation. The most recent press release on the department’s website was posted in May of last year.

Gilman’s predecessor at DAS, Josh Geballe, entered into a memorandum of understanding early in the Lamont administration that transferred the school construction office from DAS to the state budget office. That move accommodated then-school construction office head Kostantinos Diamantis’ move to the budget office to serve as deputy to his close friend Melissa McCaw. The Geballe/McCaw agreement violated state law and was terminated when scandal struck the Lamont administration and the school construction program.

Published January 20, 2023.

There will be many meetings and some excuse-making at the Connecticut Hospital Association. Healthgrades, the respected hospital rating service, included no Connecticut hospital on its national list of the top 50 hospitals in the nation for 2023.

The Healthgrades “ratings and awards are based on the mortality and complication rates, adjusted for risk, of nearly 4,500 hospitals and 33 of the most common procedures nationally, according to its latest methodology document. The goal of Healthgrades is to provide ‘trusted, actionable information about the care delivered at our nation’s hospitals,'” Fierce Healthcare noted on its website when the ratings were released last year.

The best 100 list includes Middlesex Hospital and Norwalk Hospital. Here are Healthgrades’ Connecticut hospitals on its top 250 hospitals.

Published January 17, 2023.

Matthew Brokman will served as the head of Governor Ned Lamont’s legislative office. Brokman has earned a reputation as a political polymath, serving in a variety of positions, including with the House Democrats and the state party.

Claims Commissioner Christy Scott will return to the House Democrats. She served as a senior staff member there until then-Governor Dannel P. Malloy appointed her to the claims commissioner job in 2016. Scott replaced J. Paul Vance, Jr.

Published January 17, 2023.

State Senator John Fonfara is expected to form a campaign committee for the Democratic nomination for mayor of Hatford on Monday. The former five-term House member began his 19th term in the Senate Wednesday. He wields significant influence as co-chairman of the legislature’s finance committee. Fonfara will likely take a leading role this spring in shaping and passing Governor Ned Lamont’s middle class tax cut.

Fonfara retains a reputation as an energetic candidate. He has remained rooted in his district, which includes much of Hartford. Decades of constituent casework provide will provide a potent list of prime voters that no other candidate can hope to match.

Arunan Arulampalam scored an own goal with his Thursday campaign kickoff. The former lobbyist surprised officeholders and others by proceeding with his event on the same day state Representative Quentin ”Q” Williams was killed in a fiery wrong way motor vehicle as he drove home from Governor Ned Lamont’s inaugural ball. Arulampalam began his campaign launch with a tribute to Williams, telling the audience he had prayed on whether to hold the event. God said yes, and Arulampalam began his quest to find the 6,000 votes he says he will need to win September’s primary.

Legislative leaders received a different answer to their anguished prayers Thursday morning. They cancelled all meetings scheduled for Thursday and Friday and closed the Legislative Office Building. Williams surpassed popularity at the Capitol. In his four years in the House the Middletown Democrat was the object of affection beyond the usual limits of bitter contemporary partisan politics.

Williams was no ordinary legislator. His success came from toil devoid of privilege. Legislators will spend this legislative session in the shadow of his death.

Published January 7, 2023.

State Representative Quentin “Q” Williams was killed last night in a motor vehicle collision on Route 9. Williams, a Middletown Democrat, was sworn into office Wednesday for his third term and had been appointed to serve as co-chair of the legislature’s labor committee. He was 39 years old.

Early indications are that Williams was struck by a vehicle traveling in the wrong direction.

The Legislative Office Building will close today. All committee meetings are cancelled.

Published January 5, 2023.

It took the Connecticut House of Representatives just one ballot to upend the established order and oust incumbent Speaker of the House Irving Stolberg on January 4, 1989.

The plan was unveiled to House Republicans the afternoon before the new session of the legislature was to begin. Members of the Republican caucus agreed to join disaffected Democrats to oust Democrat Irving Stolberg, on the verge of a historic third term, and replace him with Newington Democrat Richard Balducci.

All 63 House Republicans joined 31 of the House’s 88 Democrats to replace Stolberg with Balducci on the first ballot–after defeating a motion to recess so the Democrats could knock some heads together. The plan to defeat Stolberg came together when a handful of Democrats, considered moderates at the time, met at a private office and realized their might be enough of them to form a majority with the House Republicans, who had chafed under Stolberg’s leadership during this two terms as speaker.

The ideological divide between House Republicans and Democrats was neither as rigid nor as broad then as it is today. Two extraordinary elements of the coup, as it was labeled by some, were that it remained secret until the night before it occurred and the Republicans asked for nothing in return for their votes–and received nothing. Years of tax increases and fiscal indiscipline followed–something the moderate Democrats who rebelled that morning 34 years ago might have resisted if they had not made one of their own speaker.

Later that day, Governor William O’Neill addressed a joint session of the legislature and noted, as a former Democratic House majority leader would, that the action was always in the House.

Published January 3, 2022.

Hartford Democrat Arunan Arulampalm will announce his candidacy for mayor Thursday afternoon. Arulampalam will address supporters at the Parkville Market at an hourlong event beginning at 5:30 p.m.

Arulampalam becomes the third Democrat to enter the race to succeed incumbent Democrat Luke Bronin, who is not seeking a third four-year term. Arulampalam sought the Democratic nomination for state treasurer in 2018. He won enough votes at the state party nominating convention to qualify to participate in a primary but declined to enter the next round against endorsed candidate Shawn Wooden and challenger Dita Bhargava.

Arulampalam served as a deputy commissioner of the Department of Consumer Protection in the Lamont administration until joining the Hartford Land Bank last year.

Eric Coleman, a former state senator and retired Superior Court judge, was the first Democrat to enter the contest for mayor. He was followed by Nick Lebron, a city council member. State Senator John Fonfara is considering entering the race and would bring four decades of experience and winning campaigns into the arena.

Members of the Democratic town committee will meet this summer to select an endorsed slate. A primary will likely follow in September.

Published January 3, 2023.

State Representative Rosa Rebimbas chose not to seek re-election to her safe Naugatuck seat. Instead, she took on fellow Republican and five-term incumbent Probate Judge Peter Mariano as he sought four more years in office. Some of the race was chronicled here and in my Hartford Courant column. WTNH also reported on the August primary contest between the two Republicans.

Rebimbas won the party endorsement, the primary and the general election against Mariano. Though Mariano began May by serving a short sentence for drunk driving and reckless endangerment, he received enough votes at the Republican nominating convention from Middlebury delegates to qualify for a primary. Mariano also won the endorsement of the Democratic delegates in the four-town district to their enduring shame.

The Naugatuck Valley delights in its reputation for a tough brand of politics. Mariano’s jackals did their worst but misjudged Rebimbas. She ran a disciplined campaign, drawing the stark contrast between herself and Mariano. Rebimbas defeated Mariano by a wide margin on November 8th–and then silence. The traditional conversations between an outgoing judge and an incoming one on the state of the court never occurred.

On Wednesday, Rebimbas’s fortitude was subtly recognized. Chief Justice Richard Robinson administered the oath of office to Rebimbas. Mariano’s tenure in office had become a significant embarrassment to the administration of justice in Connecticut. Chief Justice Robinson added his considerable prestige to an important moment.

On Thursday, Donald Deneen, who has been admitted to practice in Connecticut for more than 60 years, administered the oath of office to his granddaughter, Mary Deneen, as the new judge in the Greater Windsor Probate District. Her father, Michael Deneen, is also a lawyer.

Mary Deneen succeeds fellow Democrat Marianne Lassman Fisher, who chose not to seek re-election after 18 years of service. Mary Deneen won the party’s endorsement in May, the primary in August–with nearly 80% of the vote–and the general election by a wide margin.

Voters elected 14 new probate judges in November, the largest class of first term judges since the probate courts were consolidated in 2010. Only three of the new judges are women, Rebimbas, Deneen and Gabrielle Labonte. Labonte defeated incumbent Democrat Leah Schad in the 26th Probate District in northeastern Connecticut.

Published December 30, 2022.