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.

State Senator Matthew Lesser (D-Middletown) has his eye on some lobbyist money–again. Lesser collected enough in small contributions to qualify for public financing of his race for secretary of the state in the spring. Lesser retreated from that contest when he fell far short of winning the party endorsement at May’s nominating convention. He made have made his crucial error when he ceded the party nomination for comptroller to Sean Scanlon.

Lesser declined to primary Stephanie Thomas, the party endorsed candidate for secretary of the state, after she made short work of him. Thomas and her sharp floor operation administered a final humiliation that day by giving Lesser some mercy delegates to insure she’d face him in the convention’s final ballot.

The campaign calendar allowed Lesser to find refuge at his state Senate convention and seek re-election from the four-town district. He defeated a Republican challenger in November.

Lesser’s Middlesex Area Team for Tomorrow (MATT PAC) is offering lobbyists the chance to “Ring in the New Year With Senator Matt Lesser.” The event is January 2nd at the Red Rock Tavern at the edge of the Capitol village. Lesser, who left Wesleyan University before graduating to work on Barack Obama’s first presidential campaign, is workin’ the same old corner. A lobbyist ducat goes for $100. Other PACs can give up to $2,000 to attend. Businesses can buy an ad in a program book for $250.00.

Lesser held a similar event in pre-pandemic 2019. Much of the money for his PAC came from lobbyists. The organization’s connection to its name has grown tenuous with Lesser’s ambitious. In the fall, it made contributions to Democratic town committees in Ansonia, East Windsor and Vernon. It also gave some of the green stuff that folds to the Working Families Party.

There was a time when a plague of PACs was deemed contrary to the public interest by people much like Lesser. They were seen as an instrument for lobbyists to purchase a disproportionate amount of influence over elected officials. Now, the public finances campaigns and legislators establish slush funds filled with money from lobbyists and their clients. That seems worse than what came before.

Published December 29, 2022.

WTIC’s Brian Shactman raised a topic on many minds when he interviewed Governor Ned Lamont Wednesday morning. “Rates are going to double in a matter of days. Is there anything you can do or is there anything to be done to ease this?” the popular host asked. Shactman pointed out the burden of the increase in electricity costs will place on people with fixed and low incomes. The segment is posted above.

“Doubling this cost is brutal,” Shactman added. “First of all it’s not doubling,” the Greenwich Democrat replied, “but it is going to go up dramatically. Probably 45, 50% for some people.” Lamont rattled through some of the subsidies available to eligible residents and pointed out, as he has done in the past, that the hikes are higher in neighboring states, adding, “but who cares?”

Shactman pointed out that the rate increase that will begin punishing customers in January is from $0.12 to $0.24 per kilowatt hour for the first half of 2023. That’s double. The cost of electricity is doubling for most Connecticut customers. The distribution charge from Eversource and United Illuminating, a separate part of a utility bill, is not doubling.

This is not how any governor wants to begin a second term. Connecticut customers continue to pay the highest electricity rates in the continental United States. Connecticut and Massachusetts utility regulators will hold a joint hearing on January 3rd to discuss the hikes by Eversource, which does business in both states. The issue continues to flummox state officials. They acknowledge Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has roiled world energy markets. They also need a local target to blame for rates in New England rising higher than in other parts of the country.

The most important player will not be participating in Tuesday’s hearing: New York Governor Kathy Hochul. She could expand the natural gas pipelines that run through her state into New England, but will not. New Hampshire residents stopped a proposal to build transmission lines that would have carried hydro-electric energy into the New England grid.

Connecticut’s energy policy has been expensive and laden with crossed fingers. It has failed and in the winter crunch the blame will fall on our leaders.

Posted December 29, 2022.

Never a note wrong.

Published December 21, 2022.

Governor Ned Lamont’s inaugural committee eliminated its top $50,000 sponsorship after a Hartford Courant column revealed the committee’s solicitation of state contractors and lobbyists. The top sponsorship package can be purchased for $25,000. Sponsorships will be acknowledged throughout the inaugural ball venue.

State law, according to the state’s ethics agency, allows state contractors and lobbyists, prohibited in other instances from making contributions to state officials, to make unlimited “gifts to the state” to underwrite the inaugural ball. The inaugural committee sent sponsorship packages to lobbyists, seeking to have members of the permanent government put the touch on their clients to finance the January 4th event.

While the inaugural ball can be a highlight for elected officials, it is a dreary obligation for lobbyists. Two registered lobbyists have found a way to score points with the honored politicians of the evening. Lobbyists Brian Durand and Steve Kinney are two of three volunteers helming the inaugural ball committee.

Tickets are $200 for anyone over 30 years old, $100 for those 30 years old and under.

Published December 20, 2022.

Published December 20, 2022.

Chief Court Administrator Patrick L. Carroll, III, will take senior status on January 30th, Chief Justice Richard Robinson announced Friday afternoon. Popular deputy administrator Judge Elizabeth Bozzuto will become the new leader of the day-to-day administration of the state’s court system.

Judge Anna Ficeto, currently serving as Administrative Judge in Waterbury, moves into Bozzuto’s position. Ficeto served as legal counsel to former Governor M. Jodi Rell. She was nominated to the Superior Court in January 2012 by then-Governor Dannel P. Malloy. Ficeto’s skill moving the state’s informal but influential levers of power should prove useful in setting a new tone in the court’s administration office.

Bozzuto and Ficeto have worked together before. Both had to address and cope with Carroll’s inability to get Judge Alice Bruno to perform her duties. Bruno left her Waterbury chambers in November 2019 and never returned. She complained in a proceeding before the Supreme Court earlier this year that Ficeto would not greet her when they passed in the hallways of the Waterbury courthouse.

Carroll concluded his announcement by noting, “I’m not going anywhere. As long as the Chief Justice and Judge Bozzuto can tolerate me, I will continue to work here in the Office of the Chief Court Administrator, on a somewhat reduced schedule….” Judges on the frontline of the court system will nevertheless look forward to Bozzuto setting a new and courteous tone in her office.

Published December 19, 2022.

Max Reiss, the former local television reporter who served as Governor Ned Lamont’s spokesperson for three years, has announced he is leaving M&T Bank. Reiss joined M&T as a community affairs director last summer, weeks before its catastrophic Labor Day weekend conversion of People’s United Bank’s technology into the Buffalo-based bank’s computer system. M&T purchased the Bridgeport-based People’s United for $8.3 billion.

M&T’s blunders left thousands of Connecticut customers without access to their funds. Customer profiles were provided to strangers who then had access to accounts not their own. Millions in checks were mistakenly dishonored by M&T. The Lamont administration shrugged. Lamont himself hosted an October 5th cordial meeting M&T CEO Rene Jones, who received $6.8 million in compensation in 2021. Lamont offered only muted criticism of the banker, who he referred to by his first name in a post-meeting tweet, as thousands of customer and frontline bank employees endured the consequences of bank executives’s blunders.

Reiss is expected to join a publicly traded company that state law guarantees a profitable rate of return, Daily Ructions has learned. The company so many join eventually, whether in or out of government.

Published December 16, 2022.

State Senator John Fonfara is close to entering the Democratic race for mayor of Hartford, Daily Ructions has learned. The veteran state legislator has been making calls to city Democrats and members of the Capitol village.

Fonfara has represented Hartford’s South End neighborhoods and part of Wethersfield in the Senate since 1996. He served in the House for 10 years before succeeding William DiBella. The Hartford native serves as co-chair of the legislature’s finance committee.

Fonfara, 67, would join his former colleague in the House and Senate, Eric Coleman, in the race to replace Luke Bronin, who announced on November 29th, first reported by Daily Ructions, that he will not seek a third term as mayor. City Council member Nicholas Lebron, also a Democrat, announced his candidacy for the job this week.

State campaign finance laws could provide a significant boost to Fonfara in the early going. Legislators are banned from soliciting lobbyists for contributions for campaigns for state office during the legislative session–which this year will run until early June. The law, does not, however, prohibit legislators from soliciting lobbyists and their clients for contributions for their municipal campaigns during the legislative session. Fonfara knows how to insert himself as facilitator or obstacle in the legislative process. That talent could help him raise a significant amount of money in the first two quarters of the year. Concern that an unhappy Fonfara might lose the September Democratic primary and remain in the Senate would also spur donors.

Decades ago Fonfara enjoyed a reputation as one of the legislature’s most energetic on-the-ground campaigner. He built a loyal personal organization that he could deploy in his own races and also in frequent skirmishes that characterize Hartford Democratic politics.

If Fonfara won next year’s election, Hartford Democratic party committee chairman and Fonfara ally Mark DiBella would lose unhampered access to a key player at the Capitol, potentially diminishing DiBella’s luster as a registered lobbyist. A Fonfara candidacy comes as a tricky time for another Fonfara ally, William DiBella, whose hold on the chairmanship of regional water and sewer authority MDC may be in jeopardy.

Fonfara, who often appears to brood in public, is no stranger to the gaffe. In 2018 he made a well-publized comment about needing an “I stand with White Men pin.” Fonfara pledged to hold a community forum to discuss his comment in April 2018. Three months later, he had not scheduled it and there is no record of it ever taking place.

Published December 16, 2022.