State Senator Kevin Witkos will not seek re-election. The seven-term Canton Republican announced Thursday.

Witkos entered politics with a stunning win in 2002 when he defeated eight-term Democratic state Representative Jessie Stratton in their Avon and Canton district. Stratton was mounting a bid to become speaker of the house when Witkos, a popular Canton police officer, defeated her.

Witkos was the deputy Republican leader during the two years Republicans and Democrats each held 18 seats in the Senate.

Democratic and Republican legislative leaders will meet with Governor Ned Lamont Wednesday afternoon to chart a way forward over Lamont’s public health emergency powers. The group will meet by Zoom at 4:30 p.m.

Lamont, mindful of his re-election campaign, wants his emergency powers enacted into law by special acts. A third year of extraordinary authority bestowed upon him by legislative leaders would signal to voters that his success in dealing with the Covid pandemic does not match the gentle narrative portrayed in the governor’s television commercials.

Some legislative leaders may resist the Greenwich Democrat. One faction does not want to extend Lamont’s authority in any manner. Others would prefer not to have their fingerprints on specific grants of authority that may raise a social media storm.

The meeting is closed because Lamont and legislative leaders have a narrow view of how far the public’s right to know extends into the conduct of the people’s business. Pay no attention to that original Norman Rockwell the governor likes to point to in lieu of transparency.

Posted January 18, 2022.

Bob Stefanowski, who astonished Republicans by winning the party’s crowded 2018 primary for governor, will make official Wednesday his return to the arena. The Madison Republican gave Democrat Ned Lamont some nervous moments during the Democratic wave year. Stefanowski lost the Greenwich Democrat by 45,000 votes.

Stefanowski ran a single-issue campaign with a promise to repeal the state’s income tax. The self-funding Stefanowski advertised that pledge on cable news outlets at the start of 2018 while other candidates delayed entering the race or scrambled for months to qualify for public financing and seeking party convention delegates’ support.

Since his 2018 defeat. Stefanowski has become more familiar to party activists. He impressed many with his ability to locate. acquire, and distribute PPE during the traumatic early days of the COVID pandemic in 2020. The former payday loan honcho has been expanding his brief with opinion pieces published in Connecticut newspapers and the Wall Street Journal.

Stefanowski will face former state Representative Themis Klarides in the contest for the party nomination. Lamont is unopposed for the Democratic nomination. Lamont will fund his campaign from his fortune.

Posted January 18. 2022.

Harwinton Democrat Paul Honig announced Tuesday that he is seeking his party’s nomination for the eleven-town 8th Senate District. Honig is a selectman in Harwinton and has unsuccessfully run for the House.

The University of Pennsylvania graduate is running “on a platform focused on making Connecticut more affordable, growing our economy and supporting a robust recovery from COVID, and protecting our environment,” Honig said in a written statement. After graduating from Wharton (you know who else in politics went there), Honig enjoyed a successful 22-year career in fixed income finance.”

Honig is an active volunteer in the region and lives in “an ultra-energy efficient house” that he and his wife Diane built in 2012.

Republican Kevin Witkos, in his eighth two-year term, has faced Democrat Melissa Osborne in three of the last four campaigns. Osborne was able to narrow her margin of defeat but could not defeat the Canton Republican.

Witkos won re-election in 2018 and 2020 as six of his Republican colleagues fell during an ongoing realignment of suburban voters away from his party. He has not announced his intentions for 2022.

Posted January 18, 2022

West Hartford Republican Mary Fay is running for comptroller. The town council member ran for Congress from the state’s 1st district in 2020. She created her committee declaration on December 30th.

Fay was the $175,000-a-year executive director of the Connecticut State Retirement Authority during its brief life. Fay hurled angry recrimination’s at the authority’s board as it dissolved. She was embroiled in controversy a year ago when on Facebook she appeared to endorse a local Trump supporter’s participation in the January 6, 2021 protest over the loathsome demagogue’s 8 million vote defeat by Joe Biden. Recriminations followed when Fay claimed criticism of her by Shari Cantor, West Hartford’s mayor, and then-Republican council member Lee Gold caused her to receive threats that endangered Fay’s safety.

Democrat Kevin Lembo, who was elected comptroller three times, resigned last week, citing health issues. The Democratic competition for the comptroller’s nomination is expected to be fierce. State Representative Sean Scanlon, currently serving in a prize hackerama job at Tweed New Haven Airport, has been calling town chairs. Scanlon checks no boxes for diversity.

If elected, Fay would be only the fifth Republican in more than 60 years to win a constitutional office.

Published January 4, 2022.

A grim start to 2022 in Storrs and Stamford. The University of Connecticut’s spring semester may begin with online-only class and “will closely resemble the residential quarantine the university followed in the fall of 2020,” Daily Ructions has learned.

UConn posted and then removed the detailed announcement Thursday night—after the deadline for students to cancel on-campus housing agreements. Students will be allowed to begin to move into campus housing on January 29th, two weeks after the original date.

Students will be required to have vaccine booster shots. Oddly, only “discussions are also occurring regarding requiring the same for eligible faculty and staff.” Following the science ought to lead the leaders of the state’s premier public university to recognize that faculty members are likely more vulnerable to the COVID virus and its variants than are students, many in their late teens.

Published December 30, 2021.

The Covid home test kits were mired in supply chain troubles. They were not stuck in a warehouse. They were not delayed in a cargo plane waiting in line to take off.

Governor Ned Lamont never secured the first 500,000 home test kits that were to have arrived in Connecticut Wednesday and been distributed by the state’s 169 towns beginning today. Nothing is on its way.

Lamont said Thursday he believed there was a contract and knew there was an agreement. The Greenwich Democrat engaged in some astounding hairsplitting as he faced the press upon returning from Florida Thursday to try to rescue a gobsmacking own-goal in the final week of the year. Lamont and his administration claim they are the victims of multiple misrepresentations from the supplier Lamont declined to identify in his painful appearance in East Hartford.

“I think we got a little ahead of ourselves, to tell you the truth,” Lamont explained in a memorable understatement of the wounds he inflicted on his credibility in four days.

The best the Harvard and Yale Management School graduate can claim is he was duped as his administration spiked the ball at the start of a very bad week for an incumbent governor seeking a second term.

Published December 30, 2021.

Democrat Muad Hrezi’s campaign has been out and about during this holiday season. The palm card above was left at the door of a South Windsor Democrat a few days before Christmas.

Hrezi is challenging incumbent Democratic U.S. Representative John Larson from the left. Hrezi declared when he announced his candidacy in September, ““Politicians beholden to corporations will always protect corporate interests…Instead of being shocked at the little progress our leaders have made, it’s time for us to change our leaders.”

That defiant language suggests Hrezi has not taken a serious look at the campaign finance reports of his former employer, Senator Christopher Murphy. Northeast Utilities, the predecessor to utility behemoth Eversource, larded one of Murphy’s political action committees with contributions that provided plenty of dough for such urgent public priorities as tickets for sporting events.

There’s plenty to talk about in a vigorous Connecticut campaign, but the topics are not always what candidates prefer to address.

Published December 29, 2021.

Former state Senator Edith Prague has died. The veteran Democrat served in the House of Representatives before joining in the Weicker administration in 1991 as commissioner of the Department of Aging. Weicker fired her for refusing to cut the department’s budget.

After leaving that job, Prague was elected to the state Senate. The Columbia Democrat served in the legislature’s upper chamber from 1995 to 2013. She briefly returned to the reconstituted agency on agency after leaving the Senate.

Prague was a defiant advocate for making Connecticut’s roads safe from the drunk drivers. She endured the taunts and insults of powerful legislators in her quest to stiffen the state’s drug driving laws. Her resolution saved many lives.

Chris Keating’s 2014 affectionate profile tells much of the tale.

Published December 16, 2021.