Connecticut Commentary: Red Notes from a Blue State

Early in January, Laurie Rich Salerno posted a story in Meriden Patch concerning the nomination of Democrat Thomas Bruenn to fill a seat in the state senate left vacant by state Sen. Thomas Gaffey, who quit the senate after having been arrested on larceny charges that he improperly used his own PAC funds to pay for trips he also billed to the state over several years. Mr. Bruenn and the Republican nominee for the seat, Len Suzio, who lost to Mr. Gaffey in the recent election, are not strangers to each other. Before the nominations were settled, Mr. Bruenn said of Mr. Suzio, “If I do get the entire nomination from the delegation of the 13th District [and Suzio does as well] I look forward to having discussions with Len Suzio...he and I worked on the BOE together. We know each other and we get along well for the most part." Mr. Suzio, a fourteen year veteran of the Board of Education in Meriden, was equally complimentary of Mr. Bruenn, a 37-year Platt High School math teacher,...

Hartford Courant columnist Kevin Rennie , whose nose is extremely sensitive, smells something fishy in the relationship between former eight-term state Sen. Thomas Gaffey and state Senate President Donald Williams. After recently running for re-election to his seat and winning, Mr. Gaffey quit the senate when he was convicted of having used his own PAC funds to pay for trips that he also billed to the state over several years. It appears the double billing may have been occasioned by Mr. Gaffey’s fondness for a fetching lady. A second girlfriend, Mr. Rennie reported, also tapped into Mr. Gaffey’s affections: “Connecticut State University System Associate Vice Chancellor for Government Relations and Communication Jill Ferraiolo employed her charms to make Gaffey the chief and relentless advocate for a $1 billion blank check in public funds for CSU to spend on construction at its four campuses.” Far from recoiling in horror at Mr. Gaffey’s indiscreet petty larceny, his influential ...

State senators Thomas Gaffey of Meriden and Joseph Crisco of Woodbridge were not present in the chamber when Republican Sen. John McKinney offered a bill, voted down by dominant Democrats, to establish a standing legislative ethics committee. There is some humorous speculation that Sen. Crisco, recently found to have forged documents for which he was fined $4,000 by the State Elections Enforcement Commission, had secluded himself behind the statue representing “The Genius of Connecticut” in the North lobby of the Capitol, while Sen. Gaffey, fined $6,000 by the same committee for having fraudulently charged both the state and his political action committee for the same campaign travel expenses, was canoodling with a lobbyist for Connecticut’s four state colleges in the cramped elevator that connects the building’s first and second floors. The issue of a standing ethics committee was first raised after Republican Sen. Lou DeLuca had failed to resist the blandishments of an FBI plant pre...

Ken Dixon, a reporter and blogger with the Connecticut Post , realized after he had assembled a transcript of a media opportunity with President Pro Tem of the state Senate Don Williams that he had a mini- Marx Brothers movie in hand. Reporters were asking Williams about what Dixon called “the bicameral ethics of the state senate,” controlled these many years by fastidious Democrats. The State Elections Enforcement Commission had just penalized Sen. Joe Crisco, D-Woodbridge, $4,000 for having signed the names of his campaign officials on documents he had used to apply for up to $85,000 in taxpayer funded campaign cash, often called forgery. And the reporters in the room were just curious: Could Williams please put the DeLuca case in context with the Crisco case? Lou DeLuca, at the time a leading Republican with a sterling record, was drummed out of the senate after an FBI agent got him to agree in a conversation that he would be willing to accept the services of the agent, then pretend...

Because Lou DeLuca complained of maltreatment and suggested that the Gaffey potboiler be handled in a way similar to his own case, both commentators and politicians, among them President Pro Tem of the state senate Don Williams, felt constrained to point out the differences. Williams said, "For Lou DeLuca to have brought this up is an outrage. For somebody who was investigated by the FBI, the chief state's attorney's office, and but for the fact that law enforcement was able to break up the hit that he ordered on a relative, he would be in jail. For him to start talking about Tom Gaffey, who broke no law … we're talking about two different universes." All true. Apples are not oranges. The characters to whom we’ve been introduced during the DeLuca drama are not at all the same as those wandering the stage in the Gaffey drama. There are no FBI agents posing as mobsters under state Sen. Thomas Gaffey’s bed, and Gaffey did not refuse a bribe and then decline to report...

With the first two paragraphs of a column by Kevin Rennie that ran in the Hartford Courant on Sunday, we were off to the races. “Lust for power is merely ambition,” Rennie wrote. “Lust and power together, however, can make trouble. The question is whether that potent cocktail cost taxpayers $1 billion this year because of a secret relationship between a high-ranking legislator and a state university vice chancellor. While they were pushing the bonding package, they were bonding.” The “lust” to which Rennie refers is the affection and high regard that State Sen. Thomas Gaffey, D-Meriden, chairman of the Education Committee and vice chairman of the Higher Education and Employment Advancement Committee, had for Jill Ferraiolo, associate vice chancellor for government relations and communications at the Connecticut State University System. CSUS was created during the gubernatorial administration of Lowell Weicker, who pulled up his deep-rooted Connecticut stakes and moved to Virginia rece...

Gov. Jodi Rell already having publicly announced her defection to the Big Spenders, two radio talk show hosts who represent the last vestige of Connecticut’s disappearing “firewall” -- which is supposed to check improvident spending -- derisively refer to Connecticut’s Conference of Municipalities as “the conference of crying mayors,” an understated description. Of course, there are firewalls that really do prevent tax pirates from running off with the gold in taxpayer’s teeth -- municipal referendums. The CCM hates referendums for much the same reason the prodigal son hated the homespun advice of his father, and the organization wants these firewall dismantled. Municipal referendums across the state represent the voice of the people on budget matters, and the message arising from referendums has been constant and unequivocal: Town officials have been asking for increases of 10 to 14 percent; budget increases of more than 3 or 4 percent are insupportable. That is what those who pay tax...