Statue will remain on State Capitol’s exterior, for now
HARTFORD — The fate of the controversial John Mason statue remains up in the air following votes Tuesday in the State Capitol Preservation and Restoration Commission.
But the 3,000-pound hunk of carved marble isn’t going anywhere soon.
The 12-member advisory commission was split three ways on the fate of the notorious Indian fighter, who led the massacre of hundreds of
Pequots in Mystic in 1637 and whose likeness has stood in an exterior niche three floors above the north entrance of the State Capitol since 1910.
After an 80 minute debate, only two other commissioners voted along with Sen. Cathy Osten, D-Sprague, to remove and relocate the statue to the Old State House a mile away in downtown Hartford. She stressed that the statue was hoisted to the gothic niche above the Capitol’s north steps decades after the building was completed in 1878.
“It was never an original piece of the building,” said Osten, whose eastern Connecticut district includes two of the staterecognized tribes along with the federally recognized Mashantucket Pequots and Mohegans.
Six commission members voted to agree with State Historian Walter Woodward, who suggested leaving the statue in place and support a task force of historians and educators in developing a program to enhance public knowledge of Connecticut’s past. “We have both a great need and a great opportunity,” said Woodward, who is also a commission member.
Three other members voted to take no action, noting a murky area of legislative rules that puts the commission under the power of the six leaders of the House and Senate.
Emil “Buddy” Altobello, a former longtime member of the state House of Representatives who is chairman of the commission, said the mixed vote would be given to legislative leaders, to whom the panel reports. Commission member Brian Flaherty, another former House member, said that the growing public interest in the statue controversy is a great opportunity for using the State Capitol as an educational tool to tell the state’s “real story, possibly for the first time.”
The current estimate to rig and remove the statue exceeds $50,000 — far above the $15,000 that Osten, as co-chairwoman of the legislative Appropriations Committee, inserted in the current state budget — to remove the statue. That higher amount triggers the need for either Senate Minority Leader Kevin Kelly of Stratford or House Minority Leader Vincent Candelora of North Branford to join the four Democratic leaders of the House and Senate to approve the expenditure.
William Morgan, a commission member who is the former longtime chief of the State Capitol Police, voted to take no action on the issue because there has been no direct request from the General Assembly’s Legislative Management Committee and the so-called big six: the two GOP leaders and four Democrats.
“I believe we should do nothing until we get a legislative bill, or direct legislative interest from the Legislative Management Committee,” Morgan said.
And currently, that GOP support for the statue’s removal apparently isn’t there. Kelly did not return a request for comment on Tuesday.
Candelora said Tuesday night that the state faces a great many more challenges over the next six months, including somehow opening the Capitol complex in February, when the next legislative session begins. “In my opinion this is not the way we should be spending
money at this time,” Candelora said.
Osten said Tuesday night that the initial bid for the work has been received by nonpartisan Capitol administrators, so she is still awaiting word whether the top Democrats and a Republican will agree to her request. She told the committee that an earlier opinion from the state attorney general’s office indicated that if the project was mentioned in a budget debate, as it was earlier this year, it officially becomes part of the spending package. Even though there isn’t a specific line item, Osten detailed it the night the Senate approved the budget last spring during the floor debate.
“I just have to wait for the leaders to respond,” Osten said of the Legislative Management Committee, which she believes hasn’t met in recent years. “They can make the decision
now, or not, as the case may be. I’m going to wait until January and see what to do next.”
While Gov. Ned Lamont has no say in the management of the State Capitol, which is the purview of the General Assembly, he said after an event in Rocky Hill Tuesday morning that he has some ideas for historic figures whose likenesses could join the exterior statuary.
“I think I’ll leave that up to the legislature,” Lamont said. “I know the Pequots feel very strongly about the Mason statue. I’ve tried to get people energized about what other types of people you want up there on the pedestal. I’ve tried with Jackie Robinson, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Igor Sikorsky. A different type of person that tells the story about what Connecticut is.”