The Middletown Press (Middletown, CT)
A crowded rearview mirror
Ah, the 2010s ... It seems like only a couple days from now they’ll end in a shambles.
Election Night 2010, I stood around an office in the historic McLevy Hall at around 2 a.m., after Bridgeport’s debacle of failing to order an adequate supply of paper ballots resulted in a voter nightmare and the multiday delay in announcing that the city was the difference in Dan Malloy’s victory in the governor’s race over Greenwich millionaire Tom Foley.
Nothing like high tension leavened with exhaustion for election officials to wonder why they volunteered. Who knew that President Barack Obama would fill the Bridgeport arena just a few nights earlier, energizing the state’s largest city into a massive turnout?
That long Election Night culminated the year that U.S. Sen. Chris Dodd retired and Attorney General Dick Blumenthal easily replaced him, despite Republican criticism over Blumenthal’s misspeaking about his Vietnam service as a U.S.based Marine Corps reservist, accidentally using “we” instead of “they” to describe the incountry wartime experience.
Coincidentally, 2010 was the first year that the fatal white nose syndrome and fungus was recorded in the North American bat population, and Joe Ganim was released from federal prison after a sevenyear sentence for corruption while Bridgeport mayor.
It was the year that the historic, expensive system of 117 probate courts was drastically reduced to 54.
It was also the year that federal stimulus came to Connecticut in what has become an endless rebuilding of the Merritt Parkway, which itself turned 75 in 2015.
In 2011, Malloy took quick aim at the state’s publicemployee unions, forcing them to agree to givebacks, under the threat of layoffs. It was the first of three big deals he made with the unions during eight years in office, the last of which turned the State Employee Retirement System into a 401(k) clone for the next generation of Connecticut workers.
That was also the year Joe Lieberman, the onagainoffagain conservative Democrat with an anemic approval rating of about 30 percent, announced he would not seek a fifth term in 2012, paving the way for Chris Murphy.
Hurricane Irene hit the state on Aug. 27, causing tens of millions of dollars in damage and giving the lower neighborhoods in Bridgeport a taste of global climate change.
In 2012, the General Assembly, at Malloy’s recommendation, approved Sunday sales of alcohol. It also repealed the death penalty and okayed the medical marijuana program, which is a nationally recognized model where pharmacists run local dispensaries. There are now 38,456 registered patients and 1,213 participating physicians.
The December 2012 murders of 20 firstgraders and six adults in Sandy Hook Elementary School led to the April 2013 laws banning the sales of military style rifles and largecapacity ammunition magazine, putting Connecticut into the forefront of the national gunsafety movement, which has been largely impotent because of the NRA and the majority Republicans in the U.S. Senate.
In 2014, Malloy was reelected over Tom Foley, who this time did not invest his own money, but instead went the public financing route, losing by more than three times his 2010 margin.
Earlier that year, John G. Rowland, the former governor who served one stretch in federal prison in the mid1990s, was indicted on more corruption charges for an underthetable payment of $35,000 for consulting a congressional candidate. In September he was found guilty at trial and sentenced to 30 months.
Attempts by environmentalists to ban plastic bags was rejected in 2015. In Bridgeport, Joe Ganim II was put into motion when he defeated thenMayor Bill Finch in the city’s August primary.
In 2016, the state Supreme Court ruled that Death Row inmates were also exempt from capital punishment.
In one of the moreobscure 2017 laws, mushroom hunters were allowed to keep specimens from state parks. In the bigger picture, in a rare display of cooperation, Republicans and Democrats, united against a common foe — Malloy — agreed to major changes in the state budget process.
The biggest story of 2018 was the ascension of Ned Lamont to the governor’s office, after the GOP again neglected the mostqualified Republican — John McKinney in 2014 and Danbury Mayor Mark Boughton in 2018 — and instead backed a deeppocketed neophyte, this time Bob Stefanowski of Madison.
In this soontobecompleted 2019, Democratic majorities in the General Assembly approved a $15 minimum wage to phasein by June 2023, as well as paid Family and Medical Leave that will begin to take small portions of people’s paychecks in 2021. But Lamont’s signature legislation, highway tolls on trucks, is stuck in neutral.
There’s 10 years in a blur of 2020 hindsight.