GOP auction of police boat ride raises questions
For years, the Fairfield Police Department has offered rides on one of its two Long Island Sound patrol boats to civic organizations, religious groups, nonprofits, school PTOs and even individual residents.
The floating tours with marine-unit cops are a regular part of police outreach in town. Often, groups arrange for them in order to peddle them at fundraising auctions.
Now the Republican Town Committee has raised eyebrows — Democratic Party eyebrows — by selling a ride for up to six people on a Fairfield town police boat at its Lincoln-Reagan Dinner and Auction on April 20. That’s a no-no, Dems are saying. It’s a partisan group, a political party, making money off a town service aimed at nonprofits, charities and the like.
The look isn’t great especially since at least one police officer in uniform was at the Republican event as a participant, and the Republican-majority police commission has a member — and former chairman — who headed the GOP town committee and is still in party leadership.
“This is a clear misuse of town assets and resources for the purpose of raising political and campaign donations. It violates state statutes and raises ethical issues,” Steven Sheinberg, the Democratic town chairman, said in an emailed comment. “We call on the First Selectwoman to right this wrong and rescind this improper auctioning of town assets. Furthermore, we urge her to affirm that she will not allow town resources to be misused in such a way going forward.”
Republicans, including First Selectwoman Brenda Kupchick, say the auctioning of police and fire tours is an innocent tradition in place for at least 15 years — though Kupchick told me Friday, “It’s something we’re going to have to think about in the future.”
Like most partisan disputes involving law, this is no legal slam-dunk. The fact that the rides and tours are offered routinely under a publicized program — as Fairfield Police Chief Robert Kalamaris explained to me — reduces the likelihood of a ruling that the auctions are illegal, several experts on the law said.
But the deeper issue here is that a politically polarized culture yet again threatens to block progress and mar efforts to compromise. Obviously we’re seeing this poisoned environment at the national level.
It also crops up at the local level, nowhere more than the town of Fairfield these days. They’re in a very contentious election year in which Kupchick is seeking a second four-year term. Last week, a Bridgeport jury convicted a former public works superintendent of illegally moving contaminated fill onto a town site, a case that played a key role in Kupchick’s 2019 victory.
And in a bizarre battle last year involving the town registrars of voters, police had to be called to Town Hall.
Sheinberg said late Friday that a town resident is filing a complaint with the State Elections Enforcement Commission on the recent auction. He did not name the resident. SEEC, as the agency is known, has not made such a complaint public by placing it on an agenda.
Is it right or is it wrong?
Kupchick, who was not an organizer of the fundraiser, and Melissa Longo, the Republican Town Chairwoman, both said they’re not aware of anyone questioning the auction items before. “This is a past practice that I followed,” Longo said in an email response to my query about it.
“My memory is that we’ve always had something from police and fire,” Kupchick told me Friday. In fact, at one GOP auction her husband bid on and won a fire department tour and she gave it to a family with young kids.
Nancy DiNardo, the state Democratic chairwoman, called the practice highly unusual. “I’ve never heard of this before where you use town assets to raise money for a political party. I can’t believe it, it doesn’t make sense that you would do that,” said DiNardo, the state chair for 13 years in two stints and the former Trumbull Democratic town chair for 30 years.
She said she would advise town committees to talk with lawyers if the question came up, “but I don’t think it is right to use town assets for political purposes like was done there.”
“It seems inappropriate,” said Cheri Quickmire, executive director of Common Cause in Connecticut, a nonprofit, nonpartisan clean elections advocacy group. “I think it should be tested.”
In one way of looking at it, the auction is akin to political parties using town buildings for meetings, as happens all the time. It simply was not illegal or improper, said Town Attorney Jim Baldwin, who looked into it after questions were raised. “That’s the conclusion that I’ve reached and I’m very confident of it,” he said Friday — in part because of the wide availability of the tours and rides and in part because the rides on regular patrols don’t cost the police extra money.
“When you scratch the surface it’s much ado about nothing,” said Baldwin, who donated to the RTC auction a round of golf and lunch with him at the Brooklawn Country Club. (He is an interesting guy, seriously.)
‘It contributes to a climate’
The law, 7-421 of the CT statutes, was revised in 2012 to say that “no person employed in the classified civil service ... shall utilize municipal funds, supplies, vehicles or facilities to secure support for or oppose any candidate, party, or issue in a political partisan election.”
“Without doing all that analysis I’m not in a position to say” whether the Fairfield fundraiser was illegal, said Kari Olson, chair of municipal and land use practice groups at Murtha Cullina LLP and general counsel for the Connecticut Conference of Municipalities.
I was not able to learn how much the sale fetched on April 20. “This is not politics for us, this is community outreach,” Kalamaris said. “I am a neutral party.”
Kalamaris told Democrats they could have equal access — but Sheinberg, the Democratic Party chair, said the Dems have never accepted such an offer as far as he knows, and wouldn’t do so now.
So, where does this dispute go? The auction created a misuse of town resources and an appearance of conflict and could be found to be illegal regardless of the intent of the people involved, Nancy Lefkowitz, the Democratic selectwoman, said on Friday. Therefore the town should adopt tighter rules around police and fire department involvement in politics. That makes sense though wording it precisely would be difficult because everyone has the private right to participate.
“If the intent is to increase community relations, it’s going to have the opposite effect,” Lefkowitz, who is not seeking reelection, said Friday of the auction. “To me it contributes to a climate that is already polarized.”
She added, “The chief of police was acting in good faith. I think there’s no malfeasance, I think there’s nothing nefarious” — but that, she said, is not the point and does not take away the fact that the action happened.
It may not be the point but it does matter. The voters would like to see the good people of Fairfield work out this police boat ride auction question amicably.