The Register Citizen (Torrington, CT)
GOP vows no return to ‘dirty money’
Watchdogs blast Republican plan to end public financing
Connecticut election and consumer watchdogs Tuesday blasted the pending Republican budget and supported the veto of a provision to end the public-financing system for statewide and General Assembly races.
But high-ranking Republican lawmakers said the public funding should be repealed because politicians can easily run races for a fraction of the awards now given under the Citizens’ Election Program; or even under the former fundraising law that ended with the 2008 elections.
Cutting funding to the CEP would enhance the probability of “dirty money” flowing back into state political races, charged advocates from Common Cause CT, the League of Women Voters, the Connecticut Citizen Action Group and legislative leaders during a morning news conference at the Capitol complex in Hartford.
Rep. Matthew Lesser, D-Middletown, whose successful 2008 campaign was among the first under the voluntary public-financing program, said the bipartisan 2005 law that created the program is a positive legacy of former Republican Gov. M. Jodi Rell.
In November 2005, Rell brought Democratic and GOP lawmakers together in the wake of several major scandals, including the imprisonment of Joe Ganim during his first stint as Bridgeport mayor; John G. Rowland, the former governor; and Ernest E. Newton II, a former longtime member of the General Assembly representing Bridgeport.
Lesser said the Republican budget, passed Friday afternoon in the Senate and early Saturday in the House, was voted on in a “pretty shameful and brazen way.”
“This law has changed the way that politics works in the state of Connecticut,” said Sen. Mae Flexer, D-Killingly, co-chairwoman of the Government Administration
tion & Elections Committee, who also was first elected in 2008 using public financing, which limits individual contributions to $100, allowing candidates to access the state’s pool of abandoned property, mostly old bank accounts of those who died without heirs. “It is absolutely critical that we keep this program in place.”
Flexer and other advocates said they would fight hard to retain the program during upcoming bipartisan budget negotiations. Gov. Dannel P. Malloy has already promised to veto it.
“It seems like the last thing this Legislature should do is take us back to ‘Corrupticut,’ ” said Cheri Quickmire, Common Cause’s executive director.
But Sen. L. Scott Frantz, R-Greenwich, vice chairman of the GAE Committee, said there has been too much money flooding state politics. “I think you don’t need to spend $100,000 on a state senate race,” Frantz said in a phone interview. “This is taxpayers’ money being used to buy bumper stickers, posters, all kinds of advertising.”
While most legislative and statewide candidates participate in the CEP, Frantz, a private banker, does not. But he raises his own funds, according to the $100-per-person limit.
“People should have to find the financial and political support,” said Frantz, who is the ranking member of the legislative Finance Committee and also serves on the State Bond Commission. “I don’t want to cost the state a dime. It’s a principle thing. I don’t take a salary, I pay for my health care.”
Sen. Michael A. McLachlan, R-Danbury, co-chairman of the GAE Committee, said Tuesday he believes taxpayers want their money used for other things. He said the warnings of elections advocates are overstated.
“Their projections are the same when we have previously proposed reducing the grants,” McLachlan said in a phone interview. “Their warnings that this heads us back to a dark world is wrong.”