Chaos is in Lamont’s style, not his staffing
Toward the end of Gov. Ned Lamont’s first legislative session this spring, with his push for highway tolls not progressing, he apparently floated an idea with his old friend, Rep. Livvy Floren, RGreenwich.
How about we don’t toll the Merritt Parkway? Maybe that would bring a few no votes over to the yes side, Lamont suggested to Floren, according a story in the Hartford Courant.
Floren spoke openly about the conversation, and boom! Lamont’s communications staff, not to mention his legislative outreach staff, had a fullblown crisis on their backs.
Soon enough, it came clear to Lamont — perhaps through any of the countless highway planners who work under him — that tolling I95 and leaving Route 15, the Merritt, as a free ride along a parallel path would turn the Merritt into a parking lot.
That was just one of many times the governor has strayed off the planned messaging when it comes to important issues. In another, Lamont said in the 2018 campaign he would absolutely not seek to reopen the state employees’ health and benefits agreement — only to do just that in his budget, for a savings of just $20 million a year.
That plan — not a bad idea — went nowhere and opened the governor to criticism from advocates on both sides of the neverending state union battles.
I was thinking about that tendency by Lamont on Wednesday, after he changed out his communications team.
Colleen Flanagan Johnson, senior adviser, is returning to Cigna, where she previously said she would go sometime this summer or early fall. She’ll be replaced by Jonathan Harris, the former everything in state and local government and politics — senator, commissioner, West Hartford mayor, state Democratic Party director — who’s likely to focus more on policy and the legislature than on communications.
Maribel La Luz, the communications director, heads over to a strategy job in the state Department of Economic and Community Development, where she’s more likely to work with companies and other government officials on state initiatives than on daytoday public crises. And Max Reiss, now (and oddly, still for the next couple of weeks) a reporter at the local NBC news affiliate, Channel 30, will take over as Lamont’s chief spokesman.
Those are not Earthshattering moves for a governor to make in midsummer, after his first legislative session, as Lamont indicated. But among many observers, the changes are viewed as an attempt to “fix” chaos and craft a clearer message in the governor’s communications with lawmakers and the public.
The reality is that no communications team can rein in a top elected leader who keeps an open mind to a fault on cornerstone issues, floats ideas without realizing that looks dangerously like policy and generally chatters freely with the people around him — including reporters whose job is to tell our readers and viewers where the governor is heading on matters of consequence.
Whether the name is Max Reiss or Mad Max or Reese Witherspoon, a boss like Lamont is going to create the appearance of chaos just by having a blast in the job of governor, which Lamont clearly does.
And there’s absolutely nothing wrong with that. When it works — when the state passes a budget ahead of the deadline and moves ahead on modernizing computer systems in the bureaucracy — chaos feels like creative energy. When it doesn’t, such as the state’s failure to pass sensible marijuana reforms or even bring the tolls issue to a vote — chances are the problem is deeper than the messaging anyway.
Part of what we’re seeing is a study in contrasts. Few governors, few executives of any stripe, have spent eight years so focused onpoint, so disciplined on message and timing, as former Gov. Dannel P. Malloy.
Malloy’s discipline had its own charms and its own costs.
“That is a good thing most of the time,” said Roy Occhiogrosso, Malloy’s closest advisor and spokesman in the first Malloy campaign and the early years, who’s now a policy and business consultant. “Sometimes, it means people perceive him as being little bit stiff.”
Um, a little bit?
“The upside there is that he almost never made a mistake,” Occhiogrosso said — speaking of messaging, not necessarily policy. “It seems Lamont is on the other end of the spectrum.”
“The style actually appeals to people,” he said, but he added, “It’s not without its challenges.”
The far end of the spectrum, of course, is President Donald Trump, who conducts much of his policy through impulsive tweets that exacerbate staff, leading to true, meltdown chaos. That’s not what we’re seeing with Lamont.
Mostly, it’s little stuff. For example, in early June, two days after United Technologies Corp. announced its merger with Raytheon, Malloy visited a coworking space in Darien. He was expected to talk about the merger on the way out. Instead, Lamont quickly mentioned to a few reporters on the way in, the good news that UTC’s Otis Elevator would remain headquartered in Connecticut and Pratt & Whitney would hire 1,000 people this year.
By the time he emerged from the scheduled visit, most reporters had left — and Lamont missed a chance to control and refine the message, which was good news, in the way he might have if he had kept his powder dry. Staff scrambled to post a press release hurriedly.
Flanagan Johnson, whose last day will be July 26, after which she’ll likely have a significant internal communications role at the Bloomfieldbased health insurer, defended her boss’s style.
“In the recent and even longterm past, Connecticut has had governors who are of the political class,” she said, referring to long experience in state or local legislating. “Ned Lamont has done none of that ... he thinks and acts with the mind of a CEO.”
What she means by that is not the hardheaded CEO model, but one who deliberates, discusses and then decides. Lamont’s problem on tolls is that he keeps updating and refining details. After the end of the session, he announced a concept — not a proposal, mind you, just a concept — of income tax relief as part of a tolls package.
“What you’re hearing when he’s thinking out loud and when he’s talking about compromise is somebody who’s saying .... ’Let’s have a conversation,’” Flanagan Johnson said.
Conversations can be chaotic, certainly compared with hardnosed policymaking. That’s not good or bad, it just is, but no one should think it will change with a new cast of characters. If it does, it will mean Reiss and Harris are reining in Lamont too tightly, and that would get ugly.