Gwyneth K. Shaw Photo
Republican gubernatorial candidate Tom Foley with environmental activist Tom Harrison after Monday’s event.
Tom Foley may not consider himself a “Teddy Roosevelt Republican,” but he does want to reclaim some of the late president’s environmental cred.
At a green-focused gubernatorial candidate forum in New Haven Monday, Foley (pictured) pointed out that although he’s agnostic on what’s causing global warming, “I would support all the policies that people who are concerned about global warming would support.”
He added that as governor, he wouldn’t pull Connecticut out of the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative.
And, if elected, he’d continue to buy land for conservation and push state government to build greener buildings, he said..
The Republican candidate for governor made the remarks during and after a forum with Democratic candidate Dan Malloy and Independent Tom Marsh at the environmentally themed event at Kroon Hall—itself a super-green building — at Yale’s School of Forestry & Environmental Studies.
The Connecticut Fund for the Environment and several other advocacy groups sponsored the forum, which featured a question-and-answer session for each candidate with WNPR environmental reporter Nancy Cohen.
If Foley’s remarks came across as surprising in a year of Tea Party-backed Republican candidates, he offered a history lesson.
“I think the Republican Party initially were leaders in what was then called the conservation movement,” Foley said. “They sort of lost their leadership role there, and I think we’re in a position to retake it, and we should.”
There was plenty of agreement Monday. Foley and Malloy said that turning brownfields into productive land would be a way to help the environment and rehabilitate some of the state’s urban centers; that Long Island Sound should continue to be fiercely protected, including from wind turbines or other surface-level energy projects; that Connecticut needs to foster green jobs.
All three also agreed that the state’s Department of Environmental Protection needs to do a better job in reviewing and approving permits, although Malloy said the agency probably needs more money and people to do that job right, while Marsh and Foley said they’d squeeze efficiencies out of the existing staff and budget.
Nancy Cohen, a WNPR reporter and the moderator of Monday’s forum, quizzes Democrat Dan Malloy.
The agency needs to approve permits more quickly, Malloy said, and he’ll set deadlines for getting there.
“It’s fundamentally important that we hold ourselves to high standards, and timeliness is one of them,” Malloy said.
Foley floated the possibility of outsourcing some of the DEP’s work to private contractors, calling the notion that the current workforce can’t handle the load “attitudinal.”
But most of the discussion focused on broader policy ideas. Malloy wants to take some of the energy-related initiatives he began as mayor of Stamford to the state level. They include working to reduce energy consumption by 15 percent and mandating that new state construction meet LEED or other green standards.
“I’ve actually done on a local basis, and advocated on a national basis, the things I’d do as governor,” Malloy said.
Marsh, who’s currently the first selectman of Chester, said he’s comfortable with the government taking a leading role in monitoring the environment, as did Malloy and Foley.
“I’m not a big government kind of person, but I do believe whether it’s transportation or energy policy, not all decisions are made by dollars and cents,” Marsh said.
Foley, a Greenwich businessman, was tersely declared “I’m not an environmental scientist” when asked about whether humans are causing global warming. But the cause, he added, doesn’t matter — it’s getting hotter, and both Connecticut and the country as a whole need to wean themselves from foreign-produced fossil fuels.
Like Malloy, Foley said the state can do more to promote environmentally friendly building. Foley said it’s important that people know more about how they can make their homes more energy efficient and save money. He also said that the state can set a good example — and promote new technologies — by adding green standards to its own buildings.
Even with the recession and the state facing a $3 billion budget deficit, both Malloy and Foley said the state should keep its commitments to buying open spaces for preservation, from forests to former farmland.
“We should keep buying the land,” Foley said. “It’s less expensive now, and these are good investments for the future.”