Challengers Eye Looney From Left & Right

After four decades of running largely unopposed in either the primary or general election, or both, State Senate President Pro Tem Martin Looney faces 2020 challenges from both the ideological left and right.

Two New Haveners have filed paperwork to run for the 11th State Senate district, in addition to Looney himself.

Alex Taubes, a local attorney and political activist, filed for an exploratory committee at the beginning of the year to bring a critique from Looney’s left in a Democratic primary. Jameson White, a salesman for a battery company, has filed to run as a Republican. Looney has also filed paperwork to run again.

The 11th Senate District includes the eastern half of New Haven and Hamden, and a small chunk of North Haven.

Both challengers said Connecticut needs something new in the General Assembly. Their vision of what that fresh perspective should be, however, is radically different.

In Connecticut’s finances and tax structures, Taubes sees a system that deepens already-deep inequity. White, on the other hand, sees a mountain of debt and a bleak financial picture that is driving people out of the state by overtaxing them.

Taubes, 31, came to politics as a debater in college, then as an assistant to D.C .Circuit Judge David Tatel. He has lived in New Haven since graduating Yale Law School in 2015, practicing civil rights law and participating in numerous local campaigns, most recently organizing the 2019 general election campaign for Mayor Toni Harp. Taubes said he wants to bring a fresh perspective into Connecticut politics, either by winning a seat in the State Senate or simply by pushing Looney to be more progressive.

“When I saw that my state senator has been there since 1980, he’s got to be Mother Teresa if I’m not going to run,” Taubes said.

In 2014, he ran for the statehouse in his hometown of Madison, and lost in the general election. He said he thinks 2020 is the perfect year to run, because the presidential election will invigorate progressive voters, which could help push progressive legislation through the legislature.

Looney first joined the Connecticut House of Representatives in 1981. He served there until he took his current seat in the Senate in 1993. Since then, he has often run unopposed in either the primary or general election, and sometimes in both. As president pro tempore of the Senate, he is now the leading Democrat in the state legislature.

White, 29, grew up in Essex and Farmington, and lived in New Hampshire and Florida before moving to New Haven in August. In Florida, he said, he would read articles about Connecticut’s finances, and became angry about what he sees as mismanagement. So, he decided to brave the high cost of living to be closer to family again, and maybe help the state get on a better financial footing.

“I see Looney as the head of the snake,” he said. ​“So, I’m going after the head of the snake.”

Tax The Rich Or Cut Spending?

On Tuesday, Taubes stood outside of a CT Transit bus on the New Haven Green. He had just taken a ride for Transit Equity Day.

Equity is one of the tenets of Taubes’ campaign (which is still only ​“exploratory,” as he has not yet finalized his decision to run). He broke down his policy priority areas into four groups.

First and foremost is changing the state’s funding structures to equalize educational resources and tax rates across municipalities.

“And how do we pay for it?” he asked rhetorically. ​“Taxing the rich.”

Greenwich’s mill rate is a quarter of Hamden’s, and schools do not lack for funds, Taubes noted. Taubes said the state should try to smooth over those differences. He referred to a recent Connecticut Voices for Children proposal that would restructure taxes in order to reduce the tax burden on low-income residents by $600 million and shift it to the wealthiest residents. He also suggested a state tax on properties worth over $1 million. He said he would also support regionalizing school districts to smooth over differences in school funding.

White said the main issue with Connecticut’s finances is not the inequities in the tax rates between municipalities, but rather overspending that has put the state in dire financial straits.

“I want people to understand that this is a crisis that the state is in,” he said. ​“Just because it hasn’t blown up yet doesn’t mean it’s not a crisis. If you look at these numbers, they have to be addressed now. And the way to address them is by cutting spending.”

He said he will go through the state’s budget and other financial documents to come up with a plan, which he will present on his YouTube channel.

The Department of Motor Vehicles, for example, could be a place to cut, he said.

White blamed years of Democratic control for the state’s tough financial position and its massive unfunded pension liabilities. When he met with the Independent at the Blue State Coffee near his East Rock apartment, he carried a green folder with printouts of reports from the Yankee Institute, a conservative Connecticut think tank. One reported that as of January, the state was running close to a $100 million deficit. Another covered a report that showed Connecticut to be in the worst shape out of all 50 states in terms of its pension funding.

“All these problems are just getting kicked down the road and eventually we are going to have to pay for them,” he said. He referred to a pension-debt restructure that Lamont introduced last year that put off $9.1 billion for payment later. As CTmirror’s Keith Phaneuf reported, that could end up costing $27.2 million down the road. White said that plan simply puts the burden of paying down debt on the shoulders of today’s young people like him.

White said smoothing over tax inequities and inequities in school funding between municipalities is not a priority for him.

“It’s a local issue,” he said of education funding. ​“It’s not a state issue. Property taxes are what funds a school. I don’t think the state should be involved in it.” He said he doesn’t think that centralizing power in Hartford will solve the problems of Connecticut’s education system because centralized power was what got the state into debt in the first place.

“I have a problem with the education system in the United States in general,” he said. ​“I don’t think the solution to our poor education system is just throwing money at it.” He said that education should be localized, and that it should focus more on individual places and people rather than being centralized with a focus on standardized tests.

“The Record Speaks For Itself”

Looney said he has filed paperwork to run for a 21st two-year term in the legislature. He said it’s not accurate to say that the state has not tried hard to cut where it can and get its finances under control.

Since Gov. Dannel Malloy took office in 2011, he said, the state’s budget increases have been lower than beforem Looney said. The state has also eliminated around 8,000 positions since then, he said. The state also won large union concessions packages in 2011 and 2017 that included the creation of tiers within the state’s pension plan. Pension plans are now much less generous than they were before, producing significant savings, he said.

“We have been systematically finding ways to cut for the last eight years,” he said. At this point, the only way to make real cuts would be to cut essential services and municipal aid, he said.

He gave a long account of the pieces of legislation he said he is proud to have pushed through the legislature. He listed last year’s minimum wage increase, paid family medical leave, the state earned income tax credit (“one of the greatest hits,” he said, which took a long fight that he personally led), the abolition of the death penalty, and assistance for undocumented students in the state as a few among many progressive bills he has championed.

“These were all hallmark issues of my career, so the record speaks for itself,” he said.

He went on to list many more, including the decriminalization of the possession of small amounts of cannabis, which he said was the beginning of his efforts at criminal justice reform. He said he now has his eyes set on bail reform.

He listed a number of consumer protection measures he has helped pass, including one health insurance reform measure that passed the senate last year. Its measures were then incorporated into the budget and passed that way rather than going to the house. (Read about other bills that passed the senate last year here.)

This year, he said he hopes to pass a bill that would limit the cost of insulin so that no one has to pay more than $100 a month for it, as well as limit the cost of prescription drugs in general.

He said he would like to reform the state’s payment in lieu of taxes (PILOT) system, which reimburses municipalities for certain tax-exempt properties. His plan would create a tiered system where municipalities with a greater percentage of non-taxable properties would get a larger percentage of that lost revenue reimbursed by the state. He proposed the reform last year, but this year he said he would add to it to include towns with the lowest net property values per capita in the top tier.

Looney also said he would fight for more education funding for New Haven and Hamden.

Looney said he would support making Connecticut’s income tax more progressive by raising rates for the highest income earners, but that it would be hard to do this session because Governor Ned Lamont has said he does not support such a reform.

Dreams: No More Northern, No More Income Tax

Fixing Connecticut’s funding structures is just the first of Taubes’s stated four priority areas. In second place is prison and police reform, followed by climate change (he was recently appointed co fundraising director of Connecticut’s Sunrise Movement), and affordable housing.

“The entire police structure needs to be completely changed,” he said. He said the function that police officers now find themselves fulfilling is not what the job and its systems were originally designed to handle. Though he acknowledged that guns might still, unfortunately, be necessary, there should also be a much greater focus on deescalation and mental health training.

He said he would like to see a piece of legislation passed that would enable civilian review boards statewide with subpoena power. He said he would also like a state civilian review board that could step in when individual towns cannot not handle an issue themselves.

Prison reform would be another priority, he said. ​“Mass incarceration will be looked at as a point in time when we were not a free country,” he said. He said that Northern Correctional Institution, a maximum-security prison in Somers, needs to go. ​“Northern needs to be completely abolished, demolished, brought to the ground, razed.”

On prison reform, Taubes and White agreed, at least on the surface.

“Generally, in the United States, we have more prisoners than anywhere else in the world, and we’re supposed to be the land of the free,” said White. ​“It is much cheaper for a society to actually rehabilitate offenders than having them keep going back to jail,” he added. He said the state should look into ending or reforming solitary confinement because of its terrible psychological effects.

Though White might support criminal justice reform measures, his long-term dreams do not include closing Northern or overhauling the police, but rather getting rid of the state income tax.

“I’m morally opposed to taxing income,” he said. ​“I think it’s wrong to tax somebody’s labor because you have to have a job to support yourself.”

Abolishing the state income tax would be nearly impossible at the moment, he said, but eventually, the state should get rid of it. He said he prefers voluntary taxes. In that category, he includes consumption taxes, such as a sales tax on certain goods. Those types of taxes don’t only affect Connecticut residents, he said, but also residents of other states who pass through. He said such taxes would need to be levied very carefully so they don’t hurt low-income Connecticut residents.

If he decides to run and qualifies for the ballot, Taubes will face Looney in the Democratic Primary on Aug. 11. The winner will then face White, if he gets his party’s nomination, in the general election on Nov. 3.