Campaign 2010—

Former Choir Mates Facing Off To Represent Newtown In Hartford

By John Voket

As high school classmates, Newtown legislative candidate Christopher LaRocque said he used to stand beside Chris Lyddy during choir practice. But as summer 2010 kicks off a heated campaign season for the 106th District Assembly seat, pitting the formerly harmonious duo against each other, incumbent Democrat Rep Lyddy and his GOP challenger appear to be reading from two fundamentally different arrangements.

Mr LaRocque said he wants to go to Hartford to help benefit Newtown taxpayers and citizens by working to effect a top-down overhaul of how the state manages its fiscal house.

The Republican challenger believes that by scrutinizing (and selectively shelving) mandates, controlling spending, and forcing state agencies to be more efficient, Newtowners will share in the advantage by facing stable or possibly lower property taxes in the future.

Rep Lyddy, on the other hand, notes that as a result of the economic disaster that faced the state and nation in recent years, even some constituents who were best equipped to ride the storm out have found themselves in financial straits to the extent they are leaning heavily on already overtaxed social services.

And as the difficulties and horror stories of individuals in his district mount, he has been motivated to find ways to maintain or enhance certain social programs while keeping an eye on the bottom line by working to minimize the tax burden required to pay for those services.

Like the incumbent legislator two years ago, Mr LaRocque was tapped to consider running for the 106th District seat in the middle of his first term as a member of Newtown’s Legislative Council.

“I had no intention of running for state rep when I was elected to the council,” Mr LaRocque said. “There was a tremendous amount of work to do in Newtown.”

But as Mr LaRocque observed how benefits coming back to Newtown from Hartford began to lag further and further behind what he believed local taxpayers deserved considering the amount of tax dollars sent into state coffers, and the increasing local taxes required to supplement shortfalls in state aid, he became increasingly frustrated.

“I was tremendously frustrated by the level of spending at the state level and the support for that spending coming from Newtown’s representative,” Mr LaRocque said. “The cost of those actions ultimately hurt every taxpayer in Newtown.”

Lax Fiscal Responsibility?

Mr LaRocque said if the majority of state legislators could not exercise the fiscal restraint to minimize or even temper the tax burden on residents, the least lawmakers could do was be more fiscally responsible about how they allocated tax dollar expenditures for state programs.

“If we can’t be more careful and smart about spending our taxpayer dollars, we’ll never have the kind of success with our social programs that Connecticut and Newtown residents really need,” Mr LaRocque said. “That means to best serve Newtown taxpayers, Connecticut’s budget has to be my number one concern.”

With an economics background and experience working as a federal consultant helping the Pentagon and various military agencies to improve operations while cutting costs, Mr LaRocque feels he has the wherewithal to contribute to effecting improvements in state budgetary and spending practices. This while keeping his two feet firmly planted in Newtown, and maintaining a very personal relationship with local constituents.

“What I did was offer contributions professionally that helped make our federal government and its military spending more efficient, while learning how financial systems and processes work in a segment of government notorious for overspending and waste,” he said.

In his canvassing the community door-to-door, Mr LaRocque said the “number one thing people want me to do something about is increasing local property taxes.

“They believe they are getting fewer services while they see the state spending more and more,” Mr LaRocque related. “They wonder why the state is going out to lunch every day while taxpayers are being forced to pack peanut butter sandwiches.”

Since his consulting work with the federal government, the Republican challenger has worked in the capital development office at the University of Hartford, and most recently was recruited to work in a similar capacity with the Danbury Whalers professional hockey franchise.

Fashioning himself a fast learner, Mr LaRocque said in just a few short months serving on the local council he has already clearly seen how financial decisions made or supported in Hartford have put undeserved pressures on towns and cities, especially in the form of unfunded mandates.

On that issue, the GOP challenger took issue with the fact that Rep Lyddy previously campaigned to reduce unfunded mandates, but then voted against a bill, HB 5095, that contained an amendment that would require a two-thirds affirmative legislative vote to pass any future unfunded mandate.

Freshman Challenges

Rep Lyddy told The Bee that he could not support legislation that included the two-thirds vote to enforce unfunded mandates because the result would be fundamentally changing established government processes.

“If mandates are being discussed, we need to look at what that mandate hopes to achieve for constituents on a case-by-case basis,” Rep Lyddy said. “Tagging it as an amendment did not provide the opportunity to focus on the possible negative outcomes to the extent it deserved. Passing that kind of sweeping change demands we take a long look at its possible impacts, and whether it could jeopardize towns and cities from doing what has to be done [in their individual municipal practices].”

On the other hand, Rep Lyddy agrees that he both campaigned and made good on promises to scrutinize unfunded mandates. “And I voted to pass a number of bills to reduce those mandates,” he added, pointing most recently to legislation that will now permit local school districts to participate in or regionalize health care plans.

In regard to his participation in the past two years’ state budget processes as a freshman lawmaker, Mr Lyddy paused and chose his words carefully.

“These budget challenges were not planned and were certainly unwanted,” he said. “But the problems we are facing with our state budget [has to be viewed in the context of] the larger national and global economic landscape.”

Facing Local Woes

Given the obvious and historic breakdowns in national and global economies, Mr Lyddy returned to the many individual issues facing his constituents here in Newtown.

“As the economic climate grew worse, I was getting more and more calls from local families looking for help with social services, health care, mortgage relief, even food stamps,” Rep Lyddy said. As a result, the Democratic legislator with a professional background in social services said, “It became more and more important for me to protect the community services a growing number of Newtowners were depending on, many for the first time ever.

“And I was able to prevent harmful cuts to those constituent services while helping bring Connecticut back from an $8 billion deficit without instituting widespread tax increases,” Rep Lyddy said.

Coming to Hartford with only half a term on the local council to his credit, Newtown’s new lawmaker was immediately “disheartened by the partisan bickering” he witnessed, especially throughout the latest contentious state budget process.

“The governor presented us with four different budgets, the first of which was $2 billion out of whack,” Rep Lyddy said. “But once we had agreement politically on what the state deficit actually looked like, we were able to move a final state budget forward.”

Rep Lyddy credited Governor M Jodi Rell with at least philosophically agreeing to support added taxation on Connecticut families making more than $1 million annually, and the political compromises he and fellow Democrats made to cut programs while “ensuring the most vital and important social and community services were protected.”

If reelected in November, Rep Lyddy said he will return to Hartford ready to “drill into” the structural and long-term issues that have negatively impacted taxpayers statewide. Top among those issues is examining the state employee pension plan.

“Currently, we are facing one of the highest unfunded state pensions in the entire nation,” Rep Lyddy said. “Maybe it’s time we looked at reevaluation what we are giving to state retirees. And if we determine it is not fair, I will look at finding a better way.”