|
|
|
The Candidates
Treasurer
Paul Silvester (R), incumbent
Denise Nappier (D), Hartford city treasurer (endorsed)
Frank Lecce (D), businessman
Secretary of the State
Ben Andrews (R), businessman
Ellen Scalettar (D), state representative,
Woodbridge (endorsed)
Susan Bysiewicz (D), state representative,
Middletown
Primaries For
Treasurer, Secretary of the State Split Democratic Party
|
Business New Haven
9/7/1998
By: Jennifer M. Gangloff
|
The Democratic battle continues for another week before primaries are held September 15 for both state treasurer and secretary of the state. The battle within the Democratic Party gives the Republicans a chance to sit back - for a moment, anyway - while their contenders duke it out over issues, experience and, yes, even race.
Treasurer
Experience
Frank Lecce is a businessman with more than 25 years of experience in the investments industry, working his way up the hierarchy from stockbroker to owner of his own business for 12 years. He sold that firm, U.S. Securities Inc. in Hartford, two and a half years ago but remained with it for another year, he says.
Lecce says that opponent Denise Nappier's experience is purely political, not financial. He also says that financial directors of cities and towns are really the officials dealing with fiscal issues, not city treasurers like Nappier.
“The main problem with the treasurer's office,” he says, “is that we've never had anyone with expertise in financial matters. The state treasurer is the sole trustee managing close to $20 billion - by the time I get in there. That's tremendous responsibility without the proper experience.”
Replies Nappier, a five-term Hartford city treasurer: “He's wrong. I'm the only candidate with actual hands-on experience in all the areas the treasurer must deal with. Frank Lecce is a broker and an investment banker. He brings the buyer and seller together. He's like a salesperson. I hire people like Frank Lecce.”
In fact, the two did work together intermittently from 1980 through the early 1990s. In 1980, Nappier says, she first brought Lecce on board as a junior underwriter for a Hartford development project. When she became Hartford's city treasurer in 1989, she again did business with him.
For his part, incumbent Paul Silvester said he has spent his “entire life” in investments, giving him the edge on experience. He was appointed treasurer in 1997, following several years as deputy treasurer. Silvester, an investment banker, once worked for Advest Inc., where Lecce worked for two years during the early 1980s.
Silvester is the first chartered financial analyst to serve as state treasurer. In the last three years, he says, he has helped turn around the state's troubled pension fund. He has added nearly $8 billion to it, bringing it to just over $18 billion and pulling it up from a bottom-rated fund to the top 50 percent.
The Issues
Lecce says he will bring the pension fund into the top five percent. “The performance so far has been dismal, at best,” he says.
Silvester counters that that goal is too risky in
the short-term. “You have to financially secure the retirement of 150,000 people,” he says. “When you have that kind of obligation to people, you have to take a prudent, conservative approach and not run around like some cowboy shooting from the hip.”
Lecce also says he wants to launch a new version of a previous Treasury-sponsored program that allowed residents to purchase zero-coupon bonds for investments in future higher education. It was shut down under the previous administration because of high costs and misuse. “I think it served the public good and we should bring back a similar program,” Lecce says.
In fact, the treasurer's office rolled out a new and vastly different educational investment program in January. That program, the Connecticut Higher Education Trust (CHET), already has more than $10 million and 2,000 members.
Nappier said she'd like to expand CHET to make sure Connecticut's working poor can take advantage of it, and that she would also use the program as a launch pad to educate consumers about the importance of investing.
The Race Card
A recent story in the Philadelphia Inquirer said the Nappier-Lecce contest is “exposing the party's racial divide.” The article reprised one of Lecce's previous comments: “Who's going to appeal to voters, a black candidate or an Italian candidate? Blacks want to have that seat because they're black.”
But Lecce disputes the quote. “That's not at all what I was saying,” he tells BNH. “I was saying my candidacy is about qualifications. If anyone sees me and knows I'm Italian and votes for me, that's a nice plus. I try not to campaign about race.”
Says Nappier: “I realize this is his campaign rhetoric. It's the politics of race-baiting.”
Secretary
of the State
The position is being left open by Miles S. Rapoport, who is running for the 1st congressional district seat.
GOP candidate Ben Andrews, who could not be reached for comment, has tried to pre-empt the same sort of bad publicity former GOP state comptroller nominee Antonio Serbia received over another newspaper's revelations that he fudged his résumé, was a tax delinquent, and was tried for federal bank fraud charges in Puerto Rico.
Andrews recently acknowledged that he had a $1.6 million bankruptcy filing, has run afoul of the IRS, and does not have a bachelor's degree, as he had earlier implied. However, his official campaign biography still claims that he “completed” his undergraduate work at Central State University and City College in New York. It also says he is “currently managing director” of Smith Whiley Co. in Hartford, although officials there say he left the company August 7 to campaign full-time.
The most immediate battle, of course, is between Ellen Scalettar and Susan Bysiewicz. Both are Democrats, lawyers, and in their third terms as state representatives.
Experience
Scalettar has fought the tobacco industry, led the campaign to make Connecticut's domestic-violence laws among the strongest in the country, and helped protect individual privacy rights. She has also supported legislation on brownfields, workers compensation reform, deregulation and industry clusters. She sits on several legislative committees and is vice-chair of the judiciary committee.
“You can't get all this done if you don't work well with people,” she says.
Bysiewicz said she is the only candidate who has practiced private-sector law and that she has a special interest in business issues because her husband owns a small company. “I'm very interested in making the secretary of the state's office an advocate for small business,” she says.
Bysiewicz, as co-chair of the legislature's government administration and elections committee, also has had oversight over the secretary of the state's office and the elections enforcement commission. “That is a very critical difference,” she says.
As a legislator, she has supported, among other items, legislation to ban so-called “drive-through” mastectomies, to reform managed care, and to expand job and education programs. She has also advocated campaign finance reform, including passage of a ban on the influx of “soft” money to Connecticut.
The Issues
Bysiewicz and Scalettar share similar stances on many issues.
Both, for instance, advocate creating a “one-stop” center for a business registry through the secretary of the state's office.
“Do you know how long the Department of Economic & Community Development has been working on this type of registry?” Scalettar asks. Her office, she says, wouldn't run the registry alone but would serve more as an ombudsman for businesses that need help sorting through bureaucracy and tracking down sometimes dozens of permits they need to open.
Both Scalettar and Bysiewicz also want to encourage Connecticut companies to conduct more business over the Internet, but says the state needs to quickly develop legal standards about Internet commerce. “This is a big issue brewing out there,” Scalettar says.
For more details about the elections, check out these Web sites and their links to the individual candidates:
Treasurer's Office
http://www.state.ct.us/ott/
Secretary of the State's Office
http://www.state.ct.us/sots/
Connecticut Republicans
http://www.ctgop.org/
Connecticut Democrats
http://www.ctdems.org/
|
Go FirstGo PreviousGo
NextGo LastGo
to Index
|
|
