10/16/2017
Editorial
After Shakedown Of City Employees, Mayor Drew Needs To Exit Governor's Race
Hartford Courant October 15, 2017
Mayor Daniel Drew, please get out of the governor's race.
You messed up. You used your position as Middletown's mayor to get confidential information — home addresses of police officers and firefighters, among others. You then used that information to shake down city employees. You abused your position.
You wrote to those officers, firefighters and other city workers at their homes, asking for $100 donations to your campaign for the Democratic nomination.
State law bars the disclosure of police and firefighters' home addresses.
It's in Section 1-217: "No public agency may disclose, under the Freedom of Information Act, from its personnel, medical or similar files, the residential address of any of the following persons employed by such public agency: ... A sworn member of a municipal police department [or] a firefighter."
Coercion
Not only did you do that in apparent violation of the law, but even more egregiously, you put the squeeze on workers who might feel they have no choice but to donate if they wanted to keep getting that paycheck or that promotion. This is coercive, at best.
And while state campaign finance laws can be murky, there is a state law that bars municipal employees from soliciting campaign contributions from those they supervise. It's under Section 9-622, "Illegal practices."
It frowns upon "any municipal employee who solicits a contribution on behalf of, or for the benefit of, any candidate for ... municipal office ... from ... an individual under the supervision of such employee."
You say that you are not a municipal employee, but an elected official, and therefore you are not subject to that law. That's splitting hairs. You're an employee of the public, and what you did is ethically wrong. You shouldn't be shaking down your subordinates for campaign donations.
'Error In Judgment'
You claim you didn't know about the law barring disclosure of police home addresses. That strains credulity. The Courant's Shawn Beals and Jon Lender wrote this week that this was an issue just two years ago in your city.
The police union protested in 2015 when a candidate for the retirement board used officers' home addresses for a campaign mailing. Your legal adviser then sent a memo to your top aide, other city attorneys and union officials apologizing for the breach.
If you didn't get the memo, what does that say about your inner circle and the shop you're running?
"That's why we have staff," you told The Courant. "They handle what they handle and only bring to me what requires my immediate attention." This should have required at least a bit of your attention. After all, the buck stops at your desk.
The Courant, as a media organization, likes open government. We like Connecticut's Freedom of Information Act. So we've never been comfortable with the provision that bars disclosure of some home addresses — police officers', anyone who works at the Department of Corrections and any employee of the judicial branch, to name just a few examples — while others are freely available to the public. Nevertheless, we accept that this is the law.
Even if you didn't know the law, you should have known how putting the arm on city employees would be seen. You've since called it an "error in judgment," and you've said that you'll refund donations. It's an error that calls into question whether you're ready for the highest office in the state. We don't think so. That's why we ask you to stop running for governor.
The state has some massively serious problems, and we need leaders who can do far better than this.
Copyright © 2017, Hartford Courant
