Rell spends $220,000 to find out voters like honesty

So what are we to make of the Rell administration spending nearly a quarter of a million dollars in taxpayer funds to learn that voters want governors to be honest, principled and intelligent?

To be fair — and this is about all the fairness the governor deserves on this — a partially completed “study†by a polling specialist on how to streamline state government has also come up with some money-saving ideas. It discovered there are too many state cars, there’s money to be made from unclaimed empty bottles and less time should be spent faxing. If you believe the governor’s legion of spokespersons, it has already helped to save millions of dollars. We look forward with great anticipation to a complete, itemized listing of these savings.

The story, broken by Ted Mann of The Day, was quickly picked up by other papers and the best political bloggers. The Hartford Courant put its first story only on Page 3, but the paper also ran a highly critical editorial headlined, “Taxpayers Paid $220,000 for This?†Then, The Journal Inquirer reported the money for the strange project came from a $2 million governor’s contingency fund the former reformer Rell once considered a slush fund and pledged not to use for government projects.

Now that the state auditors, the attorney general and the university are investigating whether tax dollars and UConn have been misused, the story should have an impact on whether Rell runs again.

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Here’s what happened. Last year, Kenneth Dautrich, a professor of public policy at UConn and an expert on polling and research, was commissioned by Rell adviser Lisa Moody to conduct a study on how to streamline state government, a rather bizarre commission for a teacher of polling and research techniques.

As gubernatorial candidate Dan Malloy asked, “Isn’t that the job of people at OPM [Office of Policy and Management] and in the governor’s office?†One answer may be these people lacked Dautrich’s ability to offer advice on how to streamline Rell as well.

Part of the study was to have been a full-scale public opinion poll on how the public feels about a governor who is yet to announce if she will run for re-election next year. But Moody apparently thought this might have been a bit much in a taxpayer financed study on how to save state funds, so a simpler form of polling, a focus group, was slipped in instead. But make no mistake, a focus group is a form of polling, despite the protestations of Rell’s people that a poll was not taken.

 Most focus groups on statewide issues would include people representing a cross section of state residents, but this included nine residents of the eight Hartford-area towns of West Hartford, East Hartford, Rocky Hill, Newington, South Windsor, Manchester, Middletown and Higganum. Omitted were several counties and all city residents but they’re mostly poor people who vote Democratic anyway and the group was skewed away from Democrats. The nine citizens focused upon included four unaffiliated voters, three Republicans and two Democrats. This is consistent with the Connecticut voter demographic that elected Calvin Coolidge in 1924 or is Rell’s base. Pick one.

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Rell’s aides have tried to make a case that the focus group helped formulate the state budget. We have been asked to believe, for example, that the budget makers were helped along by focus group participants who have been annoyed by the number of state cars they see in their supermarket parking lot. “Was that,†asked The Courant, “so much better than the collective wisdom of her commissioners, her budget chief and her own insights gained from years in the Legislature and six years in the governor’s office?â€

Rell’s reaction was what we usually get from the governor when there’s bad news and the heat is on. She hid out the day Mann’s story broke, only issuing a hard-to-believe written claim that her office “worked very hard to ensure that the work he did and the questions he asked were policy-based, dealing with budget, spending and taxing issues.â€

It turns out these policy-based questions were also dealing with Attorney General Dick Blumenthal, who was a potential Rell opponent at the time and whose name, Dautrich claimed, came up only incidentally but led to an informative discussion on how the focus group compares him and Rell on such policy-based issues as honesty, intelligence and integrity.

Rell’s response changed slightly when she resurfaced last Friday, at a photo op for a food drive in a Torrington firehouse, and announced she was telling the treasurer of her political committee to ask elections officials if the polling should have been disclosed as an in-kind political contribution. That’s quite a departure from polling she said dealt only with budget, spending and taxing issues.

Dick Ahles is a retired journalist from Simsbury. E-mail him at dahles@hotmail.com.