E-mails cast doubt on Rell in flap over budget poll
By Ted Mann
The Day
Published 10/28/2009
Moody message indicates governor
approved survey
Hartford - University of Connecticut
professor Kenneth Dautrich conducted a
$6,000 poll this spring on the orders of
Gov. M. Jodi Rell’s chief of staff aimed
at weighing voters’ attitudes toward tax
increases, borrowing and service cuts
as Rell struggled to gain an upper hand
over legislative Democrats in a brewing
standoff over the state budget.
And while Rell has insisted that she did
not know Dautrich had helped craft the
questions for that poll “until I read it in
the newspaper,” e-mails that the chief of
staff, M. Lisa Moody, sent to Dautrich
suggest otherwise.
“Governor thought it was great too,”
Moody wrote to Dautrich on April 7 after
approving a draft of the poll, which was
paid for by Rell’s exploratory committee.
The poll would ask detailed questions
about the voters’ support for raising some
taxes versus cutting services, and what
effect those moves would have on the
governor’s popularity.
If Rell “agrees to the Democrats plan to
put the budget deficit problem behind
us,” one sample question asks, “would it
make you more supportive of her or less
supportive of her?”
In a recent public appearance in Old
Saybrook, Rell insisted repeatedly that
she had not known that Dautrich had
suggested questions for the poll.
“I did not know that, and I don’t know
whether he did or not,” Rell said.
A spokesman for the governor declined
to comment Tuesday on questions related
to Dautrich, citing ongoing investigations
by the Auditors of Public Accounts and
Attorney General Richard Blumenthal
into the possible misuse of state
resources.
The e-mails between Dautrich and Moody
were obtained Tuesday by The Day
through a public records request. Rell’s
office had initially failed to produce the
April exchange between Dautrich and
Moody, but included it after The Day
raised questions about the governor’s
office’s compliance with the Freedom of
Information Act.
Dautrich did not return calls Tuesday but
has said in previous interviews that he
consulted on Rell’s committee poll but
was never paid by the committee.
That is seemingly confirmed in his
exchange with Moody, in which Dautrich
asks whether the poll will be paid for
with private funds or whether he should
conduct it through his position at UConn.
“Just let me know if I should log this in as
a uconn project, or not,” Dautrich wrote
on April 8.
“Got the sign off - private,” Moody
responded.
Dautrich later told Moody the committee
would be charged only for the cost of the
phone-banking to conduct the survey.
That $6,000 payment to Braun Research
in Princeton, N.J., listed in Rell’s
committee’s campaign filings, caught the
eye of political veterans and consultants
in Hartford, since statewide surveys
routinely cost several times that amount
to produce.
Dautrich’s failure to charge Rell’s
committee for political services is the
subject of a pending elections complaint
filed by a Hartford consultant and former
political director to the state Democrats,
Jonathan Pelto.
Dautrich drafted the poll for Rell just
months after conducting a secret and
now-controversial focus group to help
the governor gauge public opinion as she
put together her 2010-11 budget proposal.
That focus group was paid for out of the
$223,000 contract Dautrich has with the
Office of Policy and Management, which
is intended to support a 30-month survey
of strategies for streamlining the budget.
It has also been used to help craft Rell’s
budget messaging, a fact that has led
lawmakers and others to criticize Rell for
inappropriately mingling political and
government business.
In an interview just before The Day first
reported on the focus groups Dautrich
conducted on the budget - now known to
include at least two others conducted as
part of his classwork at UConn last fall
- Dautrich insisted that he had not helped
advise on the governor’s political poll
while on state time.
But if Dautrich gave his services as a
pollster to the governor’s committee
free of charge, Pelto and other observers
believe the committee may have run
afoul of campaign finance laws, which
set a $375 limit on the value of in-kind
contributions that may be given to an
exploratory committee.
In their exchange in April, Moody and
Dautrich share their frustration that voters
outside the Capitol seem not to reflect
a deep enough urgency about the tax
increases Democrats were then proposing,
which Dautrich calls the largest since
Gov. Lowell P. Weicker Jr. introduced the
income tax in 1991.
The poll, he wrote to Moody, would help
them both understand why the general
public didn’t seem to feel as they did.
“The poll will shed light on this,” he
wrote.