Malloy touts transportation push
Member of the Year Award winner Susan Pica of Capital Grille and Gov. Dannel Malloy. Photos by Bill Fallon
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ov. Dannel Malloy on Thursday told a crowd of 200 at the 28th annual meeting of the Stamford Chamber of Commerce Inc. transportation would dominate the legislative agenda for his second term. Addressing the audience at the Stamford Marriott Hotel & Spa, Malloy said he will ask for an amendment to the state constitution on the November 2016 ballot to guarantee payment for improvements. The initiative would place an already-achieved
Joyce Mazur delivers the secretary’s report, part of the chamber’s annual business conducted at the lunch.
Armando Goncalves, senior vice president and division president for southern Connecticut, People’s United Bank.
transportation allotment of 1.5 percent of state sales tax revenues into a “lock box” with the money dedicated exclusively for transportation. Malloy said, absent the amendment, the funds will find other uses. “If you can’t house and move people in and out in a reliable way, your ability to attract the jobs being created is substantially challenged,” Malloy said. Malloy said $100 billion is needed across the next 30 years “to make up for 40 years
of underfunding.” Such an outlay would lead to a “first-in-class system,” he said. The governor said the state is losing $4.2 billion annually due to traffic-caused lost productivity. “We have to pay to catch up,” he said. Malloy called the Merritt Parkway a museum and Interstate 95 a parking lot. He also cited the antique bridges on the New Haven line of Metro-North as problems that could not be ignored. Where I-95 is three lanes, Malloy said it
Garry Feldman, president, U.S. Computer Connection and Stamford Chamber of Commerce Board chairman with Education Award winner Sharon White of UConn Stamford.
must have four. And where it has two it must have three. He said Interstate 84’s two lanes should become three. He also said the past year has been the best for job growth, notably 80,000 privatesector positions. Government-sector jobs had not recovered from the recession, but Malloy didn’t cite that as a problem in his view. “Government being smaller doesn’t particularly bother me,” he said. — Bill Fallon
Whistleblower ruling in Conn. high court may prompt more cases, policy changes BY ALEXANDER SOULE Hearst Media Connectcut
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ven as corporate whistleblower cases grow more prevalent nationally on October 5, a decision by Connecticut’s highest court could embolden workers reporting employer wrongdoing who were previously restricted under a 2006 U.S. Supreme Court ruling limiting employee protections. In the case, Richard Trusz argued he was fired in 2008 from a UBS subsidiary in violation of his right to free speech after warning superiors the company overvalued properties in its portfolio by as much as $100 million. The Glastonbury resident, who worked in the Hartford office of UBS Realty Investors, sued in 2009. The Connecticut Supreme Court Justices said in their ruling that the state constitution and state law ban public and private employ-
ers from disciplining workers for speech about ‘‘matters of significant public interest.” Whistleblower statutes protect employees from retaliation by employers if they report wrongdoing, with government agencies offering a bounty for any money they collect in cases. The Securities and Exchange Commission reported receiving 37 whistleblower tips in Connecticut for the fiscal 2014 year ending in June. Of 3,620 nationally, that represented a 20 percent increase in just two years. Much of that increase is the result of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act of 2010, according to David Golub, a partner and attorney with Silver Golub & Teitell, which has offices in Stamford and Danbury. “The decision is really important because … it rejects a restriction on actions by whistleblowers the U.S. Supreme Court imposed,”
6 Week of October 12, 2015 • FAIRFIELD COUNTY BUSINESS JOURNAL
Golub said. “What the (U.S. Supreme Court) was struggling with was the conflict between an employee’s right of freedom of speech, and a public employer’s right to control what an employee can say.” Robinson & Cole, which has a Stamford office, represented UBS Realty Investors in the case, which prompted reactions from the American Civil Liberties Union, the Connecticut Business & Industry Association and the Connecticut Commission on Human Rights and Opportunities. It is not just Dodd-Frank and the SEC generating increased whistleblower activity. Between the 2009 fiscal year when Trusz filed suit and the fiscal year ending June 2014, the federal Occupational Health and Safety Administration reported five straight years of increased whistleblower cases filed nationally, combining for a 42 percent jump to 3,060 cases in all in fiscal 2014.
Of cases tracked by OSHA in 2014, more than half were dismissed, with just over 20 percent of cases reaching a settlement and just as many getting withdrawn. Just 64 cases of more than 3,000 that year were found to have merit under a formal court review. Golub said the Connecticut Supreme Court decision is reverberating nationally, and will prompt corporate personnel departments to review their policies. Choosing to become a whistleblower remains a daunting prospect, he added. “When you become a whistleblower, it’s not over within a week or a month or a year,” Golub said. Hearst Connecticut Media includes four daily newspapers: Connecticut Post, Greenwich Time, The Advocate (Stamford) and The News-Times (Danbury). See ctpost.com for more from this reporter.