New Haven Independent

As the sun was setting, Opie supporters, teens and kids and party loyalists stationed themselves around town. They smiled and waved and held up signs. Opie and Kurt Schwanfelder, who is running for Second Selectman, planned to spend the evening phoning registered unaffiliated voters who at this late date were still undecided. Unk DaRos and his running mate Fran Walsh were likely doing the same.

Campaign sources say the race between DaRos and Opie is close, and the unaffiliated voters —-roughly 9,500 —-may decide the outcome. Will they come out to vote? All sides are hoping for a large turnout.

To that end, the phone banks at each of the headquarters were busy this weekend, as volunteers called their lists of registered voters. Morris took a page from Opie’s play book and put up her first YouTube Ad. Click the arrow to play.

DaRos has done no YouTube or television ads but Opie has done two Tabor spots along with television commercials. Over the weekend voters in some districts received DaRos’s mailing on the Tabor land issue and today registered Democrats received Republican mailings.

All three candidates have served the town as First Selectman: DaRos for six years and Opie and Morris for two years each. Mrs. Morris did not seek the Democratic nomination. Nor did she seek a primary race. Rather she ran as an Independent, a move that keeps her in the race to the bitter end. One result is the constant reminder of the divisiveness within the local Democrat party, intensified in part because Morris’s husband, Bruce, remains a key figure in state and local Branford Democratic politics. Republican Opie has capitalized on this conflict, saying the town is ready for a Democratic “time-out.”

The two big issues facing voters are the Tabor verdict, which could set the town back $17.3 million or more, and property taxes in light of previous soaring assessments. There are other issues, of course, including traffic congestion, which all candidates say they will tackle, but these are the two big ones.

The next Selectman will oversee the 2009 property revaluation, a major one. DaRos was First Selectman in what turned out to be the disastrous 2002 revaluation when shoreline properties soared and long-time residents were forced to leave their homes. The hundreds who didn’t leave sued the town. The exodus included the elderly, retirees on fixed income, families who had inherited their homes and working class families. The 2002 revaluation saw property taxes along the central Connecticut shoreline double, triple, even quadruple.

It also saw the arrival of high-tech appraisal companies. When residents sought to find out how Vision Appraisal Technology, the town’s outside reval company, came up with its numbers, they learned that as a private company Vision’s own designed software was “proprietary,” meaning secret and not open to the public. Because these are mass appraisals, the state, which has enormous oversight over the process, does not certify the software, or, for that matter have the manpower or expert knowledge to inspect it for all 169 towns.

DaRos says he will change the way the town conducts its revaluation and if Vision doesn’t go along he will drop them. Vision has done Branford’s prior two revals. “I want the town to have greater control over the reval process,” he told the Eagle. “We will redesign the process to make sure it is done in an open, honest, transparent way. What we want is to know what this piece of property is worth. Period. That is the way it is supposed to be.”

He also said he would create a citizens oversight committee to fine tune the procedures. “We are going to fix this,” he said.

What Vision did, with the approval of the Town assessor Barbara Neal, is to divide Branford into 38 neighborhoods organized on socioeconomic lines. Then it assigned each property a “unique water view factor” or “C” factor if the house has a water view. In the 2002 reval, a “C” factor multiplied the unit price of land by 150 to 200 percent for a partial view; 150 to 300 percent for a river or cove front view; 250 percent for a good water view; 300 percent for a good ocean view; 350 percent for an excellent ocean view or harbor view; and 450 percent for ocean front. The view factor and the “neighborhood” factor were then compounded to transform the price of a piece of land.

Vision also added a “custom” component that Opie sought to undo. The custom designation spawned a number of lawsuits, including a major, ongoing lawsuit against the town brought by William and Dawn Massey.

DaRos said he would do away with arbitrary neighborhoods and view factors. “I want the town of Branford to have control of the software.” So either Vision or another company will comply with his proposal, he said, or he will do the reval in house. Before Town Hall became computerized that would have been impossible. Now it is possible,” he said.

When Opie came into office in 2005 he was faced with the massive upheaval caused by the 2002 reval. He kept Vision because he wanted to undertake another reval in order to fix the prior inequities. To a large degree he succeeded. He has said that not a whole lot can be done with the process because so much of it is defined by state statute but he, too, is likely to review how the reval process is undertaken.

One of Opie’s ideas is to seek a revision in the town charter so that the town’s mill rate can be capped. Other states have adopted this form of controlling property taxation. Connecticut has yet to tackle the issue head-on. Massachusetts adopted a property tax cap in 1980 when it limited to two and one-half percent the total property taxes a city or town could raise in a given year. The law permits a town to conduct an election to override the limit if the town needs to.

Both Opie and DaRos say the will keep pressure on the state to change the educational funding formula, which as it now stands does not give a number of towns in the state their legally permissible allotment. As a result the property tax must make up for state deficiencies in education.

Property taxes are complex. It has been easier for the candidates to talk about Tabor. Opie had agreed with DaRos to take a hands off approach to Tabor, but he now says that “as more facts come to light, new questions arise about the lawfulness of the Town’s actions, and the handling of the defense of the lawsuits.” As an RTM member in 2003, Opie says he now believes that the RTM was not fully informed about the constitutional issues raised by the taking. As First Selectman Opie formally took the land in January, 2004.

Opie has called for an Independent Counsel to get to the heart of the legal problems that have enveloped the town. One aspect centers on Morris’s decision to remove the Tabor cases from expert outside attorneys who knew the Tabor cases well and give them, along with scores of others, to Town Attorney Ed Marcus. Morris did so within days of taking office in 2005. Finally, in May, with a trial looming, and under pressure from the RTM, she hired new attorneys, but very late in the game.

In his campaign mailing, DaRos says “it’s that time of year when politicians will say anything to get elected. Even if means distorting the truth. Unfortunately John Opie and Cheryl Morris are no exceptions.”

DaRos’s Tabor mailing says Opie’s idea for a settlement would include residential housing on the parcel. Whether a settlement is even possible, given the enormity of this case, is unclear. But Schwanfelder said the Republican plan would never include housing on the 77-acre parcel. That is also true for any settlement plan DaRos might approve, his advisers say.

DaRos quotes Bruce “Zeke” Zuliski, the state representative from Southington in the Tabor piece. Zuliski said his hometown “is still suffering from the decision to build housing next to our landfill. Branford is fortunate to have a courageous leader like Unk DaRos who learned from our mistakes.” At the trial, Superior Court Judge William T. Cremins Jr. would not permit the town’s attorneys to introduce evidence concerning other Connecticut towns, their land fills and development next door. He was persuaded by the developer’s attorneys that this information would prejudice the jury.

The Tabor case is now on appeal and should it be reversed the $17 plus million the town owes will be history. But the legal fight is not the political one.

As for Morris’s 30-second clip, it says families in Branford will have to pay at least a $1,000 toward the Tabor verdict. Her figure is lower than Opie’s whose mailing put the number at $1,532.62 per household.

And whose fault is it, the Morris ad asks. At this point DaRos appears on screen. He is shown at an RTM meeting in which he says of himself: “This is the guy who caused the trouble.”

Morris wants to convey a “gotcha” moment, but like her 2005 ads against Opie, this one distorts both DaRos’s words and the event. What he said at the RTM meeting was yes, he was the guy who decided to seize the property but he only did so because he didn’t want housing put up next to a town dump. And, he added, he would do it again.

Old wounds from the 2005 election have surfaced in this campaign. Opie was narrowly defeated in 2005, in part because of Morris’s deceptive political ads against him, in part because he ran a poor campaign. This time he has mounted an aggressive campaign, fighting back against her and particularly DaRos.

DaRos has not been publicly combative. His campaign literature is benign, generally showing his accomplishments and endorsements—-from Richard Blumethal, the Attorney General, from Congresswoman Rosa DeLauro, from State Sen. Ed Meyer. Opie has endorsements, too, including Governor Jodi Rell who came to Branford to personally endorse Opie and Schwanfelder.

In the last election too many voters didn’t vote. That was an enormous mistake. It’s time to get to the polls. They open tomorrow at 6 a.m. and close at 8 p.m. Click here to find out where you vote.
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