Constitutional Amendment Floated

At a transportation confab Tuesday, one gubernatorial hopeful called for changing the state constitution to protect transportation funds from being raided by the state.

The proposal came at the Holiday Inn in North Haven, where more than 100 people gathered at a forum sponsored by Keep CT Moving. That group is a coalition of transportation advocates.

Four GOP gubernatorial hopefuls — two declared candidates and two people who are ​“exploring” running — showed up at the forum.

The two declared candidates, Lt. Gov. Michael Fedele (pictured) and former Ambassador to Ireland Tom Foley, emphasized the need for ​“a stable funding stream” for transportation. Both protested that the General Assembly and state government had raided that fund for other purposes.

The Special Transportation Fund was established in 1984 to fund transportation projects in the state. It’s funded by the gas tax.

One of the men exploring a run for the governor’s chair, MetroHartford Alliance CEO Oz Griebel, took it a step further. He called for a constitutional amendment that would seal the transportation fund’s coffers to everything but transportation uses. The MetroHartford Alliance is the Capital region’s chamber of commerce.

The lack of secure funding ​“is the single biggest impediment,” to transportation progress, he said. The only way to guarantee that secure funding is by amending the Connecticut Constitution. Griebel and Danbury Mayor Mark Boughton are both exploring runs.

In an interview after the program, Griebel said the only way to convince the public that the funds were secure is to lock them away.

“If you can’t convince the public that the funds you use for transportation are secure, the reaction you get always is ​‘you are raising my taxes,’” he said. With a constitutional amendment guaranteeing that funds collected for transportation will be used only for that purpose, he said. ​“You can tell them, ​‘Don’t trust me. I can tell you the funds are safe,’” he said.

After the program, Fedele said a constitutional amendment might be difficult to pass and there are ​“a number of ways” of securing the funding. He did not have specifics, but talked about a concept like the 401(k) account that would require repayment for funds taken from it. He said he would convene a panel to sit down and iron out the concepts and find ways of securing the transportation funding.

“I don’t know that you need a constitutional amendment,” Foley said in an interview after the program. ​“But there should be some quasi-independent authority to protect [transportation funding] from the legislature’s manipulation.”

But Karen Burnaska, the head of the New Haven-based Transit For Connecticut, said that securing the fund in vital, even if it takes a constitutional amendment to do that.

“The people need to know their money is safe in a lock box,”; she said. ​“If the only way to do it is a constitutional amendment,” then so be it, she said.

“I was really impressed. They did address transportation well, they all hit the key of a stable funding source,” she said.

The state constitution can be amended by a vote of the General Assembly, either by three-fourths of the House and Senate or by a simple majority of the House and Senate two years in a row. The amendment then put on the ballot the next November. Voters then can approve it by a simple majority. In 2008, a call for a constitutional convention was soundly defeated.