Party Hits A Convention Snag

Meeting Postponed After Democrats Hear A Problem With Rules May Keep Delegates Home

March 22, 2006
By OSHRAT CARMIEL, Courant Staff Writer

They took attendance and said a prayer to the Lord. That much, everyone agreed on.

But when it came time Tuesday for the 70 members of the Hartford Democratic Town Committee to get to business - picking delegates to the state convention that will endorse candidates for governor and U.S. Senate - that's when the trouble began.

And ended.

Several disgruntled party members contended, with the aid of legal documents, that the entire gathering was illegitimate, that every member of the town committee assembled there was a renegade.

And if that illicit group were to select delegates to the state convention, the disgruntled faction charged, those delegates would be illegitimate and - this is not an idle threat in Hartford politics - the entire matter would end up in court.

So Noel F. McGregor Jr., chairman of the Democratic Party, postponed the meeting until next Tuesday in order to sort things out. "It could put us in a situation where we won't have any delegates" to the state convention, McGregor said.

At the center of the dustup is the 3rd District town committee, led by state Rep. Minnie Gonzalez. Members of her district, at odds with the city's Democratic Party machine and Mayor Eddie A. Perez, who largely controls it, were excluded from the proposed list of 54 delegates to May's state convention.

The list of delegates did include members of every other district as well as people on the slate that unsuccessfully challenged Gonzalez's district at the polls earlier this month - among them, the mayor's brother, William.

So Gonzalez, with the help of former deputy mayor - and expert reader of fine print - Nicholas Carbone, lobbed a wrench into the party machinery.

Carbone, a member of Gonzalez's 3rd District committee, said Hartford's Democratic town committee as composed is illegal, because the party did not file an update of its rules with the secretary of the state. Doing so is mandatory under state law - even the party's legal counsel for the evening, Michael Collins, agreed.

The last time Hartford's Democratic town committee filed its rules with the secretary of the state' s office was in 1983. And the rules were different then; under those rules, the town committee should have no more than about 35 members - half the number who assembled Tuesday to help choose between incumbent Joseph I. Lieberman and Ned Lamont for U.S. Senate and between John DeStefano Jr. and Dannel P. Malloy for governor.

"Right now it's not a legal town committee," Carbone said.

Even if the party were to update its rules with the secretary of the state's office, Carbone said, it would take 60 days for the new rules to take effect - a real problem for Hartford, since convention delegates must be picked by the end of this month. Hartford has the third largest delegate group to the state convention after Bridgeport and New Haven.

"We don't know what the cure is," Carbone said.

He did, however, suggest including members of Gonzalez's town committee on the list of delegates. That, he suggested, might make the legal challenge go away.

"We're looking for a fair method where all members of the party have a say," Carbone said. "This is not a club."

McGregor, the party chairman who drew up the delegate list, said the exclusion of Gonzalez's group was intentional, a response to what he said was their lack of participation in the party's meetings and other planned events over the last two years. "I did not want to reward them for their inactivity," McGregor said later.

He declined to say whether he would reconfigure the list to include Gonzalez and her posse, but said he would consult with lawyers and think about it.

"There's no ruling that says you have to select certain people as delegates," he said.