Guilford’s local autocrat, First Selectman Matt Hoey, is again proposing to waste our tax dollars on another open space boondoggle by spending $800,000 to buy a totally unnecessary 63 acre tract near Lake Quonnipaug.  Guilford is already rich in open space.  The town’s growth-management document records 27% committed open space and 54% perceived open space (i.e. committed and uncommitted)  versus the State of CT’s goal of only 21% open space.  This means that roughly  16,001of Guilford ‘s 30,080 acres are already open space.  Hikers are already blessed with 21 tracts of open space with trails, including nearby Menunkatuck Trail that will take hikers all the way from New England Sound to New Hampshire.  The town had already spent $2.45 million on a combined 27.47 acre parcel of unnecessary open space (a state grant of $1.592 million reduced Guilford’s share to $857, 500), not to mention the $3 million spent to purchase the Mooring Restaurant property that is now tied up in court because Hoey failed to exercise his due diligence.  We need relief from oppressive property taxes, not more open space.  Vote NO! 

  

This latest example of Hoey’s fiscal profligacy, however, is nothing compared to his shameless manipulation of the Charter Review Commission for which he handpicked every member and violated multiple procedural rules in the process.  There was no advance notice to the community to elicit volunteers, and he improperly chose members who had already served on board and commissions, all with the intent of ensuring support for his power-hungry goals. Appointees should be chosen from among those without prior political baggage, biases, or preconceptions.  It this instance, and not surprisingly, Hoey’s appointees complied like a pack of obedient sheep.   

  

In fact, one of them, attorney Bill Bloss, was Hoey’s accomplice in the plot to blow-up the minority representation rule in the Board of Education election in 2021. His selection was particularly egregious considering his past behavior.  In that election, the two fabricated a cynical plan to form a fusion ticket with a previously non-existent Independent Party in order to replace the Republican Party as the minority party.  Since the Democrats were able to run only two candidates in that election, they recruited three Independents to run in coordination with the Democrats.  Registered Democrats, who outnumber Republicans 2-1 in Guilford, were thus able to cast their three excess votes for the three Independent candidates with the express purpose of replacing the Republicans as the minority party.  Given Democrat registration advantage, the results were predictable. The three faux Independents, not surprisingly, vote in lockstep with the Democrats on the 9-0 BOE, ensuring that superintendent Paul Freeman and his illegal politicization of the school district and incompetence on multiple fronts cannot be challenged.      

  

This chicanery set a subsequent pattern for elections for other elected bodies.  When Jonathan Trotta, the lone Republican member of the Board of Finance, decided to run for First Selectman in 2024, he was replaced by a member of the Independent Party (one of 3 Independents on that board) .  Now, only through town budget referenda can citizens force reductions in the bloated budgets that are crippling Guilford taxpayers, and even these reductions are minimal. 

  

While the Charter Review Commission made numerous recommendations, these merely provided a duplicitous cover for the Matt Hoey’s originally stated objective of solidifying one-party rule by removing the opportunity for an unsuccessful First Selectman candidate to serve as a regular Selectmen.  It pained him profoundly that Jonathan Trotta, the lone voice for fiscal responsibility on any elected Guilford board, won a seat on the Board of Selectmen in 2024.  So, he set about to ensure that this couldn’t happen again, by Charter.  This is the same man who routinely sits on applications for months of Republicans who volunteer to serve on towns boards and commissions so that an Independent can be quickly recruited and approved in their place.  As a consequence, we now have an Independent Party of 380 members with 50 members on board and commissions versus a Republican Party of 3,600 members with only a handful of such members, most grandfathered in, RINOs, or non-voting alternates.  Only a shameless autocrat like Matt Hoey would orchestrate such an imbalance and, in the process, deny 3,600 of his neighbors representation, as well as the ability of Republicans to develop a “farm team” for future candidates.    

  

Once elected, a First Selectman has a moral and ethical duty to serve ALL the people of his community, not go out of his way to ensure that members of the largest minority party are denied the representation they are owed under long-standing minority representation rules.  His unholy alliance with the Guilford Independent Party has already excluded Republicans from the essential deliberative process that gives voice to differing viewpoints on decision making bodies.  This amendment would only serve to enforce this process across all three elected bodies.  Hoey has replaced a healthy deliberative process among differing viewpoints with a cynically orchestrated Group Think that has taken political partisanship to an egregious level of excess and divided this community as never before.  Voters now have a duty to reject this outrage on November 3rd. 

  

Kendall Svengalis, President 

  

New England Law Press