Questions raised after Rell’s denial of publicly funded poll

E-mails contradict governor’s contention that survey on state budget never pursued

By Ted Mann

Published on 10/14/2009

Hartford - Gov. M. Jodi Rell has insisted that her staff rejected an adviser’s suggestion to use public

funds to conduct a poll of voters
on budgetary issues soon after the
suggestion was made, and that the
issue was never discussed after
the administration conducted a
focus group instead in December

2008.

But e-mail correspondence
between University of Connecticut
officials indicates that the
proposal was still alive as late as
Jan. 21, 2009, long after Rell has
said the issue was discarded for

good.

At a news conference Friday, Rell said her administration rejected a proposal to do a poll using public funds soon after the idea was

raised in mid-summer 2008.

But the governor’s staff still
refuses to explain why Rell
contends an e-mail exchange
between the pollster, UConn
professor Ken Dautrich, and
Rell’s chief of staff, M. Lisa
Moody, from the same week in
January - in which Moody and
Dautrich discuss “poll testing”
and “polling” on “specific cuts” in
her budget proposal - isn’t really
a conversation about polling after

all.

In the UConn e-mail exchange,
obtained Tuesday by The Day,
Amy Donahue, the head of
the university’s Department of
Public Policy, alerts College of

Liberal Arts and Sciences Dean

Jeremy Teitelbaum that one of

the department’s professors -
Dautrich - “has been approached
by the Governor’s office to
conduct a statewide survey of 500
Connecticut adults to gather their
views of the state budget situation
and opinions about how the

problem should be solved.”

The exchange occurred well
after Rell has said her top aides
rejected the idea of doing a poll
with public funds, and more
than one month after a publicly
funded focus group on budget and
political questions.

In the e-mail, Donahue goes on
to say the poll was to be “funded
through the Office of Personnel
Management as an addition to an
existing contract” - apparently a
reference to the Office of Policy
and Management, the state agency
that was funding Dautrich’s
existing contract to consult with
Rell on budget matters - and that
the public policy department
would “obtain appropriate
approvals for this addition” to
Dautrich’s contract through
UConn’s Office of Sponsored
Programs, which approves faculty

work for non-university clients.

Teitelbaum forwarded the

message to the interim director of

the Center for Survey Research
and Analysis, the polling center
Dautrich once ran but which was
already in the process of being
shut down after several years of
controversy, including an ethics

investigation into Dautrich’s work

for the Center.

Apparently, the poll was not

conducted by the university, and
Rell, Dautrich and administration
spokesmen have been adamant
that no formal polling, apart
from the focus group, was ever
conducted with public funds.

The e-mail exchange between
Teitelbaum and the center’s
interim director, Lyle Scruggs,
seems to confirm Dautrich’s

explanation for why he never

conducted the poll for Rell:
University policy would still
have required him to conduct
the poll through the Center for
Survey Research and Analysis,
with which he had a strained
relationship. The center has since
been shut down.

In a written statement, Rell’s

spokesman, Rich Harris, stood by the version of events the governor laid out at her press conference on Friday.

“The idea of doing a poll was

rejected early in the process by