In the final hour before the midnight deadline, when all bills left to languish would die, Tesla lobbyists, national Tesla staffers and a Tesla owner-activist were still there, watching the chaos in the Senate chamber.
If they held any lingering hope that their bill would come to a vote at the Capitol late Wednesday — allowing the maker of high-end electric cars to sell directly to customers in Connecticut without an independent dealer — they didn’t show it. The Senate had a far bigger crisis unfolding.
But there they were, joining in the bleary-eyed ritual of witnessing the messy close of a legislative session. The outcome, to them, made no sense.
“With the lobbying we’ve done, I think the support was there,” said Will Nicholas, a Tesla policy and government relations executive.
He was probably right. The bill passed in a lopsided House vote but never came to a vote in the Senate because it didn’t have the right champion, and no one could cut deals to make it happen.
Tesla was one of three bills in this session involving upstart businesses challenging established industries that have protection in state regulations. All three attracted loud interest as they pushed to reshape, knock down or get around rules that were designed in a different era, for a different economy.
Uber hoped to win lawmakers’ blessing to run the app-based livery service that it calls “ride-sharing,” even though it’s already allowed to operate outside the state’s strict taxi industry regulations.
And Total Wine & More, the Home Depot of package stores, hoped to boost the state’s limit from three stores to six, add hours of operation, and end Connecticut’s minimum pricing rules.
It was a three-way assault on Connecticut’s arcane trade restraints by players claiming the mantle of the modern economy.
The three battles ended differently when it comes to regulation, though all will continue. Together, they illustrated the chaotic and personal process of lawmaking. That process, all at once, is both a cynical bazaar of deal making and an elegant dance of compromise.
One quirk: In all three cases, what happened in the legislature did not reflect the popular will of lawmakers.
Common Ground
No one on any of the six sides of the three issues ended up entirely happy. That includes Sean Scanlon, a freshman Democrat from Guilford who sponsored a bill to regulate Uber.
Scanlon believes he’s closer than many of his General Assembly colleagues to the digital economy of instant online transactions and unfettered technology, simply because of his age: 28.
“As a young person, I fully understand that my generation … wants that kind of service,” he said, referring to Uber’s all-electronic, decentralized car-calling system. “But just because consumers want something doesn’t mean that we as government can allow them to have unmitigated carte blanche over what we’re doing.”
In January, Scanlon signed up to be an Uber driver — which took him 30 minutes online. He received his driver’s app without having a car inspection or an interview with anyone from Uber, even though, he added, “I intentionally lied on some of my answers.”
Scanlon never worked as a driver. He co-sponsored a bill that required background checks and insurance, including “app-on, app-off” coverage that’s more comprehensive when drivers are working. He wanted stricter background checks and other measures as well, but compromised — allowing Uber to do its own background checks for interim approval, followed by FBI checks, which take much longer and cost more.
The taxi industry, claiming an illegal onslaught by Uber, wanted full regulation, including a requirement that Uber would not refuse rides in urban neighborhoods — important to the legislature’s Black and Puerto Rican Caucus — or for disabled people.
“I want common ground,” Scanlon said, adding that both Uber and the taxi industry needed to see a bigger picture.
Most elected officials publicly say just that — they see both sides and want a workable deal. And, of course, many try to paint opponents as extremists.
When the compromise Uber bill came to a vote in the House, Scanlon knew he had plenty of votes. As the co-sponsor, he had a right to bring up his amendments, calling for stricter regulation. By several accounts, he would have prevailed — at some political cost.
He would have risked ticking off the chairman of the transportation committee, where the bill started, not to mention House Speaker Brendan Sharkey, who needs to keep order if he wants to control the big nut, the state budget.
Even without that, Scanlon — who works for U.S. Sen. Chris Murphy and reminds me of a younger Murphy in the state legislature — is a bit of an upstart; he later was one of only 11 Democrats to vote against the budget.
And so Scanlon held his fire and the bill passed overwhelmingly.
Like the Tesla bill, it languished in the Senate. The reason: key senators — and in the waning hours, everyone is key — wanted some of those stricter amendments.
This angered Themis Klarides, Republican leader in the House, who wanted the compromise — because some regulation was better than none at all. With Uber, unlike Tesla, the company could do what it wanted if lawmakers didn’t act.
In the waning days and hours, Uber had its drivers lobby to kill the amendments. Klarides trekked up one flight of stairs to the Senate.
“I said, ‘I totally understand your concerns and your interests, but let’s just do this,’ ” Klarides recounted just after the midnight deadline.
The idea, as with many bills, was to pass something now, then come back next year for another try. There was some back-and-forth in the Senate — over what? “You never know this time of year,” Klarides said — and everyone agreed to drop the amendments.
But by then it was too late.
“I did the best I could,” said Sen. Carlo Leone, D-Stamford, who, as Senate vice-chairman of the transportation committee, was the bill’s driver. “We were close to being able to call the bill but then the budget took over.”
Falling Short
Leone, as it happened, was also the senator in the spotlight for the Tesla bill, once it passed the House. The bill took a similar path of compromise, as Tesla wanted the right to open five stores and ended up with a bill allowing three.
Tesla, like Uber, and like Total Wine, made an economic development argument. That’s the language of legislation in this lean era, even among advocates for social programs. At each location, Tesla would hire 10 to 25 people and spend $7 million to $10 million.
The Connecticut Automotive Retailers Association, led by former Sen. James Fleming, fought hard, not wanting a precedent of car sales without independent dealers. It grew ugly, with Tesla opponents launching a “Tesla Crash” website, implying the cars — known for their safety — were unsafe.
The association agreed to language that limited the exception to Tesla. Did Fleming’s group back down because it also received long-desired legislation strengthening dealers’ position with manufacturers? Some say yes, some say no.
Sen. Art Linares, R-Westbrook, a 26-year-old Tesla owner, badly wanted the bill. But as a member of the minority party, he couldn’t bring it up for a vote.
Even though Leone voted for a version of the bill in his transportation committee, he wasn’t willing to fight for it. “I was a little concerned about drafting the bill for one company,” Leone said early Thursday as Democratic senators gathered for post-session libations.
And Leone added: “There’s a lot of dealers that are in everyone’s district.”
The dealers, as it turned out, were not all behind Fleming’s compromise. Sen. Beth Bye, D-West Hartford, said she might have supported the Tesla bill, but early on she promised the Gengras family — one of the largest auto dealers in the state — that she wouldn’t back it.
Most people expect the Tesla compromise to prevail, perhaps next year — or, it is whispered, as a quiet add to the budget “implementer” bills.
Nicholas, the Tesla executive, made the point that three states — Georgia, New Jersey and Maryland — recently passed similar bills in one session. But he dared not criticize Connecticut’s system.
Trump Card
One factor might have changed the outcomes for Tesla and Uber. The Senate transportation chairman, Andrew Maynard, D-Stonington, kept that title through the session even though he only partially participated, as he recovered from a brain injury suffered in a fall.
That left only Leone, the transportation vice chairman, representing that committee’s leadership in the Senate. With the chairman more active, would Tesla or Uber have come up? No one can say for sure.
Total, by contrast, had the ultimate champion: Gov. Dannel P. Malloy. In his budget speech, Malloy made what he called a pro-consumer case for expanding hours of operation, allowing chains to own more stores and eliminating minimum bottle pricing stronger than any lobbyist could make.
Lawmakers didn’t go along. The budget crafted by Democrats in the legislature included none of that. On the floors of the House and Senate, there was no bill helping Total for lawmakers to consider.
By the time the closed-door budget talks were done, Malloy had his way, partly — and the result was in the budget agreement itself. Total, with stores in Manchester and Norwalk with another planned in Milford, would get the right to open one more next year and a fifth the year after.
And the hours for package stores were extended again, over the objections of independent package store owners, to 10 p.m. Minimum bottle pricing was maintained, which, Bye and others said, represents a victory for the package store owners.
Many in the legislature didn’t want to allow the added locations, especially for much larger superstores. But as a part of a $40 billion budget that had just two days of debate, that issue fell by the wayside.
Ultimately, we had one failed bill that led to continued free rein for the upstart company, Uber; one failed bill that led another upstart, Tesla, to have to try again; and one compromise reached in secret negotiations, which gives yet another upstart more yardage.
The moral: When it comes to changing old regulations to fit new commerce, there is no straight line, no inevitable course of history and no one wins the whole ballgame.
“It’s always a turf war and I get that but there is also reality as far as modernization,” said Klarides, the House minority leader, who was upset about the lack of any Uber rules. “It’s up to us to regulate them.”
