Foley, during batting practice in Hartford, swings and misses a couple times

 

tom and heatherIf any crowd would be a friendly one for GOP gubernatorial candidate Tom Foley (Dixon photo), it would be the Metro Hartford Alliance group of business and non-profit leaders gathered in a Main Street function room downtown to listen to his stump speech and ask questions. But with about 15 minutes left in a 45-minute appearance (Gov. Malloy visited with them last week), Foley first admitted he knows little about the major issue facing Hartford these days: the luring of the minor-league baseball team from New Britain, a move that Malloy has promised no state support. Then he recommended that the state’s $7-billion annual healthcare system be run like “great companies,” namely Walmart. This comment was followed a short time later by an announcement that the giant retailer will be cutting health benefits for many part-time workers.

Here are some Foley quotes from this morning’s event.

rock cats

On the Rock Cats role in a proposed Hartford development: “I don’t know a lot of specifics about the stadium. If the state government got involved in taking a baseball team away from one city and giving it to another, I think that’s a mistake. I don’t know if that happened or not. I understand that a lot of people believe that sports teams in a town don’t create as much economic value as people think they do. You create a lot of jobs when you build a stadium, but the actual business it brings in to the city after that is a little questionable, so I don’t know if it’s a good economic investment for the city. And I don’t really know how the city is going to finance it without the help of the state government. I don’t know how Gov. Malloy can say ‘well we don’t have anything to with it’ when the state government is paying so much of the budget to the city. So if the city is going to have to repay these bonds, it doesn’t compute for me that it’s not coming somehow from the state budget, so the taxpayers of the state will be paying for a stadium to be built in Hartford that was taken away from New Britain. I’m happy for Hartford if it’s happening but I’m not sure that it’s good policy overall for the state.”

On health care: “We have to make it more efficient and more competitive. State government is the largest consumer of healthcare services in Connecticut. It’s almost $7 billion. When you’re that large a customer, you need to either be a bully and tell everyone that ‘ah I’m only gonna pay 70 or 80 percent of what everybody else pays and you can figure out the rest.’ Or you can be like a Walmart or some other great company that are market dominators and you can sit down with your suppliers and others involved and engage in doing what you do for your customer and say ‘How can we make this better? How can we make better products delivered in a more timely manner for less cost per customer?’ Nobody is doing that in Connecticut.”

This was said a minutes before word was emerging from Walmart HQ in Arkansas (found Sam Walton, left) that health benefit were being cut for many part-time workers. walmart