Nancy S. Wyman, a prescient voice of caution about Connecticut’s unfunded pension liability as state comptroller, then the lieutenant governor who gave Democrats a crucial tie-breaking vote as the presiding officer in an evenly divided state Senate, died Wednesday. She was 80.
Her death was announced by the office of Gov. Ned Lamont.
“Nancy Wyman was a good friend to me, a good friend to Democrats and a good friend to the people of Connecticut,” Lamont said in a statement issued with Lt. Gov. Susan Bysiewicz, who said, “Nancy was one of a kind.”
Wyman was the comptroller in 2010, a winner of four statewide elections and a popular figure among Democratic insiders, when Stamford Mayor Dannel P. Malloy coaxed her to abandon an easy run for reelection for a fifth term to be his running mate in a difficult campaign for governor.
The Malloy-Wyman ticket ended their party’s 20-year losing streak in gubernatorial elections, and Malloy credited Wyman as a factor in him winning the Democratic nomination and open seat. Their 6,404-vote win was the smallest margin of victory in a Connecticut gubernatorial contest in 56 years.
“Nancy Wyman’s decision to abandon a safe reelection to the comptroller’s office to join my campaign is the best thing that ever happened to me politically,” Malloy said near the end of his second and final term in December 2018. “That remains truer now than ever. I could not ask for a better friend and partner in government.”
Wyman was a happy warrior — often partisan, but rarely unpleasant. She was a petite Jewish woman from Brooklyn, N.Y., her origins evident in a raspy accent that never faded. Her ever-present spiked-heeled pumps, worn even when marching in parades, became a playful brand.
Her unlikely political base was Tolland, a Hartford bedroom suburb of 15,000 where she and her husband, Michael, then a Travelers insurance executive, settled in 1973 to a raise a family.
She was a progressive, protective of gay rights before they became synonymous with Democratic politics. As comptroller, she offered same-sex domestic partner health benefits to state employees and testified before the General Assembly in favor of a bill to legalize gay marriage.
“I can sum up my support for this bill in one sentence: To violate the rights of a few is to violate the rights of all,” Wyman said. “And until Connecticut recognizes the civil marriage of same-sex couples, the rights and liberties promised in our federal and state constitutions are lessened for every one of us.”
Wyman’s elective career spanned 40 years, beginning with her election in 1979 to the Board of Education in Tolland. She served eight years on the school board, followed by eight in the state House of Representatives, 16 as comptroller and eight as lieutenant governor. She left office in January 2019 after Malloy declined to seek a third term.
Wyman was born April 21, 1946 in New York on the eve of the post-war baby boom. She was the younger of two sisters by seven years. In a Hartford Courant interview, she mused, “I never knew if I was a surprise or not.”
Her upbringing in Brooklyn was devoid of politics. Her dissatisfaction with her two daughters’ education in the public schools was the inspiration to run and generally become active in local Democratic politics.
An X-ray technician by training, Wyman worked as a legislative aide to Sen. Michael Skelley, D-Tolland, who lost his seat in 1984 when Ronald Reagan carried Connecticut in a landslide and Republicans won control of both chambers of the General Assembly.
Two years later, Wyman was elected to the state House of Representatives on a ticket led by Gov. William A. O’Neill, contributing to the Democrats retaking control of the legislature. O’Neill was a social and fiscal moderate opposed to enacting a state income tax.
Wyman would be one of the lawmakers comprising a small and fragile majority that eventually stood with O’Neill’s successor, Gov. Lowell P. Weicker Jr., a Republican-turned-independent, in adopting a tax on wages in 1991 and lowering the high rates on sales, businesses and investment income.
Her election to the General Assembly came at a time of transition from careful ticket balancing achieved by party insiders at state nominating conventions to an era of primaries. Ticket balancing meant both opportunities and limits for Jews in Democratic politics in Connecticut.
Abe Ribicoff had been elected as Connecticut’s first Jewish governor in 1954, backed by John Bailey, the legendary Democratic boss. But when Joseph I. Lieberman ran for attorney general in 1982, his candidacy was used against Patricia Hendel, a candidate for secretary of the state. Both were Jewish, and the conventional wisdom was the statewide ticket could not include more than one Jew.
Wyman took pride in helping destroy that assumption in 1994, when four Jews competed for seven statewide offices, all Democrats: Wyman for comptroller, Miles Rapoport for secretary of the state, Richard Blumenthal for attorney general and Lieberman for U.S. Senate.
Wyman and Rapoport were running for open seats. Blumenthal had been elected in 1990 and Lieberman in 1988, and both were seeking reelection to second terms.
All four were victorious, their religious affiliations scarcely noted.
Wyman was the first woman elected comptroller, an office responsible for overseeing health and retirement benefits for 200,000 state employees and retirees, as well as providing a monthly and year-end analysis of the state’s finances.
In that latter role, the liberal Wyman emerged as a voice of caution in the Democratic Party on the state’s unfunded liabilities for pensions and retiree health care. She opposed a retirement incentive plan proposed by Gov. M. Jodi Rell to close a projected deficit, warning that the pension and retiree health costs would outweigh any short-term savings and exacerbate a growing crisis.
Connecticut long had ignored actuarial standards for making annual contributions to pension funds. By the end of 2009, Connecticut had $15.8 billion in unfunded pension obligations for state employees and teachers, $21.7 billion for retiree health care and $18 billion in bonded debt.
“Our kids and our grandkids are the ones going to be paying for this,” Wyman told the Connecticut Mirror. “To me, so much of what we do is short-sighted.”
Five months later, when the state’s dire fiscal state was becoming a major issue in the 2010 gubernatorial election, Wyman accepted Malloy’s invitation to form a ticket, attracted in part by the opportunity to set fiscal policies, not merely critique them. She joked it was a long courtship, one he had begun years earlier.
“He’s inviting me to be part of that as a partner,” Wyman said. “I’ve been doing it from the outside and not in those rooms where the decisions are being made. Dan said as a partner I’d be there.”
The Malloy-Wyman administration existed in a near-constant state of fiscal crisis, a consequence of the lingering effects of the 2008 recession, as well as the need to confront the neglect that created one of the nation’s worst unfunded pension liabilities.
Despite the fiscal difficulties, the state made its actuarially determined contributions to the pension fund in every one of the Malloy’s eight years as governor, a trend continued by Lamont, who also has used a string of surpluses to significantly pay down the pension debt Wyman found so worrisome.
“Her expertise, based on what she had done in state government, was extremely useful to our thinking and the steps that we knew ultimately we had to take — even though you know those things were not popular, but we didn’t run to be popular,” Malloy said Wednesday. “We ran to get the job done, and she was always there pushing to get the job done.”
Wyman’s constitutional role as the presiding officer of the Senate made her vital to Democrats retaining effective control of the chamber after Republicans flipped three seats in 2016, producing an 18-18 tie for the last two years of her tenure.
She had broken other ties earlier, beginning in 2011 with a vote for a bill decriminalizing possession of small amounts of marijuana, an early element of Malloy’s criminal-justice reforms supported by Wyman. Democrats held a majority then, but her vote was necessary after four Democrats voted with every Republican in opposition.
Wyman was prepared to cast other more controversial tie-breaking votes, including the repeal of the death penalty and the creation of the first-in-the-nation mandate on private employers to provide at least minimal paid sick time. But those measures ultimately passed without her help.
One of her final tie-breaking votes was to ratify a controversial state-employees concession deal necessary to close a budget gap in August 2017, three months after Malloy had become a lame duck by declaring he would not seek a third term.
Wyman, who then was 71, would wait another three months before deciding she would not try to succeed Malloy, who was unpopular after a series of tax increases and budget cuts necessitated by faltering state revenue streams.
Had she run, Wyman said in an interview with CT Mirror, she believed she could have established an identity separate from Malloy, despite seven years of standing by his side and campaigning for him twice.
“Dan Malloy is not the reason I am not running,” she said.
Wyman, whose style of politics leaned toward conciliation, said the evolving nature of modern campaigning played a role in her decision. While partisan on issues, Wyman’s warmth and self-deprecating humor produced friendships across the aisle, including one with Rell, the GOP governor whose policies she occasionally critiqued as comptroller.
The routine savaging of candidates on social media takes a toll on families, one that she was uncomfortable seeing exacted on her husband, children and grandchildren, Wyman said. The game had changed.
She is survived by her husband, the Democratic registrar of voters in Tolland; their daughters and husbands, Stacey and Steve Papa and Meryl and Bill Baldwin; and grandchildren Kyle, Taylor, Lindsey, Max and Sydney.
To the last, she defended Malloy, who had to contend with an inherited deficit and revenue shortfalls in six of his eight years in office.
“I am appreciative to Dan for giving me this opportunity to serve as lieutenant governor,” Wyman said. “And I do think in the future people will look back at him and realize the good things he has done.”
One measure of her continued good standing with Democratic activists and insiders came a month after Lamont and Bysiewicz were elected as the successors to Malloy and Wyman.
The governor-elect faced a fight over removing Nick Balletto, who had initially been dismissive of Lamont as a candidate, as the Democratic state chair. Lamont decided the best way to ease out Balletto would be to endorse perhaps the one person who would be embraced by nearly everyone.
He chose Nancy Wyman.
This story was originally published by the Connecticut Mirror.
