Campaign Contributions Investigation Lingers Over Dillon Stadium Promoter

A state investigation of tens of thousands of dollars in potentially illegal campaign contributions continues to hang over the mostly state-funded project to rebuild and revive Hartford’s long moribund Dillon Stadium in Colt Park as the home of a new United Soccer League expansion team, Hartford Athletic, that is being assembled by the local Hartford Sports Group (HSG) partnership.

The investigating agency, the State Elections Enforcement Commission, took no action Wednesday, in its final meeting of 2018, toward concluding its month-old probe of $47,500 in campaign contributions made by HSG lead partner Bruce Mandell, his wife and their college freshman daughter to the state Republican Party and its unsuccessful nominee for governor, Bob Stefanowski, this past August and September.

The pending SEEC probe might be bad news for the Dillon project in two ways. First, any SEEC decision that the Mandell contributions were illegal could disqualify HSG as a contractor on Dillon and blow the whole thing up. But, even if the SEEC decides in the Mandells’ favor, serious problems still could result if that decision is delayed for months beyond when it next meets in January — a possibility, based on past probes’ duration — because the contract for the overall Dillon project can’t be signed until the SEEC makes its ruling. And, without that contract, the vision of a renovated stadium with a Hartford home team can’t be realized.

Home games for the new team are supposed to start on May 4, but some officials are pretty much resigned that Dillon won’t be ready. That means play would shift for the time being to the much larger (and, probably mostly empty) Rentschler Field in East Hartford — a point driven home Friday when Robert Rinker, chairman of a State Contracting Standards Board subcommittee, asked Executive Director Michael Freimuth of the Capital Region Development Authority (CRDA) how badly the project is being affected by the lack of a signed contract.

Construction is underway via an interim legal agreement between the City of Hartford and CRDA, but officials say an overall contract called the “Stadium Use Agreement” still must be signed by three parties — the city, the CRDA and HSG. And the longer it goes unsigned, the more construction calendars might be affected, Freimuth said.

Rinker asked if Freimuth foresaw “maybe a Yard Goats situation” at Dillon. That was a reference to the Hartford Yard Goats having to play their 2016 inaugural baseball season on the road because of legal disputes and delays in construction of their new Hartford stadium.

“We hope not,” Freimuth replied.

Rinker asked if Freimuth had “any indication” of when the SEEC was “going to take the matter up … and going to decide?”

“No, I don’t,” Freimuth said.

The SEEC has refused comment on the details and progress of its probe, which it voted to embark on in November after a lawyer for HSG, Kevin Reynolds, submitted a Nov. 7 “self-report complaint” asking the election agency to investigate the large contributions by the Mandells, as well as small donations by Bruce Mandell’s two partners. Reynolds wrote that the contributions may have been “in violation of” a state clean-election law that prohibits state contractors, and even “prospective state contractors,” from donating to political parties and candidates for statewide offices such as governor. That prohibition covers not only top executives of prospective state-contracting firms, but also their wives and dependent children.

Reynolds also argued that, despite his self-report of the potential improprieties, there were no real violations because HSG is, in reality, working under an agreement with the city, not as a state contractor. If the SEEC decides there were indeed violations based on a finding that HSG is a prospective state contractor, he asked that the SEEC find “mitigating circumstances” that would enable HSG to continue in its role without disqualification. CRDA has joined in that request.

Self-report not HSG’s idea

It wasn’t the idea of Mandell and his HSG partners to come forward to the SEEC with the self-report, Freimuth told the state contracting board subcommittee Friday. Instead, it was the CRDA that insisted they had to do it before they could sign the three-way contract.

Freimuth has told The Courant that CRDA informed Mandell and his partners months ago that they needed to fill out some standard forms as prospective state contractors to affirm that they had not violated clean-election laws, but “there was a disagreement.” He said that Mandell and his partners contended that they aren’t prospective state contractors, because Dillon is city-owned and it is a Hartford project, even though the state is providing the city with $10 million to spend toward its current $14 million budget.

Source: The Hartford Courant