MAY 20, 2019 VOL. 55, No. 20
westfaironline.com
The No Tolls CT group delivering stacks of petitions with over 100,000 signatures to the Lamont administration on May 9.
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CRAFT BEER
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LEADERSHIP CHANGE
Toll troubles in Connecticut BIG MONEY VS. GRASSROOTS EFFORTS PART OF FIERCE DEBATE
BY KEVIN ZIMMERMAN kzimmerman@westfairinc.com
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he fight over bringing tolls back to C on ne c t ic ut ’s highways is not limited to state Democrats and Republicans — it’s also pitting a deep-pocketed, protolls coalition called Move CT Forward against a grassroots group with the straightforward moniker No Tolls CT. “Tolls are just another
tax burden for residents,” No Tolls founder Patrick Sasser told the Business Journal. “The taxpayers of Connecticut have been very outspoken about this and made their feelings very clear in different polls.” One such poll, conducted by Sacred Heart University’s Institute for Public Policy, found 54.5 of respondents saying they’d alter their driving habits by avoiding toll roads should e-tolling be implemented on major highways in the state. But when
asked whether they’d be more likely to support tolls if it were guaranteed that the money “would only be spent on roads, bridges and highways,” 51 percent said they would either continue to support tolls or be more likely to do so. Sasser also noted that Connecticut already has the second-highest tax burden of any state. The Stamford firefighter, who also runs an excavating business, said residents have grown tired of hearing how “our bridges are about to collapse, but the money (from the state’s Special Transportation Fund) never seems to go there. So is there a crisis or is there not?” On May 9, Sasser presented Gov. Ned Lamont’s » TOLLS
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TONG APPEARS ON ‘60 MINUTES’ AS HE LEADS LAWSUIT AGAINST GENERIC DRUGMAKERS BY PHIL HALL phall@westfairinc.com
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onnecticut Attorney General William Tong is taking the leadership role in a 43-state coalition against 20 generic drug manufacturers and 15 pharmaceutical industry executives, charging them with a broad conspiracy to artificially inflate and manipulate prices, thereby reducing competition and restraining trade on more than 100 generic drugs. The lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court for the District of Connecticut, argues that companies, including Teva, Sandoz, Mylan and Pfizer coordinated an industrywide campaign to fix prices, allocate markets and
rig bids for generic drugs for diseases and conditions ranging from basic infections to diabetes, cancer, epilepsy, multiple sclerosis, HIV, ADHD and more. The attorneys general are charging that some of these coordinated price increases resulted in spikes of more than 1,000 percent. Tong argued the case before a national television audience during the May 12 broadcast of CBS’ “60 Minutes.” “It’s what we believe to be the biggest corporate cartel in history and probably the biggest antitrust price-fixing case in this country, certainly right now and maybe in our nation’s history,” Tong said May 13 on “CBS This Morning.” » DRUGMAKERS
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