Inside Connecticut’s Citizens’ Assembly: How Randomly Selected Residents Aim to Build Consensus on Property Taxes

Rick Harrison
Members of the Connecticut Citizens' Assembly on Property Taxes listen to a presentation from seats in an auditorium

Members of the Connecticut Citizens’ Assembly on Property Taxes first met in July and will present their recommendations at the end of September. Photo by Allie Barton

When 100 randomly selected Connecticut citizens first gathered in July to deliberate on property taxes, the organizers gave them the option to govern themselves. They embraced the responsibility, voting overwhelmingly in favor. 

The vote endorsed creating a Citizen Governance Committee of seven randomly selected members rotated every session to help guide the way the rest of the process should unfold. In addition, any citizen can go to the CGC with a question, and 10 members can directly put a motion to a vote by the whole assembly, including over the head of the seven CGC members if necessary.

However, this direct democracy scheme left unspecified how motions would be managed and by whom. 

Christine Baptiste, a former Board of Education chair from Bridgeport, realized they needed someone to lead the process.

“If we don’t have a process, it can lead to chaos, which was my fear the first weekend,” Baptiste said. “I was like, ‘Oh, boy.’”

After the first session, the citizens introduced a method for the selection of a chair to handle motions.

“It is citizen-led, so we have created the processes that have … been put in place in order for us to come to a consensus,” said Dawris Gomez, another assembly member from Bridgeport. 

The assembly will present its recommendations later this month. And State Comptroller Sean Scanlon has committed to presenting those recommendations to the state legislature. 

Hélène Landemore, a professor of political science at Yale who designed the assembly and helps supervise it, described the process as productive but compressed, noting that participants probably could use at least one more full day to complete the work. She said the remaining time pressure has created some stress because recommendations need to be sufficiently detailed to be taken seriously by policymakers.

She said the assembly experienced some early tensions, including debates around concepts such as equity versus equality, but that participants have generally managed those disagreements constructively.

“They all agree there’s a problem with the property tax system,” Landemore said. “They want to solve it. They don’t have the same vision of the solutions, but they’re willing to work really hard together.”

Slide projected on a screen with Connecticut Citizens' Assembly logo and a mandate: Help state and municipal leaders understand what Connecticut residents consider fair, workable, and legitimate when it comes to funding and delivering local services.

Photo by Allie Barton

The assembly is a collaboration between the Connecticut Office of the State Comptroller, the Connecticut Conference of Municipalities (CCM), the University of Connecticut Department of Political Science, and Yale’s Institution for Social and Policy Studies’ Democratic Innovations program. Democratic Innovations seeks to identify and test new ideas for improving the quality of democratic representation and governance.

“This project and so much of Hélène’s work provide us with a wonderful opportunity to investigate how institutions like citizens assemblies operate,” said Alan Gerber, ISPS director and Sterling Professor of Political Science. “We are delighted to support research to advance our understanding of existing and novel approaches to democracy.”

So far, the assembly has met in three in-person sessions of one or two days and two virtual sessions of four hours. Earlier this month, four representatives chosen to speak for the group characterized the work as a challenge to balance ambitious and practical ideas. And to build consensus.

“We’re all coming together, spending a lot of time together, doing a lot of work,” said Carly Tuthill, an assembly member from Northfield. “So, we want it to be meaningful. We want it to be taken seriously.”

Some participants said they expected conflict but found the group largely united for a common purpose.

“Everyone, every single person that I’ve met there is there for the same reason,” Tuthill said. “I thought that this was, like, going to be a bloodbath. But it’s really been so beautiful.”

Jim Farrell, a member from East Haven, agreed.

“Everybody in this group has been professional and have been great to get along with,” he said.

Gomez said she has witnessed some conflict but that she attributed it to the participants’ commitment to the project.

“We’re all fighting for the same mission,” she said.

Much of the early work involved education on the issues.

“For those not involved with politics or finance, it can be very overwhelming,” Farrell said. “This group really laid the groundwork so that everybody was on the same level.”

Tuthill appreciated the effort.

“This process has been so interesting because I’ve learned so much,” she said. “And I’m still trying to wrap my head around all the ideas.”

More recently, the group has begun narrowing down their proposals.

“We started out with something like 60 big ideas that we put on poster paper as teams,” Gomez said. “We’re going into a wordsmithing stage because we understand … how this wordplay can make a big difference on the impact that we’re trying to make.”

Gomez characterized the process as a “game changer” by “bringing people together outside of their individual echo chambers” in a democratic process.

“There’s a huge hope that this inspires more courageous action for us to improve our state and our country,” she said. “Courage is infectious.”