With the state's economy in free fall in 1990 and its budget deep in the red, the prospect of an income tax in Connecticut was more real than ever. However, finding a politician brave enough to advocate for it and popular enough to get elected and see it through was a very tall order.

Undaunted, state Rep. William J. Cibes Jr., D-New London, accepted the challenge, touting himself during his short-lived campaign for governor that year as "A big man for a big job."

Cibes, who passed away Feb. 15 at age 80, never shied away from difficult challenges; he relished them. And, more than just about anyone else in state government found a way to overcome them, if not with reason and gentle persuasion then with political muscle — he was effective at both.

Such was the paradox of Bill Cibes, a bookish, Princeton-educated professor at Connecticut College who happily participated in the often-unkempt business of New London's street politics. He narrowly won a seat on the city's Board of Education, but shortly after lost his first bid for state representative in a 1977 special election to succeed Richard R. Martin, who had died in office.

Jay B. Levin, who was one of Cibes's students in three classes at Connecticut College and would later serve next to him in the state legislature, remembers how his mentor took the loss to Republican Ralph L. Wadleigh.

"Bill lost a very close race there, and I remember sitting next to him and Peg (Cibes's wife), going over the results and trying to console him," Levin recalled. "He said: 'I'm running again, and I will beat him.' And he did."

Unabashed liberal

Once elected in 1978 as the state representative for New London's 39th District, Cibes was an unabashed liberal who advocated louder than anyone for a state income tax. Despite that, however, he would co-chair the 1986 and 1990 campaigns of then-Gov. William A. O'Neill, a moderate Democrat, whose hardline position on a state wage tax was "over my dead body."

Cibes rose to the rank of Deputy Speaker, under House Speaker Irving J. Stolberg, D-New Haven, in 1988. He could endear colleagues with his Kansas farm-boy smile or win them over with his intellect and firm grasp of issues. Or he could send them scrambling with an infrequent but explosive display of temper that once shattered a telephone in the well of the House when he got unwelcome information from the other end of the call during a session.

While some may have viewed his devout loyalty to O'Neill as hypocritical, Cibes explained it matter-of-factly as pragmatism. He was never going to change O'Neill's opposition to an income tax, and O'Neill was never going to convince him that an income tax wasn't best way out of Connecticut's fiscal mess at the time. But Cibes was younger than the governor, so he bided his time.

And when O'Neill's once-soaring popularity collapsed with his state's economy and the budget deficit grew to record proportions, the governor ended his 1990 re-election campaign and Cibes announced he was running for the seat.

Given the public's disdain for an income tax and Congressman Bruce Morrison's win that summer at the state convention, Cibes's campaign was quixotic. And while he had enough support to force a September primary in 1990, Morrison, who had sidestepped questions about an income tax, defeated him easily for the Democratic gubernatorial nomination.

Former U.S. Sen. Lowell P. Weicker Jr., who had lost his Washington seat to Democrat Joseph Lieberman two years earlier, had also jumped into the 1990 race for governor under A Connecticut Party, which he had founded for his third-party run. Weicker won the race for governor, defeating Morrison and Republican Congressman John G. Rowland to become Connecticut's first third-party governor since William T. Minor was elected in 1855 on the American Party ticket.

Facts of the matter

Weicker had also tiptoed around the income tax question, saying enactment of a tax on wages during Connecticut's economic slump would be like "throwing gasoline on a fire." Most people took that as tacit opposition, but Weicker didn't exactly say he wouldn't enact it. And when he announced shortly after the election that Cibes would serve as his budget secretary, the die was cast, Connecticut taxpayers had their answer, and the battle lines within the legislature were drawn.

"Ultimately, Weicker knew he had to support an income tax, which (resulted in) a bloody year of battle, a legislative session that would not end," recalled Levin. "Well, it was Bill who schooled Weicker on the facts of the matter, Bill was appointed OPM (Office of Policy and Management) Secretary, and the rest, as they say, is history."

That year, the legislative session that was supposed to end in early June dragged on bitterly until November as lawmakers wrangled over the budget issue. In the end, Weicker and Cibes managed to cobble together enough House and Senate votes to narrowly pass the income tax, which remains in place today.

Critics complain the wage tax has been a license to spend, pointing out that the state's budget has more than tripled since the tax went into effect. Supporters, however, point to reductions of other taxes and the steadier, more predicable flow of revenue that prevents wild budget swings from year to year.

There was much more to Cibes's public service, however, than the income tax. He fought fiercely for affordable housing, gay rights and increased funding for PILOT (the state's Payment In Lieu Of Taxes formula) that was especially beneficial to cities like New London that had high percentages of tax-exempt property. As chairman of the powerful Finance, Revenue and Bonding Committee, Cibes was also able to steer millions in bonding money to projects in and around his New London district.

Together with Levin, Sen. Mark Powers, D-East Lyme, and Rep. Janet Polinsky, D-Waterford, who co-chaired the legislature's budget committee and represented a portion of New London, Cibes was part of a delegation that brought substantial legislative clout in the 1980s to a city that desperately needed it.

Post-political career

In 1994, Weicker's final year in office, Cibes was appointed president of the Connecticut State University System and later served as its chancellor until he retired in 2006.

As Connecticut newsroom staffs shrank and state political and legislative coverage waned, Cibes helped found The Connecticut Mirror (now CT Mirror) a publicly-funded, online-only news platform that focuses largely on state government policy and politics. It began providing free news online in 2010, and Cibes served on the board of directors of its parent organization, the Connecticut News Project, from 2010 to 2018. Today, CT Mirror provides the best, most comprehensive coverage of Connecticut politics, policy, and government.

"I would be very hard pressed to name anyone who has made as much of an impact as Bill Cibes in the lives of Connecticut's residents over the past 40 years," said Powers, who served with him in the House before being elected to the Senate in 1986. "I consider him to be one of Connecticut's stars to whom all of us, even though most didn't know him, owe a profound debt of gratitude for his selfless contributions to the state of Connecticut. ... It's really hard to do justice to such a great, yet humble, human being. I really admired and loved the guy and really felt fortunate to have known him."

Indeed, the ever-humble Cibes was only too happy to let others bask in the limelight and claim credit for various accomplishments on which he had done most of the heavy lifting. For Bill Cibes — educator, politician, mentor, visionary — it wasn't about being in front of the camera and microphones or in the headlines, it was about doing whatever it took to get the job done.

And no one was better at it than he was.

Bill Stanley, a former reporter at The Day, is a retired vice president of Lawrence + Memorial Hospital.