Gifford Claims to Be Small Business Champion – Columbia’s Records Say Otherwise

To the Editor:

Will Gifford, the 21-year-old Republican candidate for Connecticut’s 8th House District, centers his campaign on one theme: he owns a small business.

“Today I own and operate my own small business — so I know firsthand what it means to make payroll, price a job, and watch Hartford add costs to both,” his campaign website says.

Versions of the claim appear at least four times on his publicly financed campaign website and again on his Facebook page. But no record shows the business exists. His website also doesn’t mention that Gifford is a UConn junior and president of the university’s Turning Point USA chapter.

On May 12, Gifford announced on Facebook that he had started a small-engine repair business, Gifford Repair Co. Weeks later, he had filed to run for the 8th District seat and won the Republican nomination with Tim Ackert’s endorsement, leaning hard on his experience with the problems every small business owner in rural eastern Connecticut faces.

The problem is that the business doesn’t appear to have ever been registered. No company by that name or owned by William Gifford appears in the Secretary of the State’s business registry. Under Connecticut General Statutes §35-1a, a sole proprietor conducting business under a name other than his own must obtain a trade name certificate from the clerk of the town where the business is principally transacted. I went to the Columbia Town Clerk’s office, where Gifford lives, and two staff members confirmed that no trade name certificate is on file. 

When I called Gifford and asked about it, he responded, “So what?” When I said, “So you don’t have a business?” He hung up.The Independent Party, the Connecticut State Fraternal Order of Police, and the district’s five Republican town committees have endorsed Gifford. Their members include small business owners who worry about payroll and sending their money to Hartford. That support is partly rooted in a credential that appears to have been built by an undergraduate with a thin résumé in the weeks before his campaign began.

Gifford was not the Republicans’ first choice. Ackert held the seat for 16 years until April, when he joined Erin Stewart’s ticket as her lieutenant governor candidate. Stewart dropped out weeks later after reports that she had charged nearly $207,000 in personal purchases to New Britain’s city credit card.

Ackert chose Columbia Republican Michael Carroll to succeed him. Days later, it came out that Carroll had been arrested in 2017 on charges connected to Nazi and Ku Klux Klan graffiti painted on nine properties in eastern Connecticut. Carroll withdrew, and Gifford was the only person willing to run.

Gifford’s Democratic opponent, Francis Lombard of Coventry, has actually run a small business. Over more than a decade in Los Angeles, he worked as an editor at a publisher called Humanoids while writing and developing animation for Marvel, Cartoon Network and Disney. In 2007, he co-founded a comic book publisher, Antix Press. After it lost its financing in the 2009 recession, he moved east and worked on the production line, then in quality assurance, at Friendly’s and later at HP Hood, enforcing food-safety standards. In 2021, he began managing campaigns for the Coventry Democrats.

Lombard told me that Connecticut Republicans are pitching the idea “that by voting red, everything gets solved,” but that “what matters is who the candidate is, not the party: their experience, their outlook, their empathy towards what constituents need.” Of his opponent, he said, “There is an underlying aspect of this candidate that he is not talking about, and I think it will affect how he represents the eighth.”

I am 34 years old, and the 8th District has elected a Republican in every election I have been old enough to vote in. I am always open to hearing what new candidates have to say, regardless of party. But as someone who runs a registered small business in the district, I find it bothersome that a candidate would misrepresent himself so egregiously to curry favor with the hard-working families of the 8th District.

Tyler Kania
Columbia, CT