Chris Powell: Bears become less cute in Conn.

A black bear (the kind that live in New England)

— Photo by Diginatur ]

MANCHESTER, Conn.

As their appearances in Connecticut become more frequent and damaging, bears become less cute and amusing.

According to the state Department of Energy and Environmental Protection, in the last two weeks:

-- A woman sitting in her back yard in Cheshire was attacked by a bear that snuck up on her from behind. She suffered two puncture wounds before managing to scare it away.

-- A man driving a small car on the Route 8 expressway in Torrington struck a bear that ran in front of him, causing the car to crash into a guard rail. The driver was uninjured but the bear was killed and turned out to weigh more than 500 pounds, almost as much as the car.

-- A bear and its cub broke into a car in Winsted, destroying the interior.

-- And residents of a home in Winchester interrupted a bear's attempt to break in.

An official of the environmental agency says Connecticut is "good habitat" for bears and "they are here to stay." 

Why is that? 

It's because while state law now permits killing bears in self-defense or in defense of pets, in other encounters people are just supposed to shoo bears onto a neighbor's property. Bears have no natural predator except man, and state government long has prohibited hunting them. Indeed, Connecticut is the only New England state without a bear-hunting season.

If bears really are "here to stay," they won't be stopped by securing trash cans and barbecue grills and taking down birdfeeders, as the environmental agency and bear lovers urge. There were no trash cans, barbecue grills, and birdfeeders in the forests through which the bears migrated back into Connecticut. Without predators, their population increased naturally and the northern forests couldn't support all of them. 

So now bears will be reproducing in Connecticut until every town has many of them, and the more the state is "good habitat" for bears, the less it will be "good habitat" for people. Only a long hunting season will stop bears, and that won't happen until state legislators are more scared of bears and the harm they increasingly do than they are scared of the bear lovers and apologists.

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Connecticut Inside Investigator, a product of the Yankee Institute, reported the other day that state government has bigger management deficiencies than the supposed lack of diversity that has become Gov. Ned Lamont's new focus.

The news organization said Central Connecticut State University has paid nearly $763,000 to Christopher Dukes, its former director of student conduct, who, the state Supreme Court recently ruled, was wrongly fired in 2018 after police responded to a complaint that he had assaulted his wife at their home. Police arrested him there after a standoff.  

The university seems to have decided that since the director of student conduct handles complaints of abuse and harassment, it wouldn't be right to have a director who was in that kind of trouble himself. But the man denied the charges, they were dropped eventually, and the incident involved conduct off the job, not on the job.

His dismissal went to arbitration, which ordered him rehired. The university appealed to Superior Court, where the arbitration award was vacated and the dismissal upheld. But then the man appealed to the state Supreme Court, which overturned the Superior Court and reinstated the arbitration award with its huge liability in back pay.

Was the university right or wrong to persist with the dismissal though its cause did not involve the employee's job performance and the criminal charges were dropped? There is an argument on both sides, but a risk to due process should have been clear to the university. It might have been better just to transfer him to a position not involving complaints of abuse and harassment. 

In any case state government looks ridiculous here, and if the General Assembly ever comes to think that $763,000 is a lot of money to waste, it should investigate what happened, ascertain what legal advice the university got, and set clear policy so this kind of thing can't happen again. 

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Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years (CPowell@cox.net).