Don Pesci: Progressives sticking it to the towns
The Norfolk (Conn.) Public Library (1888-89), George Keller, architect. Norfolk is a wealthy town, with many weekend and vacation houses, in the southern Berkshires.
VERNON, Conn.
News is what people don't want you to print. Everything thing else is ads.
—Press Mogul William Randolph Hearst (1863-1951), press mogul and poliitician
Does the following headline from Hearst media ring a bell? – “Controversial housing reform stumbles but Democrats vow to revive it.” Here is the story’s lede graph: “A controversial bill that would make it easier to file lawsuits against towns if they didn’t support new affordable housing has quietly died amid a Republican threat to filibuster the issue in a crucial legislative committee.”
Progressives are more than eager to sow the desert with legal corpses, later to be disposed of by iron-jawed jackals – provided the corpse is, relatively speaking, an independent municipality or a police organization. A recent bill in Connecticut’s progressive General Assembly, spearheaded by state Sen. Gary Winfield, that withdraws legal immunity from police departments has resulted in an exodus of police from the state’s larger, high-crime impact cities to less chancy suburbs. But not to worry, progressives will still provide legal sanctuary and immunity for aggressive, progressive attorneys general and tax hungry legislators.
The quarrel between cities and towns is an old – very old – story. Since Roman times, urban centers and what we in the United States call municipalities or towns have been in a constant struggle for supremacy. The needs of cities and those of suburban municipalities are necessarily different. In Connecticut, suburban governance has been largely successful, urban governance, to put it kindly, less so.
There are three, not two, forms of government in the United States: federal, state, and municipal or county government. The Connecticut General Assembly abolished all county governments on Oct. 1, 1960.
Of the three forms of government, municipal or town governments in Connecticut are by far the older. Hartford, Connecticut’s capital city, for instance, was practicing self-governance – see Thomas Hooker’s Fundamental Orders, adopted by the Connecticut Colony council on Jan. 14, 1639 -- long before there was a state of Connecticut. Before there was a State of Connecticut, there was a colonial “Constitution State.”
The state of Connecticut, one among fifty in the union, was a chartered government long before colonists, shaking off a distant rule in Britain, gathered together in 1776 in Philadelphia to sign the Declaration of Independence. Later, in 1787, a Constitution was devised and signed “to form a more perfect union.” There are many indications here in Connecticut that municipalities still prize their independence, a qualified sovereignty, from both state and federal governance.
This independence has always been precarious. Schools, for example, have traditionally been governed by the state’s municipalities. Through regulations, an over-reliance on teacher certification, and its power of the purse, the state has for decades been encroaching on the educational independence of its towns. The stil- prized autonomy of towns recently has come under sustained attack by progressives in Connecticut. Flexing their political muscle after the 2018 and 2020 elections, the post-modern progressive contingent in the General Assembly is now showing their biceps to the state’s general public.
Sara Bronin, wife of Hartford Mayor Luke Bronin, assisted by Yale Law School eggheads, provided a few years ago a rough-hewn intellectual foundation for the progressive attack launched against municipal governments by often indigent Connecticut cities – Hartford, Bridgeport and New Haven – urban political strongholds directed for nearly a half century by Democratic Party-dominated, media-supported, rusting Tammany Hall-like urban political organizations.
Connecticut Commentary two months ago touched upon Sara Bronin’s faltering attempts to turn Connecticut suburbs into a progressive urbanized wonderland.
Her efforts bore political fruit following the 2016-2018 elections, during which Connecticut’s moderate Republican political structure suffered a complete collapse. What was once called “the vital center” in Connecticut’s political history, a political space shared by both traditional Democrats and Republican decision makers, has been thrown on the ash heap of history by progressives, now in the ascendancy.
Facing a close of session deadline and a promise that minority Republicans would filibuster the bill, progressive Democrat state Rep. Steve Stafstrom, of Bridgeport, co-chairman of the legislative Judiciary Committee, withdrew the bill, patterned after a New Jersey law.
According to the Hearst report, the bill would have state government estimate “how much affordable housing is needed, and it would then be allocated by region. Towns with higher per-capita median incomes and grand lists, but lower percentages of multi-family housing and lower poverty rates, would be asked to build more units of affordable housing…. Municipalities with poverty rates of 20 percent or greater [larger cities such as Stafstrom’s Bridgeport] would be excluded from the requirements.”
Exempting large cities from a statewide bill affecting most municipalities would fail to satisfy what has been labeled by many social justice warriors “equity,” the latest post-Marxian totem among progressives whose real ambition is to perfect and implement the demand most eloquently stated by Karl Marx and Joseph Engels in their “Critique of the Gotha Program”: “… from each according to his means, to each according to his need.”
Don Pesci is a Vernon-based columnist.