Chris Powell: Hartford has run out of options; time for bankruptcy

Last week's conviction of a developer who defrauded Hartford city government of a million dollars in the guise of building a soccer stadium should crush the city's efforts to obtain more financial aid from state government so that the city can avoid bankruptcy.

The soccer stadium scandal echoes Hartford's recent baseball stadium scandal, in which city government spent about $80 million to get the stadium done a year late and 60 percent over budget even as the city was going broke. So it may not have been entirely coincidental that just as the jury in the fraud case delivered its verdict, Mayor Luke Bronin announced that the city has engaged a bankruptcy law firm to pursue the city's options.

Yes, Hartford's financial condition is not the mayor's fault. He is new to the job and he has not just been seeking $40 million more from state government; he also has asked state government to establish a commission to supervise the city's finances. Neither request has been granted, the first because state government's financial position is as bad as the city's. But no matter, since more state money won't make Hartford competent politically and administratively. That's because the city lacks the prerequisite of such competence -- a large, independent middle class of people who are not on government's own payroll.

As a result city government has grown far bigger than the civic virtue available to manage it in the public interest. On top of that, Mayor Bronin's diagnosis of Hartford's basic problem is mistaken. The mayor argues that the city is hobbled financially because half its land is occupied by government or nonprofit institutions and thus exempt from city property taxes. But state government already compensates for that by reimbursing half the city's budget. Further, even as the mayor complains about property-tax exemption, he celebrates the imminent relocation of the University of Connecticut's West Hartford branch to the former Hartford Times building downtown, which will keep still more property off the tax rolls.

The mayor celebrates UConn's move because the tax-exempt government and nonprofit operations bring the city thousands of jobs and much commerce and thereby give huge support to the taxable valuation of the remaining property in the city. Indeed, this is the rationale used by the mayor's former boss, Gov. Dannel Malloy, for awarding state tax breaks to big companies just for staying put

For decades state government has poured ever-larger amounts of money into Hartford only to worsen the city's poverty and corruption. State policy has done the same to Connecticut's other cities. Maybe different policies might do better, but state government cannot even recognize its failure, so there is no chance of different policies.

So what Hartford needs most is just to stop pretending that spending more money makes things better and, instead, to slash its financial obligations to match its resources. This can be accomplished only by bankruptcy, a court-ordered cancellation of the city's big debts, primarily those to its employees and retirees as well as the bondholders who long have enabled the city's mismanagement, confident that state government would always underwrite any amount of exploitation and stupidity in Hartford.

Mayor Bronin has failed to obtain necessary concessions from most city employee unions, but given the depth of Hartford's disaster, he shouldn't have to ask permission from the unions to do what must be done. Only bankruptcy can set things right.

 Chris Powell is managing editor of the Journal Inquirer, in Manchester, Conn.