Chris Powell: Time to stock up on antivenin; paying for utility deadbeats; coping cops

Don’t pet: Timber rattlesnake.

MANCHESTER, Conn.

Another protected species made news in Connecticut other week when a venomous timber rattlesnake attacked two dogs in their yard in Glastonbury. Their owner rushed the dogs to the Pieper Veterinary clinic, in Middletown, just in time for them to be saved with snakebite antidote, what is called antivenin. The dog owner is lucky he wasn't bitten, too.

Connecticut once treated rattlesnakes as the dangerous nuisances they are. They were widespread and it was open season on them. But now that their habitat is limited to the northwest corner of the state and Glastonbury, East Hampton, Marlborough and Portland, state government has made killing them illegal, as if Connecticut couldn't live without them.

State law feels the same way about bears and bobcats, other predators that attack domestic animals.

As a result the habitat of the predators is expanding. While zoning often is used by suburban and rural towns to exclude housing that might be inhabited by unrich people, it is considered environmentally sound and high-minded to expand the habitat of the predatory animals.

The predators even have their own lobby at the state Capitol, environmental extremists who frighten the state's timid legislators more than the predators themselves do.

So Connecticut residents should ask their legislators how many more rattlesnakes, bears, and bobcats state government plans to accommodate, and hospitals and veterinary clinics should stock up on antivenin.

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Hospital and medical insurance bills are not the only places where state government has been hiding social-welfare costs from taxpayers. Such costs long have been hidden in electric and gas utility bills as well.

The Connecticut Examiner's Brendan Crowley reports that 25,000 utility users haven't been paying their bills for many months, some since as far back as October 2019, on account of state government's seasonal restrictions on disconnection and the disconnection moratorium imposed on electric and gas utilities when the virus epidemic started.

Eversource says it is carrying $171 million in bills overdue for 60 days or more. The company and United Illuminating have asked the Public Utilities Regulatory Authority to let them start disconnecting delinquents in September.

Eventually the expense of the unpaid bills is transferred to paying customers through higher rates.

Why should paying customers particularly have to pay the electricity and gas bills of customers who don't pay? For the same reason paying customers of hospitals and medical insurers are forced to pay for people who don't pay for their own treatment in Connecticut's hospitals. This is done because transferring social welfare costs out of state government through intermediaries lets state government escape political responsibility for them. So hospitals, medical insurers, and utility companies are wrongly blamed for price increases caused by government.

This doesn't mean that state government shouldn't assist with medical and utility costs for the indigent. It means that state government should cover those costs directly and honestly, through regular and general taxes.

But honesty would show that the cost of state government is far higher than people think, increasing the public's desire for efficiency in government and jeopardizing government's many less compelling expenses.

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Police in New Haven in June were disgraced by their callous treatment of a man who had seemed drunk when arrested on a complaint that he was brandishing a gun at a block party. He was handcuffed and put in a van without seatbelts. Video showed his head smashing into the wall of the van when it stopped abruptly. More video showed him being dragged out of the van at headquarters when officers didn't believe his claim to be injured. At last report he was paralyzed.

But this month police video showed three New Haven officers hastening to rescue a young woman about to jump from the roof of a parking garage. The officers functioned not only as saviors but also as social workers.

The country is going nuts all around the police, so as tired of it and flawed as they may be, it's a wonder that they cope with it as well as they do.

Chris Powell is a columnist for the Journal Inquirer, in Manchester, Conn. (CPowell@JournalInquirer.com.)