Chris Powell: Connecticut’s public-pension racket
"The Worship of Mammon" (1909), by Evelyn De Morgan.
MANCHESTER, Conn.
An angry reader notes that after 24 years as a judge, the Connecticut Supreme Court’s chief justice, Richard A. Robinson, has just "retired" while joining a big national law firm, Day Pitney, which has five offices in Connecticut. "So now," the reader writes, "he will be getting a full pension from state taxpayers plus another full-time paycheck. Why should the state pay him a pension if he is still working? This is why the state is virtually bankrupt. It’s crazy. How come the press doesn’t report this part of it?"
Maybe what's left of journalism in Connecticut doesn't report the pension angle because it's an old story, not that it ever has been told very well.
Robinson's immediate predecessor as chief justice, Chase T. Rogers, retired six years ago after 20 years as a judge and then went to work at Day Pitney too. She now draws an annual state pension of more than $160,000, quite apart from her salary at the law firm. Since Robinson had four more years as a judge than Rogers, his state pension may be a bit larger. Since both retired judges are in their mid-60s, with continued good health they probably will have quite a few years earning at the law firm at least as much as their pensions.
But such opportunities are not peculiar to retired Connecticut judges. Virtually all retired state employees are eligible to do the same kind of thing -- that is, to collect an excellent retirement pension from state government even as they launch second careers.
The practice is especially popular among state troopers and municipal police officers, who typically can retire with great pensions at a young age -- in their late 40s or early 50s -- and then qualify for other good jobs to take them into their actual retirement.
Sometimes it’s a bit of a racket, as was shown in 2020 by the internationally notorious case of State Trooper Matthew Spina. The trooper was video-recorded by a motorist he stopped in New Haven and the video was posted on the Internet. It showed the trooper hysterical with rage, screaming at the motorist, ordering him out of his car and handcuffing him, bullying and threatening him, searching his backpack, and stomping on his possessions before uncuffing him and letting him go without even ticketing him, since he had done nothing wrong, or at least nothing actionable.
While inflicting this abuse Spina declared that he hated his job and the public and was eager to retire in 14 months.
Spina appeared to be middle-aged and a little journalism revealed that for five years he had been working so many extra hours that his overtime pay exceeded or nearly equaled his base annual salary of almost $100,000. That is, like many other troopers he was risking burning himself out and driving himself crazy to attain the magical threshold of the state pension system -- three extremely high-earning years from which his pension would be calculated.
State police management readily obliged his mad pursuit of a pension bonanza.
Spina indeed retired the next year and now draws an annual state pension of more than $116,000. If he has another job now, his pretend retirement may be almost as comfortable as that of the retired judges.
Of course Connecticut’s state employee pension system isn’t a racket for everyone, but it is often excessively generous. It is a fair question as to why state government should pay large pensions, or any pensions, to people earning substantial amounts in second careers.
But there is a simple explanation. It’s that Connecticut has many more politically active state and municipal government employees and retired employees than it has politically attentive and engaged citizens.
Anyone who sees extravagance here should try putting the pension question to his state legislators. Few legislators are likely to express any criticism, lest they alienate a powerful special interest. If Connecticut is ever to have a better public life, it will need a better public.
Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years (CPowell@cox.net).
Chris Powell: The misnamed 'Banned Books Week'; about that bus highway
Mark Twain's famed novel has been banned in some American schools because of its racial language.
MANCHESTER, Conn.
Last week was what librarians and leftists in Connecticut and throughout the country call Banned Books Week. A more accurate name for it would be Submit to Authority Week.
The week is misnamed because in the United States there are no banned books at all -- no books whose publication and possession are forbidden by government. Banned Books Week has been contrived by librarians and leftists to intimidate people out of criticizing certain books that librarians and school administrators have chosen for inclusion in school libraries, curriculums, and public libraries. The objective is to prevent libraries and schools from ever having to answer to anyone for their choices.
The selection of every book for a library or curriculum is always a matter of judgment. But the promoters of Banned Books Week would have the public believe that the choices made by librarians and school administrators are always right, and that anyone who questions these choices is a follower of Hitler or, worse, Donald Trump.
Some criticism of library and curriculum choices is nutty. Two great works of American literature that have helped to defeat racism -- Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird -- are sometimes targeted by people who can't get past the occasional racist language in them.
But these days most books whose inclusion in schools and libraries are challenged involve homosexuality and transgenderism, and these are fairly challenged at least in regard to their appropriateness for children, especially amid the mental illness that is worsening among them.
This doesn't mean that such books should be excluded automatically but that their appropriateness should be settled by thoughtful review and discussion. Calling a book's critics "book banners" and a book's advocates "groomers," as is common in these controversies, is not thoughtful.
The great irony of Banned Books Week is that as a practical matter its promoters are themselves the biggest book banners. That is, with a virtually infinite number of books in the world, librarians and school administrators reject thousands of books for every one they include.
Of course not all books can be included in any library or curriculum. Do the choices that are made give a politically balanced view of the world and academic subjects or a politically skewed and propagandist one?
If Banned Books Week succeeds, no one will ever know -- which is the idea.
Shelter along the CTfastrak route
The once-controversial bus highway between Hartford and New Britain, CTfastrak, has been operating for 10 years, and this week Connecticut's Hearst newspapers sought to determine if, after a construction cost of more than half a billion dollars, the busway can be considered a success.
CTfastrak has turned 10 and seen an increase in riders from a pandemic dip
CTfastrak has turned 10 and seen an increase in riders from a pandemic dip
CTfastrak has turned 10 and seen an increase in riders from a pandemic dip
CTfastrak has turned 10 and seen an increase in riders from a pandemic dip
The state Transportation Department says the highway had 2.8 million riders in 2016, its first full year of operation, reached a peak of 3.3 million riders in 2019, and then, amid the Covid-19 epidemic, fell to about 2 million riders in 2021 and has been slowly increasing since.
But the chief of the department's Bureau of Public Transit, Ben Limmer, was unable to provide information crucial to a judgment on the project. While it stands to reason that the bus highway has reduced automobile commuting between Hartford and New Britain, the department says it has no data on that. More concerning is that the department can't or won’t say how much each CTfastrak rider is being subsidized by state government.
"We do what we can to make sure fares are affordable," Limmer said. "I assume fares have not kept up with inflation, so we’re probably flat or slightly up on subsidies."
All modes of transportation -- sidewalks, streets and highways, trains, and airplanes -- are subsidized by government in some way. But now that the epidemic-induced trend of working from home has greatly reduced commuting, CTfastrak is even more questionable than it was when it began.
Does the Transportation Department want to know what CTfastrak’s operating costs are and how much riders are being subsidized? It doesn't seem to want the public to know.
Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years (CPowell@cox.net).
Chris Powell: How many jobs were actually created by Conn. state fund? Stop companies from looting hospitals
Chimera. Apulian red-figure dish, ca. 350-340 BC
MANCHESTER, Conn.
Connecticut's state auditors are on a roll with their critical report about state government's "venture-capital firm," Connecticut Innovations, which was published the other day soon after the critical audits about expensive management failures at Central Connecticut State University, the state Department of Energy and Environmental Protection, and the Correction Department.
The problem with Connecticut Innovations, the auditors say, is that the agency, which spends tens of millions of dollars investing in new companies in the state, can't be sure that the companies have produced all the jobs they promised to produce with state government's investment. According to the auditors, Connecticut Innovations says verifying the job numbers would require auditing the companies and the companies can't afford it. Connecticut Innovations adds that while the state Labor Department has data about employment at the companies, it's always out of date.
This explanation is weak. Surely without much cost the subsidized companies can quantify their employment at regular intervals and identify their employees by names, address, and hours worked. Connecticut Innovations then could do spot checks about the claimed employees. This wouldn't be foolproof but it would be better than simply accepting the data provided by the subsidized companies as Connecticut Innovations does now.
Connecticut Innovations says it will try to figure something out, though the issue may be forgotten unless the General Assembly presses it.
The auditors' report on Connecticut Innovations should be taken by the legislature as an invitation to reconsider the agency in its entirety. For even if the job-creation data reported to Connecticut Innovations could be verified comprehensively, it would not mean the agency's subsidies were essential.
For the world is full of banks and investment firms that finance new businesses. Who can be sure that the jobs at companies subsidized by Connecticut Innovations couldn't have been created anyway with private financing? Why does state government need to get into the venture capital business any more than it needs to get into any other business?
Of course a venture capital firm operated by state government can provide one thing more readily than a private venture-capital firm can -- political patronage for those who run the government.
In any case if Connecticut had an economic and political climate more favorable to business and wealth creation than to employment by and dependence on government, state government might not feel as compelled to play favorites and subsidize certain businesses. A better economic and political climate would be the best innovation of all.
Better late than never -- and in the middle of his campaign for re-election -- Connecticut U.S. Sen. Chris Murphy has noticed the looting of Waterbury, Manchester Memorial, and Rockville General hospitals by the California-based investment company, Prospect Medical Holdings, which purchased them from their nonprofit operators in 2016 and began mortgaging their property and stripping their assets to pay big dividends to its investors.
This kind of thing has become a nationwide racket, and Murphy cited the Connecticut angle last week during a Senate hearing about the bankruptcy of Steward Health Care, a for-profit company that recently ran three hospitals in Massachusetts into bankruptcy.
Murphy asked: "How have we let American capitalism get so far off the rails, so unmoored from the common good, that anybody thinks it's OK to make a billion dollars off of degrading health care for poor people in Waterbury, Connecticut?"
The answer is simple. It is less a matter of capitalist greed than government's negligence. That is, in Connecticut and elsewhere government has allowed profit-making companies to acquire nonprofit hospitals and extract for profit the decades of public charity that built them.
Federal and state law could prohibit such transactions. So how about it, Senator, Gov. Ned Lamont, and state legislators? And Senator, how about returning the $2,500 campaign contribution you received from Prospect's political action committee in 2017, a year after it acquired the Connecticut hospitals, a contribution reported this week by political blogger Kevin Rennie?
Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years (CPowell@cox.net).
Chris Powell: Connecticut’s abortion barbarians
U.S. abortions by gestational age in 2016.
MANCHESTER, Conn.
Now that the issue has been returned to the states and democracy, abortion extremism has revived throughout the country. In some states this extremism aims to make abortion virtually impossible, limiting it to the earliest weeks of pregnancy, sometimes before women may realize they are pregnant. But in Connecticut the extremism goes the other way.
A few days ago Connecticut abortion extremism manifested itself at the state Department of Public Health, which held a hearing on its proposal to repeal three state regulations that pose only slight impediments to abortion, regulations that did not bother advocates of "reproductive rights" back when the U.S. Supreme Court's decision in Roe v. Wade was in force. Indeed, for decades Connecticut has modeled its abortion law on the principle proclaimed by Roe -- that abortion should be an individual right prior to fetal viability but subject to state regulation after, because society has an interest in the unborn when they are able to live outside the womb.
As constitutional law Roe was questionable, as even some advocates of abortion rights acknowledged, but it amounted to a political compromise that commanded majority support nationally, though not in all states.
The Supreme Court's reversal of Roe has changed nothing in Connecticut. There is no movement here to outlaw or seriously restrict abortion, though the public probably would support legislation to require parental consent for abortions for minors, since such abortions conceal rape.
To the contrary, as shown by the health department's proposal to repeal those three regulations, the political movement about abortion in Connecticut is, in its own words, to "go beyond Roe" -- to legitimize late-term abortion, abortion of viable fetuses, in all circumstances.
The department would repeal the regulation arising from the Roe principle that authorizes abortion in the last trimester of pregnancy only to protect the mother's life or health.
This regulation is actually only the pretense of concern for unborn life, since no government authority is checking on late-term abortions and since protecting a pregnant woman's health is construed to include her mental health. In advance of childbirth it's impossible to disprove a woman's claim that delivering her child will drive her insane, absurd as such a claim may seem.
But even the regulation's pretense of concern for viable fetuses is too much for Connecticut's abortion extremists.
Another regulation proposed for repeal requires abortion providers to try to save of life of a fetus -- that is, a child -- who survives an abortion. Connecticut's abortion extremists want to erase any hint of an abortion survivor's humanity. An infant bleeding and gasping for breath is to be coldly left to die in the presence of doctors, nurses, the law, and its own mother -- barbarity.
Also proposed for repeal is the regulation that authorizes medical personnel to refuse to participate in abortions for religious reasons. As Connecticut essentially declares abortion the highest public good, all conscience is to be trampled.
The foremost advocate of repealing the regulations, state Rep. Jillian Gilchrest, D-West Hartford, leader of the abortion extremists in the General Assembly -- they style themselves the Reproductive Rights Caucus -- maintains that the regulation protecting the consciences of medical personnel is unnecessary because federal law already protects them. But Gilchrest would not advocate repealing the regulation if she wasn't hoping that someday abortion extremists will gain control of the federal government, repeal the law, and let Connecticut drive anti-abortion doctors and nurses out of their profession.
Gov. Ned Lamont told the Hartford Courant he wasn't fully informed about the move to repeal the abortion regulations and would be looking into it. But he added perceptively, "I hope it's not a solution looking for a problem."
That's just what it is. For the only problem here is that some people think that while Connecticut is more liberal on abortion than all states except Vermont and Oregon, which have no gestational limits, the state still doesn't exalt abortion enough.
Does the governor agree with the barbarians? Since the health department answers to him, it will be answering for him if it decides to "go beyond Roe."
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Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years (CPowell@cox.net).
Chris Powell: What do college demonstrators in Conn. and elsewhere mean by ‘Free Palestine’?
Pro-Palestinian demonstration by students near Harvard University, in Cambridge, Mass.
MANCHESTER, Conn.
College is back in session and students are returning not just to their studies but also to protests on campus about the war in Gaza. At the University of Connecticut at Storrs, Yale University in New Haven, and other institutions, students are chanting and carrying signs reading "Free Palestine!"
Journalism not being what it used to be, since literacy and civic engagement aren't either, no one seems to be asking the students exactly what they mean by "Free Palestine!" and how that objective should be achieved.
So how do the student protesters define Palestine? Do they define it as most Palestinians themselves do, as encompassing the land "from the river to the sea" -- the land between the Jordan River and Mediterranean -- thus liquidating Israel, as Palestinians often have tried to do in war since the area was partitioned into Jewish and Arab sections by resolution of the United Nations in 1948, and as they are doing again now?
Do the student protesters define Palestine as something that leaves room for Israel -- a Palestine consisting of Gaza, which Israel evacuated in 2005, and the "occupied West Bank," the land between Jordan and Israel proper, most of which Israel agreed to evacuate during negotiations sponsored by President Bill Clinton in 2000?
If the student protesters define Palestine as the Clinton plan did, they might want to ask the people on whose behalf they're protesting why they can't accept such a compromise even now that the war that Gaza launched against Israel last October has brought catastrophic bloodshed and ruin to the territory. The students should explain why Palestinian irredentism is worth so much.
And what do the student protesters mean by "free"? Do they mean civil liberties -- speech, press, assembly, religion, due process of law, women's rights, and sexual orientation -- liberties enjoyed in the United States, Western Europe, and Israel, but not in Gaza and West Bank areas under Palestinian control, nor, indeed, anywhere in the Arab world? If that's what the student protesters mean, they should go to Gaza or the West Bank and try to exercise such freedoms there, after making provision for the transport home of their corpses.
Or do the student protesters understand "free Palestine" as most Palestinians appear to understand it -- a land free of Jews, a land free to attack a neighboring state and people, bombarding, murdering, raping, and kidnapping whenever the necessary strength has been regained during another "ceasefire"?
Yes, the war in Gaza is horrifying. But then wars against totalitarians seldom can be won politely. The war against the totalitarian aggressors of World War II, Germany and Japan, were won only by leveling both countries, killing millions of civilians, and then remaking the totalitarian societies through long military occupations.
If the student protesters think there is another way, they should spell it out and offer it to the warring parties. They may find, as Clinton did, that making peace requires more than pious hand-wringing on a peaceful campus far away from cutthroats whose hatred and brutality far surpass anything the students can imagine.
TREATMENT ISN'T ENOUGH: School officials and social workers report that Connecticut is facing an epidemic of mental illness among young people -- not just teens in high school but also children in elementary and middle school. There is clamor for state government to spend more for treatment and school mental-health clinics, as if that will solve the problem.
Little attention is being paid to the cause of the youth mental-illness epidemic. The recent virus epidemic and its disruption of school and home life is an easy explanation, but that epidemic is long over. Something else must be wrong. Child neglect was already bad when the virus struck. Because inflation soared during much of the time since the epidemic started, real incomes for many have fallen. That may have worsened neglect.
Treatment isn't enough. The General Assembly and Gov. Ned Lamont should strive to discern and eradicate the causes of youth mental illness.
Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years (CPowell@cox.net).
Chris Powell: Too much higher ed?
The precursor to the University of Connecticut in 1903.
MANCHESTER, Conn.
What a wonderfully subversive and politically incorrect idea has exploded from the committee set up by the Connecticut Conference of Municipalities to study the problem of the state's estimated 119,000 "disconnected" and alienated young people.
Meeting last week at New London City Hall, the group heard a vice president of Yale New Haven Health, Paul Mounds Jr., criticize the widespread misimpression that hospitals and other medical companies hire only applicants with college degrees.
Mounds said Connecticut's hospitals have hundreds of openings for people with high school diplomas or the equivalent. He added that employers should reach out to overlooked potential workers, including former convicts. (A decent job is a strong incentive not to return to crime.)
The president of the Connecticut Business and Industry Association, Chris DiPentima, elaborated. He said many of Connecticut's reported 93,000 job openings don't require college degrees and he urged employers to shift from degree-based hiring to skill-based hiring. DePentima scorned what he called efforts to "over-educate the population."
That is, Mounds and DiPentima were lamenting the cost of the credentialism that has been inflicted on society by higher educators, who profit greatly from it, and by society's own vanity. (See "Doctor" Jill Biden.) Credentialism is why millions of Americans are hobbled with billions of dollars of college-loan debt incurred in pursuit of degrees that conferred little in the way of education or job skills.
Of course, credentialism is a big business in itself, as shown by a review of salaries in higher education, especially administrator salaries. Reducing credentialism might cause a fair amount of unemployment, since much of higher education is just unnecessary overhead expense for society.
Higher education isn't useless. But outside highly technical fields, it is grossly overpriced and distracts catastrophically from the country's big education problem, lower education.
A recent survey by the Connecticut Education Association, the state's largest teacher union, illustrated a big part of the lower-education problem.
It wasn't the survey's finding that teachers in Connecticut say they are underpaid. As they are members of unions it's practically their obligation to feel underpaid, just as they felt underpaid in 1986 when the state's Education Enhancement Act became law, leading to decades of steady pay increases for teachers in the belief that student performance was mainly a function of teacher salaries. (There turned out to be no connection, and student performance has declined as teacher pay has risen.)
No, the CEA survey was valuable for showing that teachers are increasingly demoralized by student misbehavior, which is prompting teachers to leave their profession earlier than planned and making it harder for schools to hire good applicants.
This problem is worst where poverty, child neglect, and mental illness among children are worst -- cities and inner suburbs. While Hartford's school superintendent, Leslie Torres-Rodriguez, showed her usual enthusiasm in welcoming children back to school this week, she also acknowledged that the city's schools are still trying to fill 200 vacant positions. As the CEA survey indicated, teachers want to teach, not break up brawls or restrain children who freak out in class and don't know how to behave because they have so little parenting -- and because school administrations prohibit disciplining them.
This social disintegration is part of government's general impoverishment of society but Connecticut's political class remains oblivious to it and busies itself instead with politically correct irrelevance, as New Haven's city council did the other day even as the city's schools are just as dismal as Hartford's.
The council is promoting a resolution that would apologize for New Haven's having blocked the establishment of a college for Black people back in 1831, nearly two centuries ago.
Maybe in another two centuries New Haven will apologize for the failure of most of its schoolchildren to perform even close to grade level, for the racial achievement gap in its schools, and for the city's constant crime, most of whose victims are members of minority groups. Maybe in two centuries state government will consider apologizing too.
Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years (CPowell@cox.net).
Chris Powell: Stop Conn utility agency from usurping taxing power; more casinos coming?
MA NCHESTER, Conn.
Even a few members of the Connecticut General Assembly's Democratic majority recently expressed alarm at the latest arrogance at the Public Utilities Control Authority — its raising electricity rates again.
This time the increase is to repay Connecticut's two largest electric utilities, Eversource and United Illuminating, for the millions of dollars the agency ordered them to spend reimbursing individuals and businesses for installing electric-car chargers. The program was meant to reduce climate change.
The program was silly, since even if Connecticut stopped using every kind of energy and reverted to a prehistoric way of life, it would have no bearing on climate change, nor on the introduction to the atmosphere of the "greenhouse gases" that climate hysterics believe will destroy the planet before Greta Thunberg grows up. China and the rest of the developing world will see that oil and coal remain the world's primary fuels for decades to come, until wind and solar power become much less expensive and more reliable.
Connecticut is far too small to measure in those calculations.
Stuffing the expense of somebody else's electric-car charger into ordinary electric bills, joining other expenses of government policies that have nothing to do with the generation and delivery of electricity, as Connecticut long has done, has always been beyond silly. It's offensive, because electricity, like food and medicine, is a necessity of life and commerce.
Leaders of the Republican minority in the General Assembly and even some ordinary citizens noted last week that the rate increases to pay for electric-car chargers are doubly offensive because they take more from the poor than the rich. Rate increases for electric-car chargers are essentially regressive taxes. Since electric cars are so expensive and less durable, only wealthy people can afford them. But while Democrats claim to be the party of the working class, they don't mind regressive taxes hidden in the fine print of electric bills.
But now soaring electric bills in Connecticut at last have prompted ordinary people to start questioning what have been euphemized as the "public benefits" hidden in those bills -- "benefits" such as charging people extra to make up for the people who don't pay.
Reporting on the controversy the other week, the Yankee Institute's Meghan Portfolio noted another reason why hiding EV charger costs in electric bills is offensive. That is, quite on its own three years ago the Public Utilities Control Authority required the electric companies to reimburse people and businesses for installing EV chargers and related equipment, making the costs payable to the electric companies through general rate increases.
This appropriation was made and its method of financing was levied without legislation enacted by the General Assembly and Gov. Ned Lamont. Portfolio writes: "PUCA's ability to impose sweeping mandates without legislative oversight has left ratepayers footing the bill for policies that disproportionately benefit a select few."
That is, Governor Lamont and the legislature have essentially delegated taxing power to an unelected agency. That's irresponsible and anti-democratic.
Republicans have asked the governor to call a special session of the legislature to undo some of the recent electric-rate increases. The governor says he is open to the idea -- that is, he'll call a special session if more people clamor for an end to the "public benefits" racket. People should take the hint.
MORE CASINOS COMING? Does Connecticut want more gambling casinos, and more casinos that operate from the authority of licenses awarded as ethnic privilege?
That question soon may become compelling. The other Connecticut's Hearst newspapers reported that the U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs may reverse its position and invite the three state-recognized tribes in the western part of the state to reapply for the federal recognition that long ago was denied to them. Such recognition almost certainly will come with the same casino privileges enjoyed by the two federally recognized tribes in the southeastern part of the state.
If that happens, it will be time for the state to democratize casino licenses and let people get into the casino business regardless of their ancestry.
Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years (CPowell@cox.net).
Chris Powell: Conn. isn’t prepared for greater prosperity; sneaky ‘public-benefits’ charges
Millstone Nuclear-Power Plant, in Waterford, Conn.
MANCHESTER, Conn.
When federal census data showed Connecticut's population increasing by about 57,000 in 2021 and 2022, Gov. Ned Lamont construed it as great news, evidence of the state's prosperity under his administration, a remarkable contrast with the population losses of nearby states.
But the other day the U.S. Census Bureau acknowledged that the population increase report was a mistake and that Connecticut probably experienced a population loss of 13,500 during that period.
In a way this may be construed as great too.
For the state has a severe shortage of housing, home prices and rents have been soaring, and homelessness is rising. Experts say the state needs at least 100,000 more housing units just for its current population to be able to live decently. If the state really had gained 57,000 people, it would be under much greater strain.
Connecticut isn't prepared for greater prosperity, and more strain is promised by the increased military contracting coming into the state for which thousands of new workers are needed.
Even if the national economy were entering a recession, Connecticut still would have thousands of inadequately housed people.
Equating construction of inexpensive housing with poverty because of the mess the state has made of its cities, Connecticut has been slow to recognize that its housing policy -- unfriendly if not hostile to new housing -- has been a disaster too.
But the Lamont administration has taken the hint and is proceeding with state government incentives for housing construction. Hartford and New Haven are encouraging apartments and condominiums and are showing that city living can attractive, and a few suburbs are viewing housing proposals more favorably than usual.
It's far from enough but it's a start. If housing initiatives continue for a few more years and state government discourages exclusive zoning and controls spending and taxes, maybe even accurate census data will start showing that more people want to move to Connecticut than leave it for lower-taxed states with milder winters.
xxx
Connecticut has among the highest electric rates in the country, and the big increases imposed last month are painful reminders that the state would have to reduce rates if it would increase its prosperity and population -- or even just maintain its population.
The latest rate increases have two major causes: the decision by the governor and General Assembly to guarantee purchase of the electricity generated by the Millstone nuclear-power plant, in Waterford, as a matter of Connecticut's energy security; and second, the "public benefits" charges that long have been largely hidden in customer electric bills, essentially sales taxes to finance state government programs having little if anything to do with generation and delivery of electricity.
Among the "public benefits" charges is one by which people who pay their electric bills are required to pay as well for people who don't pay but who under state law can't be disconnected during much of the year. Since this charge is a welfare expense, it should be borne by taxpayers generally, not by electricity users particularly.
Indeed, there is no good reason to charge electricity users particularly for any of the "public benefits" hidden in their bills. Insofar as electricity is a necessity of life, taxing it is no more justified than taxing food and medicine would be.
The real justification for financing the "public benefits" from a de-facto sales tax on electricity is that state legislators and governors have liked obscuring the costs of those "benefits" and deceiving the public into thinking that the big, bad electric companies are overcharging. By some estimates 20 percent of the cost of electricity for a typical Connecticut resident results from non-electrical "public benefits" charges.
Members of the General Assembly's Republican minority have been making an issue of this and fortunately have begun pressing it harder. "Public benefits" charges on electricity bills should be eliminated, along with the "public benefits" themselves, or else their costs should be recovered through general taxation or spending cuts elsewhere.
Now who wants to specify the tax increases or spending cuts necessary to get rid of the "public benefits" charges?
Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years(CPowell@cox.net).
Chris Powell: When learning is optional
Scrapped mobile phones
— Photo by MikroLogika
MANCHESTER, Conn.
Schools increasingly are prohibiting students from operating or even carrying "smart phones" -- Internet-equipped telephones -- in class. Some schools are investing in special pouches in which students must lock their phones in school, being able to unlock them only with a special device made available when they are leaving.
At $25 or so each, the pouches are a significant expense, but educators find them effective at restoring students' concentration. The pouches even induce students to start talking to each other face to face.
Gov. Ned Lamont was an early advocate of banning "smart phones" in school, and while he was unable to get the General Assembly to legislate on the point, he has asked the state Education Department to draft and recommend such a policy to school superintendents and boards. It's a good idea and most school systems probably will go along with it if pressed by the Education Department.
But there is a bigger underlying problem here that no one in authority seems inclined to address.
For if students spend too much time on their "smart phones" in school, it's because they know they can afford to miss the teaching being attempted. They know they are going to be promoted from grade to grade and even graduated from high school no matter what. Learning is completely optional.
That is, even if school policy bans "smart phones," a bigger school policy will remain: social promotion. While it would be much more expensive, repealing social promotion would do much more to restore education than locking up "smart phones."
Repealing social promotion would require teachers and school administrators to enforce academic standards not just against students but also against their neglectful parents, who outnumber responsible parents in many school districts.
Like most states, Connecticut has resorted to social promotion to boost graduation rates and thereby make education look more successful even as it is failing, with the academic proficiency of students in basic subjects continuing to decline. Schools know that when uneducated students graduate they become someone else's problem -- the problem of employers and the welfare, medical, mental health, and criminal-justice systems.
The refusal to restore standards in public education may be behind the governor's recent conversion to "diversity, equity, and inclusion," the new euphemism for "affirmative action" -- racial and ethnic preferences in hiring, college admissions, and other endeavors.
Connecticut schools long have suffered an appalling gap between the educational achievement of white students and those from racial and ethnic minorities. The gap results mainly from something over which schools have no control -- the great disparity in the parenting and wealth of the homes students come from. Students who do poorly in school almost always need more attention at home, but state government declines to examine why they don't get it. More broadly, state government declines to inquire into why poverty endures and is worsening.
The state's primary policy for improving education is just to increase the compensation of educators. This has done little for education and nothing for closing the racial achievement gap, but it has kept Connecticut's biggest and most influential special interest, the teacher unions, working for the state's majority political party.
The governor's new plan to create an Office of Equity and Inclusion to diversify state government's workforce racially and in a few lesser respects indicates state government's acceptance of the racial achievement gap.
After all, if schools eliminated the gap and most high school graduates were of largely equal education across the races and ethnic groups, state government would not have to look so hard for qualified applicants from minority groups and would not have to incorporate racial and ethnic preferences into the hiring process in pursuit of diversity. Diversity and integration would occur naturally and income inequality would fall.
But the racial and ethnic gap in education generates an impoverished underclass dependent on government for sustenance, which in turn maintains government's power, size, and expense. In that respect the many who have made comfortable careers ministering to Connecticut's worsening poverty may consider the gap a great political success.
Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years (CPowell@cox.net).
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.
xxx
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.
xxx
Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years (CPowell@cox.net).
Chris Powell: Block housing development and your property taxes may rise
MANCHESTER, Conn.
Blame for rising property taxes in Connecticut may be shared more broadly than most people think. It's not just the fault of elected officials who yield to the demands of special interests, particularly the demands of government- employee unions for higher wages and benefits.
Property taxes are determined in large part by property values, and the great inflation created by the spectacular overspending and over-borrowing by the Trump and Biden administrations and Congress have increased the nominal value of nearly everything, including residential property.
Then there is the flood of illegal immigration. The millions of illegal immigrants admitted in recent years must live somewhere, and the federal government and state government are often subsidizing their housing, causing scarcity. Without so many illegal immigrants and government subsidies for their housing, demand would be reduced, more properties would be vacant, and residential rents, prices and property values would fall.
There is still another cause of housing scarcity and rising property values and taxes: state and municipal policy that restricts supply, such as exclusive zoning and what is called farmland preservation, a politically correct mechanism for preventing housing development. People tend not to associate these policies with rising property taxes, which homeowners pay directly and tenants pay indirectly through their rent.
But maybe the association will be noticed after more periodic municipality-wide property revaluations, such as the ones that New London and Norwich recently underwent.
According to The Day of New London, residential-property values in the little city just rose by an average of 60 percent, and many people are shocked by the corresponding increase in their property taxes, since commercial- property values didn't rise that much if at all.
With employment booming at submarine manufacturer Electric Boat in neighboring Groton, New London and nearby towns especially need more housing. But since the housing shortage, rising property values, and rising property taxes are statewide and national phenomena, any town could facilitate a building boom and still not knock housing values down much.
At least people should take their rising property-tax bills as a reminder not to complain so much about new housing. Obstructing new housing means scarcity, and scarcity means that housing prices will be bid up, taking housing taxes with them.
LEAVE IDAHO ALONE: Abortion rights are more secure in Connecticut than they are in many other states.
Having long ago incorporated into its own law the U.S. Supreme Court's decision in Roe v. Wade, Connecticut leaves abortion unrestricted prior to fetal viability, and even then few seem to be guarding against the abortion of viable fetuses. Connecticut also allows abortions for minors without parental consent, enabling child molesters to erase the evidence of their crimes.
Still, the abortion policies of other states have Connecticut Atty. Gen. William Tong in a frenzy. Lately Tong has been fulminating about Idaho's restrictive abortion law and has even had filed a brief in an Idaho case in federal court, though the case has no bearing on Connecticut.
Speaking of Idaho's law the other day, the attorney general said: "This threat and severe state abortion bans are not going away. We're going to have to keep fighting these fights in every court in every state where patients' lives and reproductive freedom are at risk."
But why? Reversing Roe two years ago, the U.S. Supreme Court didn't restrict abortion anywhere. It just returned abortion policy to the states, restoring some federalism.
Who is Connecticut's attorney general to seek to override democracy in Idaho? Presumably if enough of the women of Idaho wanted their state's abortion law to be like Connecticut's, they could mobilize to achieve it. Apparently many if, not most, women in Idaho want abortion tightly restricted.
No one has to live in Idaho or Connecticut.
And where does the attorney general find the authority to intervene in cases having no bearing on Connecticut? State law confines the attorney general's office to legal matters "in which the state is a party or is interested." Abortion law in Idaho is not a state interest in Connecticut, just a partisan political one.
Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years (CPowell@cox.net).
Chris Powell: Municipalities should be posting their most interesting records
— Photo by Michal Klajban
MANCHESTER, Conn.
Greenwich First Selectman Fred Camillo is sore at people who, he says, make lots of requests for access to town records under Connecticut’s freedom-of-information law. “Some people are abusing the system,” Camillo says, and requesting town records "has been weaponized and we’re getting harassed."
So his administration has begun posting on Greenwich’s internet site the names of all FOI requesters and the subjects of their requests.
This is perfectly legal. No one who requests access to a public record can very well object if his own request is a public record too. But Camillo’s new practice seems meant to retaliate against and embarrass requesters. It’s mistaken and almost surely will fail.
For anyone who is making FOI requests mainly to annoy town officials isn’t likely to be embarrassed in the least by publicity. To the contrary, such people probably will welcome publicity and figure that their renown will help intimidate town officials and employees in the future.
Besides, Connecticut’s FOI law now authorizes government officials to petition the Freedom of Information Commission for relief from a “vexatious requester,” a person whose requests for records are so numerous and redundant as to constitute abuse. While they are few, there are such people and the commission has taken action against some, exempting the government agency being harassed from having to respond to the requester.
So if First Selectman Camillo really thinks that any FOI requester is "abusing the system," he should identify the abuser in a complaint to the FOI Commission, whereupon the commission may call a hearing that may be as much an inconvenience to the requester as the requester’s requests are to town officials.
There’s no harm in posting FOI requests on a town’s Internet site as Greenwich is doing, but there’s not much public service in it either. Indeed, if a municipality or state agency is going to put more effort into posting records on its Internet site, many records would be of far more public interest than FOI requests.
For example, municipalities could post their payrolls as state government does. Some municipal government salaries are extraordinary but overlooked. Excessive overtime for police officers and others is often a scandal.
Municipal employee job evaluations and disciplinary records should be posted too. Those records are where some big scandals are hidden.
While teacher evaluations, alone among all government employee evaluations, long have been exempted from disclosure under state FOI law -- a testament to the influence of teacher unions and the subservience of state legislators to the worst of special interests -- nothing prevents municipalities from disclosing teacher evaluations voluntarily just as municipalities are required to disclose the evaluations of other employees.
With local journalism weakening, these days most municipal governments have little serious news coverage and few if any reporters inspect disciplinary records regularly.
Posting more records about government’s own performance would show the public far more about who is really "abusing the system." Any annoyance to government officials from this greater transparency might be offset by accountability and better management.
SLICING AWAY AT DEMOCRACY: Many people who achieve public office quickly come to realize the truth of the old saying, "To govern is to choose." French President Charles de Gaulle clarified that governing is always "to choose among disadvantages." Of course choosing can be a drag.
So some non-profit social-service groups want Connecticut to impose a special tax on telecommunications services whose revenue would be dedicated to social-service groups.
But why should cell phone or Internet users particularly pay for social services? There’s no causal relationship between telecommunications and social-service needs. It’s just that the social-service groups don’t want to have to compete for state government money as everybody else has to. With a dedicated tax their money would be guaranteed.
If choosing is restricted this way, over time the practice would slice away at democracy and insulate many rcipients of government money. Connecticut has done enough of that already.
Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years (CPowell@cox.net).
Chris Powell: Totalitarian ‘climate-change’ protestors
Climate-change protestors in Germany.
Cromwell Meadows, in Cromwell, Conn.
MANCHESTER, Conn.
When, in 1955, Rosa Parks, a courageous Black woman, refused to give up her seat to a white passenger on a bus in Montgomery, Ala., was arrested, and dramatically advanced the modern U.S. civil-rights movement, the connection between her protest and her objective was clear: to end the racial segregation maintained by the bus service.
When, in 1960, courageous Black college students sat down at the white sections of racially segregated lunch counters throughout the segregated South and refused to leave until they were served, the connection between their protest and their objective was clear again: to end the racial segregation maintained at of lunch counters.
In those protests and many others during that era, the demands of the protesters could be easily granted by the targets of the protest without any loss or harm to anyone.
But what is to be construed from the sort of protest that is erupting in Western Europe and now the United States, such as the protest that disrupted the final minutes of play at the Travelers Championship golf tournament in Cromwell, Conn., two weekends ago? The protesters, wearing shirts with the legend "No golf on a dead planet," ran onto the putting green and sprayed colored powder on it before police intercepted them, took them away, and charged them with criminal mischief.
The protesters in Cromwell want to eliminate oil and natural-gas fuels, in the belief that those fuels are causing devastating "climate change." In other venues such protesters are defacing paintings and statues. But the golf tournament, a major money-raiser for charity, and the defaced paintings and statues have no special connection to fuel use and their operators and custodians have no special responsibility for fuel policy. They don't use oil and gas any more than everyone else does.
Sometimes fuel protesters block roadways, halting traffic. Of course most vehicles use fuel, but most of their operators of the vehicles being blocked use fuel no more than everyone else does.
The fuel issue is a society-wide issue but the targets selected by the fuel protesters are not objectionable by the protesters' own standards, and hindering them won't affect fuel policy. The protesters have selected the targets instead for their capacity to cause annoyance when impaired and thus generate publicity.
But the fuel issue long has been getting plenty of publicity quite apart from the efforts of the protesters. It is a major political controversy in the United States and Western Europe, where it is politically correct to imagine that there are readily available and adequate alternatives to oil and natural gas. But fuel is not a political controversy in most of the rest of the world, and especially not in the developing world, which will be needing not just oil and natural gas but also coal, the dirtiest conventional fuel, for decades to come.
Calculating the benefits and harms of conventional fuels and striking a balance between them is a task for democratic politics. But the fuel protesters are so sure they are right, and so self-righteous, that they claim the right to nullify the rights of all people who disagree with them or don't heed them.
These protests go far beyond civil disobedience. They go far beyond criminal mischief as well. They are totalitarian. and any prosecutor who pursues the criminal charges from the golf tournament, and any court that tries them, should keep this in mind.
MORE SCHOOLS CRASH: Add Stamford to the list of Connecticut cities whose schools are getting out of control.
Teachers at Stamford's Turn of River Middle School say that they are being abused, bullied, threatened, and even assaulted by students, adding that the school administration has failed to report the assaults to the police.
The administration says it will make changes, including adding a third security officer to the school. That officer is needed not to protect the school against outsiders but against its own students, since under Connecticut law even the most disruptive students are almost impossible to expel, lest their feelings be hurt and the public notice social disintegration.
Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years (CPowell@cox.net) .
Chris Powell: What is ‘enough’? One-man crime wave in Conn.
“The Worship of Mammon,’’ by Evelyn De Morgan
MA NCHESTER, Conn.
Connecticut is not just thrilled that UConn men's basketball coach Dan Hurley has declined a lucrative offer from the Los Angeles Lakers. People are also moved by the expressions of loyalty from the coach and his wife, Andrea -- not just loyalty to the state but, as Mrs. Hurley noted in a television interview, loyalty to the players the coach had recruited and who expected to be playing for him next year.
Of course this loyalty was not exactly reciprocated by some of the players on this year's championship UConn team. They are leaving college early for what will be their own lucrative contracts with the pros.
But there's a big difference between the situations of the players and the coach. The players aren't making much if any money and may suddenly earn millions of dollars for each year of early departure. But the coach already is making millions each year, and for having won consecutive national tournaments he is likely to make millions more from UConn with a big raise that will bring his annual compensation close to what the Lakers were offering him.
When one is already earning big money, loyalty isn't the sacrifice lately imagined and cheered by UConn basketball fans, people for whom a night out with the family for dinner and a game is a substantial expense. Indeed, as F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote, "the very rich are different from you and me."
But then there are differences among the rich too.
A recent essay recounted that two financially comfortable guys were discussing a billionaire who had just undertaken a business plan he expected would bring him even greater wealth. One guy boasted to the other: "I have what he'll never have." The other guy asked: "What's that?" The answer: "Enough."
If Hurley has enough for staying put at UConn -- even if "enough" includes a huge raise -- it still may be considered relative loyalty, and Connecticut may be glad of it all the same, but just shouldn't overdo it.
That wasn't a parody of criminal justice in Connecticut on the front page of The Hartford Courant the other day. It was reality that should have been shocking, except that repeat offenders on the loose are now so numerous in the state that few people -- and apparently none in authority -- are shocked.
State police say a 35-year-old Bozrah man with a long criminal record sped through a stop sign in Griswold, ramming another car and killing one of its passengers, Charlotte Degrado, 96, of Branford. The Courant says the offending driver has at least a dozen criminal convictions, has 10 more criminal cases pending against him, and was free because, after being arrested six times since January, he had managed to post $275,000 in bonds.
State police say the driver and his companions in the speeding car ran away after the crash but the driver was apprehended while hiding in nearby woods with a bag of fentanyl pills and $4,693 in cash.
The driver's convictions, according to the Courant, include larceny, burglary, narcotics possession, and engaging police in pursuit, and he has served three prison sentences since 2016 -- 18 months, a year, 90 days. He repeatedly has violated his probations.
If elected officials in Connecticut were more concerned about public safety than in reducing the state's prison population, they might investigate this situation urgently, interviewing every prosecutor and judge involved with the repeat offender's cases. While individually some of his crimes may seem minor, cumulatively they scream incorrigibility.
Could no one in the criminal-justice system perceive this before the fatality? Could no one note the chronic offender's 10 pending cases and realize that speedy trials and maximum sentences would be necessary to halt his crime wave?
Since Gov. Ned Lamont and state legislators don't seem to be taking note of the atrocity, will anyone in journalism confront them about it?
Or will the always dim prospect of reform be left to any efforts made by the dead woman's grieving family?]
Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years (CPowell@cox.net).
Chris Powell: Coaching a college basketball team is easier than legislating
Dan Hurley
MANCHESTER, Conn.
Celebrating Dan Hurley's decision this week to keep coaching the men's basketball team at the University of Connecticut, state House Speaker Matt Ritter confirmed a thought previously reserved for cynics.
That is, UConn's success with basketball is state government's great rationalization for giving the university whatever it wants financially year after year.
Ritter said: "I think there are times when legislators wonder, 'Why UConn? Why higher education?' There were comments about how we were giving so much money to UConn even this year. But Dan Hurley and [women's basketball coach] Geno Auriemma are four million more times popular than the most popular state legislator."
True. But then in a crucial respect the coaching jobs are much easier than those of state legislators -- at least the jobs of legislators who aspire to serve the public interest.
All the coaches have to do to please their constituents is win basketball games. Their players are united on this objective.
The coaches have luxurious contracts that indemnify themselves against failure, as was recently demonstrated by UConn's embarrassing and spectacularly expensive experience with former men's basketball coach Kevin Ollie.
There are no luxurious contracts for state legislators. They are elected for two-year terms with part-time salaries for what is often full-time work or close to it.
Their teams aren't unified. No, their constituents have a thousand objectives, many of them contradictory.
While UConn always gets plenty of money despite its many management failures and financial excesses, state legislators have to find money themselves, first to pay for government and then for their own campaigns.
But most of a legislator's constituents want someone else to pay for the goodies government gives them. As the economist Frederic Bastiat put it long ago, "Government is the great fiction by which everybody tries to live at the expense of everybody else."
And even when the public interest is clear, there is usually a venal special interest with enough politically active adherents to get their way amid the public's obliviousness.
The popularity of Hurley and Auriemma might crash as soon as they had to assemble a state budget or take a position on a controversial policy issue -- say, having 6-foot-4, 240-pound transgender players on high school and college women's basketball teams.
If many state legislators are the tools of special interests, it's because so few of their constituents pay attention that making any friends requires being a tool.
MONEY WON'T FIX SCHOOLS: What exactly does it mean that the state Education Department has instructed its commissioner to look into improving the finances of Hartford's ever-struggling school system?
Certainly there is much to improve. The academic performance of the city's students long has been terrible. Hartford's schools are facing a $40 million budget deficit and laying off hundreds of employees even as the system has tens of millions of dollars of emergency federal aid waiting to be spent.
Republicans in the state Senate have good questions about the state's intervention: Will state money be spent? Will Education Department employees be embedded in the Hartford school administration? Who will make decisions? Will labor contracts be reviewed? Will other struggling school systems in the state get similar evaluations? (They should.)
The most important question here may be whether schools can accomplish much of anything when most of their students lack responsible parents and are largely neglected. Since this may be the most important question, it has never been asked officially.
In any case there is a small indication of progress. Hartford school officials lately have been openly complaining that their schools are being drained financially by tuition transfers required by the regional "magnet" schools craze prompted in the Hartford area by the long-running Sheff v. O'Neill school desegregation case. The magnets are also draining the city's neighborhood schools of their better students. Measured by educational and integrational results, the Sheff case has been a billion-dollar disaster.
Money will never solve the education problem. It's a matter of far bigger issues that politics isn't ready to face.
Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years. (CPowell@cox.net) .
Chris Powell: Silly anti- ‘climate change’ drives in Vermont and Connecticut
MANCHESTER, Conn.
While it may be hard to believe, Vermont seems to have gotten ahead of Connecticut in "climate change" craziness.
The Green Mountain State has just passed a law allowing itself to charge big oil and natural gas companies for the cost to the state of the "greenhouse gases" emitted by use of the fuel sold by the companies between 1995 and 2024. The state itself will choose the criteria for calculating the cost. Mainly Vermont wants to blame the oil and gas companies for the extensive damage done in the state last year by terrible flooding.
Under the new law it won't matter that the fuel products on which "climate change" is being blamed were and remain not just perfectly legal but also crucial to modern civilization. No matter also that nearly everyone in Vermont has been using those products ever since they became available. Vermont wants to blame the manufacturers of the fuel products, not their users, the people for whom those products were made -- the people without whose demand the products wouldn't have been made at all.
Indeed, the mere manufacture of fuel didn't emit the "greenhouse gases" Vermont is complaining about. The use of them did.
Like all other states, Vermont already has a fuel tax. If the state wants to recover what it believes are its costs of the "climate change" caused by use fuel, it can raise that tax and get the money from the parties responsible for their use: its own residents. And if the state really believes that "climate change" disasters are being caused by the use of oil and gas, Vermont already should have outlawed those fuels.
Of course the legislators who passed the law don't really believe its premises. The new law is just a money grab that, if ever implemented, will be nullified in one court or another after years of expensive litigation. But until then legislators who voted for the law will pose as saviors of the environment.
Meanwhile Connecticut's climate alarmists want Gov. Ned Lamont and leaders of the Democratic majority in the General Assembly to put "climate crisis" legislation on the agenda of a special legislative session that is to be called to make a fix in motor vehicle assessment law, a special session that was supposed to be brief.
The "climate crisis" bill at issue passed the House of Representatives during the recent regular session but was stalled by some of the majority Democrats in the Senate who thought that it was more important to guard against climate change by modifying municipal zoning. (The Senate's Republican minority almost certainly would have opposed the "climate crisis" bill, as the Republican minority in the House did.)
After declaring a "climate crisis," the bill would just specify options for reducing "greenhouse gases" by 2050 -- safely beyond the political lifespans of most current legislators. Actual sacrifices would await another day.
Whatever one thinks of "climate change" and its causes -- natural phenomena or manmade phenomena arising only in recent decades -- the "climate crisis" legislation is silly. For even if "climate change" is substantially the result of the use of oil, gas and coal as fuel, Connecticut can do nothing meaningful about it.
The state could outlaw those fuels and shut down all its industry requiring a smokestack and all its transportation requiring a tailpipe and the rest of the country and the rest of the world would continue to use those fuels. Since Connecticut's contribution to the world's "greenhouse gases" is tiny, the state would only disadvantage itself without achieving any measurable reduction in those gases.
Even a national policy of eliminating oil, gas and coal as fuel would have little impact on "greenhouse gases" worldwide, since the developing world, including industrial giant China, will continue to use those fuels until something better comes along. Only a worldwide solution is worth pursuing -- if there really is a problem to solve.
Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years (CPowell@cox.net).
Chris Powell: Innovation is needed to fight poverty and violence; Conn. customer satisfaction
The P.T. Barnum (the circus guy) Museum, in Bridgeport.
MANCHESTER, CONN.
Appalled by the shooting of five people in several incidents in Bridgeport over the Memorial Day weekend, Connecticut Gov. Ned Lamont hurried to the city on May 28 to meet Mayor Joe Ganim and other officials and show moral support.
While Bridgeport's police department is said to be understaffed and to suffer high turnover -- police work may be easier almost anywhere else -- the governor didn't promise any extra help for the city. He thought state initiatives that are already underway with city government are enough for the time being.
In contrast .Mayor Ganim thundered emptily for the television cameras that the city would ensure that the perpetrators of the weekend shootings and other shootings are punished severely. Of course they'll have to be apprehended first.
Just a few hours later four people were shot in an incident in Waterbury. This one didn't prompt a visit from the governor, as the daily business of state government had resumed with the governor's announcement of the allocation of $100 million to the state Economic and Community Development Department for establishing "innovation clusters." This is the euphemism for more political patronage dressed up as economic growth.
If only one of those clusters could figure out how to end gun violence in the cities, or, better still, figure out how to reduce poverty in Connecticut.
Most people in the state -- at least most of those who don't hold elective office -- have noticed that violent crime is closely correlated with poverty. So most people won't be surprised that three of the shootings that appalled the governor took place at the P.T. Barnum Apartments public housing project in Bridgeport and not in exclusive neighborhoods in Darien or Avon. This has been the way of life in Connecticut for many decades.
Nor have the two major state government policies involving poverty changed over that time. Connecticut long has maintained a welfare system that subsidizes childbearing outside marriage and thus deprives children of fathers and the income, discipline, and guidance they provide. The state also long has promoted children throughout school even if they fail to learn anything, thereby destroying their incentive to learn.
These policies have delivered tens of thousands of young people to adulthood largely demoralized and unable to provide for themselves adequately. They are even less able to provide for themselves now that government-instigated inflation has sharply raised the price of necessities. In such circumstances people get stressed, alienated, angry, disturbed, and predatory.
Announcing that $100 million for "innovation clusters," the governor said: "Connecticut has the best-educated and best-trained workforce in the nation. ... We are the home of innovation."
Maybe, but it wasn't the success of an educated and trained workforce that compelled the governor to rush to Bridgeport the other day. The visit was compelled by another deadly manifestation of the state's huge and growing underclass, which still gets no innovation from state government no matter how many lives are lost or damaged.
WE'RE NOT THAT BAD: According to Seattle-based survey firm Qualtrics, the services provided by Connecticut state government produce the second-worst customer satisfaction rate among the 50 states and the District of Columbia, with Connecticut's 51 percent rate leading only that of Illinois with 49 percent.
Are government services in Connecticut really that bad, or are the state residents who responded to the survey just more demanding and would find themselves even less satisfied if they lived elsewhere?
In any case, a customer-satisfaction rate as low as the one reported by the Qualtrics survey would suggest great political dissatisfaction too. But it's hard to find much evidence of that in Connecticut. For many years the same political party has controlled all major state and federal elective offices and has held comfortable majorities in the General Assembly.
Political dissatisfaction? It's hard to find even political competition here.
Of course, some state agencies could be friendlier, but next-to-last in the country in customer satisfaction is almost impossible to believe.
Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years (CPowell@cox.net).
Chris Powell: If you chant ‘Trump!’ enough, Conn. Democrats’ problems vanish
MANCHESTER, Conn.
While Donald Trump can be intemperate, reckless, and megalomaniacal, that is not why he has been so damaging to politics in Connecticut. Trump is most damaging to politics here because he has provided an excuse for so many members of the state's majority party, the Democrats, as well as their allies in the news media, to avoid serious discussion of the many failures of public policy essentially just by chanting: "Trump! Trump! Trump!"
Connecticut has big problems that have not been addressed seriously: education and the declining skill level of the rising workforce, worsening poverty, prohibitive housing prices, state government's indebtedness, a lack of economic and population growth, racial segregation, and taxes that are high even though none of these problems has been alleviated much if at all.
Not that the minority party, the Republicans, necessarily would do much better with these problems. Indeed, the most recent 16 years of Republican state administration (1995-2011) differed from Democratic administration only insofar as taxes didn't go up as much as they might have under a Democratic administration. Of course that's something, but under Republican administration Connecticut's downward trends weren't halted, much less reversed. Connecticut didn't get more value from its government.
While Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee for president, is leading the presumptive Democratic nominee, President Biden, in the recent national polls, nobody expects Trump to carry Connecticut. The state is too Democratic, and just chanting "Trump! Trump! Trump!" here will probably distract enough from the big national issues -- inflation and the economy in general, illegal immigration, and the expensive and unnecessary proxy war in Ukraine and the danger that it will erupt into a European war or even a world war. (A currency war arising in part from the Ukraine war is already being waged.)
The Democratic chant will help sustain the political status quo in the state but it won't make Connecticut great again. For that to happen, many mistaken premises of policy will have to be challenged.
xxx
WHY GO TO SCHOOL?: Last week Gov. Ned Lamont joined a White House conference about chronic absenteeism from school, a problem nationally as well as in Connecticut. Among the participants were U.S. Education Secretary Miguel Cardona, formerly Meriden's school superintendent and Connecticut's education commissioner.
They discussed the slight success in getting children to attend school more often by having school employees call or visit the homes of the chronically absent and asking parents what the problem is and if government can help them solve it.
Warning parents that not getting their children get to school is neglect is not planned. The politically correct presumption is that parents, especially single parents, really shouldn't be held responsible for themselves and their children. Many neglectful parents probably sense this presumption and feel excused.
Connecticut's elected officials should look deeper into the problem, especially since student proficiency in the state has been declining for years. They should ask: What exactly is the incentive for children to go to school today and for parents to get them there?
In the old days social pressure helped get children to school and to learn. For failure to learn risked the embarrassment of being held back a grade.
But no more. For Connecticut's main educational policy long has been social promotion: All students are promoted regardless of academic failure, in the belief that being held back is too damaging to a child's self-esteem -- as if failure to learn is not more damaging when a child grows up.
Meanwhile, the decline in the skill level of Connecticut students, and thus the decline in their ability to support themselves, is being met with more government subsidies for them as impoverished adults, so neglecting one's education is less costly to the individual and more costly to taxpayers.
In the old days most people thought education was crucial to a better life. Today many people seem to think otherwise. So chronic absenteeism may continue until something changes that thinking. Politically correct as it may be, asking negligent parents nicely isn't likely to help much.
Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years. (CPowell@cox.net) .
Chris Powell: Hartford’s new archbishop eyes the poverty factory
Archbishop Christopher J. Coyne
Cathedral of Saint Joseph in Hartford
— Photo by Sage Ross
MANCHESTER, Conn.
When he was installed two weeks ago, Hartford’s new Catholic archbishop, Christopher J. Coyne, said he has several big objectives, though he conceded that with two of them he may be dreaming.
Coyne’s most practical objective is simply restoring the local church and regaining parishioners. "In recent years," Coyne said, "we have given folks no shortage of causes to walk away from the faith -- parish closings, the abuse scandal and associated betrayals by leaders who should have known and done better, and pastoral approaches that at times have done more to judge people than serve them."
The archbishop can’t undo those scandals but he can be candid about them and make sure that the wrath of God quickly falls -- publicly -- on any agents of the archdiocese who betray their trust.
As for unhappy judgments on people, archbishops are stuck with church doctrines that many think contradict modernity, such as the refusal to ordain women or sanction same-sex relationships. Given the conservative bent of the places where the church is growing, those doctrines are unlikely to be changed soon.
Not that modernity is always right. Indeed, the basic Catholic morality of old is less primitive than today’s morality of anything goes. It wasn’t entirely because of religious doctrine, but Connecticut was better before state government started pushing gambling and marijuana on the public and pretending that men can be women and vice-versa.
Sad as Catholic parish closings are, ripping roots out of the community and leaving empty buildings as stark monuments to a vanished era, the decline in church membership requires closings and it has not been caused primarily by the scandals. While spirituality is not dead in the developed world, religious dogma is losing adherents fast. Perceptions of the divine today are much broader.
Fortunately the church has much to offer beyond dogma, starting with the Sermon on the Mount, and evangelical and non-denominational churches are growing. Catholic leaders might study their appeal.
In his inaugural remarks, the new archbishop noted that parish and school closings have left the church with many buildings that might be converted to inexpensive housing, of which Connecticut is desperately short. Of course this is easier said than done. While nearly everyone purports to want the state to have more housing, nearly everyone wants it built somewhere else. The fear of the underclass is real and often justified, as indicated by violent crime and terrible school performance in the cities.
The new archbishop has an idea about his new city, Hartford, a poverty factory where two high school students were shot to death the other day. His dreamiest objective is to restore Catholic schools in the city -- there are none left -- and make them tuition-free.
The excellence of Catholic schools is generally acknowledged. The schools have behavioral discipline and academic standards, which now are virtually prohibited in public schools. Unlike public schools, church schools can choose their students, but they use this freedom not to exclude but to pursue the most motivated students and parents.
Thus church schools can offer students an escape from the demoralization of city life, and with their better environment they can retain good staff while paying less than public schools.
Regional public "magnet" schools offer some escape as well but are still somewhat impaired in discipline and academic standards. They also impose more transportation burdens on students and parents than neighborhood schools.
In any case, as indicated by the litigation of the past quarter century over school segregation in Hartford, the city and other cities in Connecticut can use much more school choice. The return of Catholic schools could help provide it, but avoiding tuition would require money from somewhere.
A scholarship program from state government might provide it and educate students better and less expensively than government’s own system, but the teacher unions would never consent, and they run government in Connecticut. They have no interest in improving student performance, reducing poverty, and saving money. Only dreamers care about such stuff. Good for the new archbishop for being one.]
Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years (CPowell@cox.net).
Chris Powell: Don't leave looted Conn. hospitals' fate to a big game of chicken
“The Worship of Mammon,’’ by Evelyn De Morgan (1909).
MANCHESTER, Conn.
A big game of chicken may determine what becomes of Waterbury (Conn.) Hospital, Manchester (Conn.) Memorial Hospital, and Rockville General Hospital, in Vernon, Conn.
Yale New Haven Health, which two years ago agreed to buy the three struggling hospitals from Prospect Medical Holdings for $435 million, now is suing Prospect to nullify the agreement. Yale New Haven Health contends that Prospect has substantially impaired the hospitals by mismanagement since the agreement was made.
Prospect's Connecticut hospitals were already in terrible financial condition, most of their equity having been stripped from them and liquidated by their parent company, Leonard Green and Partners, a private-equity investment firm based in California. The Prospect hospitals no longer own their own real estate but must pay rent to a real-estate company.
Connecticut law never should have allowed nonprofit hospitals, which Waterbury, Manchester and Rockville were, to be acquired by investment companies like Prospect. The state now has a big interest in keeping the hospitals operating, restoring their solvency, and returning them to nonprofit status.
But Yale New Haven Health has a big interest in not overpaying for an operation that may be on the verge of collapse and bankruptcy. After all, Yale New Haven Health runs four hospitals in Connecticut, all nonprofits, and they could be critically weakened if their parent company pays too much for the Prospect hospitals.
As the condition of the Prospect hospitals deteriorated after Yale New Haven Health agreed to acquire them, Yale New Haven Health asked state government to subsidize its purchase by $80 million. Gov. Ned Lamont didn't want to do that and urged the two sides to keep negotiating. But with the acquisition unfulfilled after two years and the lawsuit charging bad faith, negotiations have failed and seem unlikely to resume soon. The Prospect hospitals are far behind in paying bills and state and municipal taxes. They may not have any net worth left at all.
But the Prospect hospitals serve large communities and their closure would be a disaster for Connecticut. Other hospitals are not prepared to take up the displaced patient load, and even if they could handle it, many patients of the failing hospitals and the doctors who treat them would have far to travel. The disruption to medical care in the state would be immense. Despite Prospect's awful ownership and top management, its hospitals employ hundreds of dedicated professionals striving to provide excellent care under worsening financial stress.
State government's financial intervention in support of an acquisition by Yale New Haven Health strikes many as the obvious solution.
But a state subsidy for the purchase will ratify Prospect's looting of its three hospitals and the real-estate company's purchase of the hospitals' property. The real-estate company now may think it has decisive leverage over whoever acquires the hospitals and intends to keep them operating. But if the hospitals fail and go out of business, their buildings probably would lose much of their value, since they have practical use only as hospitals.
The best mechanism for saving the hospitals may be to let them fail and go into bankruptcy. Bankruptcy is exclusively a federal court process but with the court's approval state government could become a party to the case and assist the financial reorganization of the hospitals from the moment of their bankruptcy filing. Bankruptcy could relieve the hospitals of their burdensome property rental obligations.
In any case state government should do more than what it long has been doing about this problem -- just hoping that Yale New Haven Health and Prospect will work things out eventually before the Prospect hospitals collapse and close. Hope is not a strategy or plan.
So the governor should assemble a team ready to assist a bankruptcy proceeding, the General Assembly should make millions of dollars in an emergency loan available to a new owner of the hospitals, and the legislature and governor should give Connecticut a law to prevent nonprofit hospitals from falling into the hands of predators ever again, and thus to prevent the theft of decades of community charity that state government's negligence allowed here.
Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years (CPowell@cox.net).