Chris Powell: Connecticut's toll trauma

Gov. Ned Lamont's plan for imposing tolls on Connecticut's highways has devolved over a few months from 50 tolling stations producing about $800 million a year to just 14 stations at bridges needing renovation, where a mere fraction of that $800 million would be raised.

So what happened to the plan? The governor, a Democrat, eventually calculated that while his party has comfortable majorities in both houses of the General Assembly, a majority can be built for tolls only on the smallest scale, since the Republicans are opposed and many Democrats are fearful of retaliation from their constituents.

Some of the governor's ideas for transportation improvements are compelling, like bringing more passenger service to Tweed New Haven Airport or a serious amount to Sikorsky Memorial Airport,. in Stratford, along with modernizing the Metro-North commuter railroad from New Haven to New York. But putting tolls all over the place would be far too visible to voters. It also would be a regressive form of taxation, falling mainly on the poor and middle class, whom the Democrats purport to represent. Meanwhile the state's ever-rising taxes are inducing people with higher incomes to leave the state, which continues to lose population relative to the rest of the country.

Democratic legislators are usually willing to raise taxes, so their reluctance with tolls indicates a change in political atmosphere. Such a change was also indicated by the most notable result of this year's municipal election campaigns -- the defeat of New Haven Mayor Toni Harp by Justin Elicker in the Democratic primary and then again in last week's election, where Harp ran as the candidate of the government employee union-dominated Working Families Party. Harp had just raised New Haven's property taxes by 11 percent and her administration lately was full of costly incompetence.

Since Democratic legislators fear tolls and since even overwhelmingly Democratic New Haven seems sick of taxes, people here slowly may be wising up. So the government class may be vulnerable if Connecticut ever has an opposition party not led by President Trump.

In any case, tolls are not really for transportation purposes. Rather they are for allowing the state's Democratic regime to avoid economizing in the rest of government in favor of transportation.

Tolls will let state government continue to overlook its mistaken and expensive policies with education, welfare, and government employees, where ever more spending fails to improve learning, worsens the dependence of the unskilled, and makes public administration less efficient and accountable.

Connecticut needs profound reform in these respects, and enacting tolls will only reduce the pressure on elected officials to choose the public interest over special interests.

The state's most fearsome special interest, the Connecticut Education Association, the teachers union, inadvertently illustrated one of those choices the other day. The union issued a report about “sick” schools -- schools that, because of deferred maintenance and lack of improvements, suffer from mold, excessive heat, and such.

But school maintenance and improvements are neglected in large part because state law requires binding arbitration of teacher union contracts, thereby giving teacher compensation priority in budgeting. There's no binding arbitration for “sick” schools, so maintenance and improvements are often deferred in favor of raising teacher pay.

What's really sick here is the law, since it serves only the special interest, letting it cannibalize the rest of government.

Chris Powell is a columnist for the Journal Inquirer, in Manchester, Conn.

Chris Powell: Lamont's conflicting poses; New Haven a haven for expense-account excess

Pouring more of his personal wealth into his campaign for Connecticut governor, zillionaire Democrat Ned Lamont went on television the other day with a new commercial touting "change." In the ad Lamont says he'll cut property and small-business taxes, reduce medical costs, and demand equal pay for equal work for women.

The latter already has been the law for a long time but Democrats need to nurture resentments to rile up their tribal base. The other objectives proclaimed by Lamont's new commercial will be delusional until state government manages to close the $4 billion deficit projected for the next state budget, and Lamont offers no ideas about that.

Indeed, while Lamont's campaign distributes press releases every day, the projected budget deficit is so large that whoever is elected governor will be lucky just to keep the lights on at the state Capitol for his first few years in office. Any proposals that cost money will be mere posturing and pandering until the deficit is closed.

At the end of his new commercial Lamont declares, "Change starts now." But even as the commercial began airing, Lamont received the endorsement of another state employee union, that of the state police. The unions are not supporting Lamont in pursuit of change but rather in defense of their privileges under the political status quo. The unions are confident that, since they dominate the Democratic Party, which has controlled state government for eight years, as governor Lamont will go easier on them than any other candidate.

Meanwhile, Lamont keeps charging that the election of the Republican candidate, Bob Stefanowski, will destroy all public services, since the Republican's only idea is to eliminate the state income tax and thus forgo half of state government's revenue. In effect, Lamont is arguing that no state and municipal government operations can manage with less money -- that no employees, contractors and welfare recipients can be directed to do more with less. That is, Lamont is arguing that the government and welfare classes must not be disturbed and that change is actually impossible.

So Lamont is presenting himself as the candidate of both change and continuity. This is incoherent. But it may be more than Stefanowski offers.

For at least Lamont is making appearances around the state, issuing statements, and being accessible. As for Stefanowski, other than his ads attacking Lamont as a clone of the ever-unpopular Gov. Dannel Malloy, the Republican is hardly to be seen. The only advantage of this campaign strategy seems to be to prevent the candidate from displaying his unfamiliarity with state government and the state itself. After all, Stefanowski never before has been involved with public life and didn't even vote for the last 16 years.

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A HAVEN FOR EXCESS: Next time New Haven Mayor Toni Harp shows up at the Connecticut Capitol to plead poverty and to clamor for more state money for her city, legislators might ask her about her administration's concealment of its travel expenses, as reported this week by the New Haven Independent.

Officials with city credit cards, the Independent found, have not disclosed to the Board of Alders their cross-country flights, hotel stays, and luxurious meals on city business. Trips to meetings of the U.S. Conference of Mayors have cost two or three times more than was reported.

Since state government reimburses half the city's budget, New Haven seems to figure that it's nobody's money.

Chris Powell is a columnist for the Journal Inquirer, in Manchester, Conn.

The world's first phonebook was made in New Haven in 1878.

Chris Powell: Free college is just a ploy; go local, not regional

The  arts, technologies and science center at Manchester Community College.

MANCHESTER, Conn.

Connecticut state government's great new "bipartisan budget" is already $250 million in deficit and budget deficits in the billions are forecast for years to come, but Democratic leaders in the state Senate are proposing to make community college free for students. Mere taxpayers would pay an extra $30 million or so per year.

Many Democratic legislators also favor making state financial aid available to illegal immigrant students in college.

Meanwhile state government's financial support for the innocent needy is in danger of being cut, and a commission appointed to study state government's financial trouble has just urged saving money.

So why are the Democrats so calculatingly oblivious, so intent on reminding people that they remain the Party of Free Stuff, as if anything really is free and as if state government's financial trouble and the contraction of the state's economy haven't been caused in large part by too much free stuff?

The Democrats are doubly oblivious about free community college because Connecticut's education problem is not higher education but primary education. Standardized tests show that most of the state's high school students never master high school math and English but are graduated anyway. Many then are admitted to public colleges only to take remedial courses. A Superior Court judge surveying the state's primary education system reported 18 months ago that high schools are graduating illiterates.

The Democrats say free community college will help the state's employers, who lack qualified applicants. But improving outcomes in primary education, through which everyone goes, would help employers more than free college when so many college students just repeat high school in pursuit of another false credential.

Indeed, in these circumstances free college is less a gift to students than to educators, whose unions dominate the Democratic Party. The proposal is another ploy to rile up the party's base.

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TRY LOCALISM, NOT REGIONALISM: Pushing regionalism again in a series at the Connecticut Mirror this month, veteran journalist Tom Condon approvingly quotes a Massachusetts mayor who says a region that wants to prosper has to "act like a region." But Condon proposes little more than the politically correct groupthink of creating regional governments and giving them taxing authority on top of the taxing authority of state and municipal governments.

What advocates of regionalism don't notice is that Connecticut already has tried plenty of regionalism.

That's what state government is, with all its laws and policies outlawing or impairing democratic control of expenses, like binding arbitration of government employee union contracts, defined-benefit pensions for government employees, "prevailing wage" requirements for government construction projects, and the state Board of Mediation and Arbitration's forbidding dismissal of government employees even for the worst misconduct.

More regionalism would mainly let the corrupt and incompetent city governments, which dominate state government through their influence in the majority party, grab more taxes from suburbanites.

In these circumstances the chance of improvement in Connecticut would be greater with more localism, letting municipalities opt out of expensive state mandates that serve only special interests.

Even as Condon was writing his series, New Haven Mayor Toni Harp proposed raising her city's property tax rate by 11 percent rather than aggravate the city's government and welfare classes with too much economizing. Why should anyone outside New Haven want more of that?


Chris Powell is a columnist for the Journal Inquirer in Manchester, Conn., and a frequent contributor to New England Diary.

 

Chris Powell: New Haven's mayor has been very busy helping to erase America's borders

New Haven from the air.

President Trump can be counted on to discredit even a legitimate issue, as he did last week at a White House meeting by joking about the absence of New Haven Mayor Toni Harp, whom he had summoned to praise, along with other mayors, for their work on transportation issues.

“Toni Harp. Where's Toni? Toni? Toni?," Trump said, adding, "Uh, can't be a sanctuary city person. That's not possible, is it?”

Of course, Harp is the mayor of the most brazen sanctuary city in the country and, having learned a few hours earlier of the Trump administration's new demand for immigration policy information from other such cities, she seems to have suspected, rightly, that, to score political points, the president might change the meeting's subject from transportation to immigration. So Harp skipped the meeting.

Whereupon the president blustered, "The mayors who chose to boycott this event have put the needs of criminal illegal immigrants over law-abiding America."

Of course the immigration issue is not that simple. Yes, some illegal immigrants are criminals but most are not. The real issue is whether immigration is ever to be controlled and, if so, how.

So it might have been helpful if Harp had attended the meeting and had replied to any demagoguery from the president.

But just as Trump demagogues the immigration issue by overstating its criminal aspects, Harp and other proponents of sanctuary cities and states -- like the mayor nearly all of them Democrats, including Connecticut Gov. Dannel  Malloy -- claim to find virtue in nullifying federal law as the old segregationists did. It is actually the position of the nullifiers that anyone who breaks into the United States and makes his way to New Haven should be exempt from immigration law.

The president's demagoguery has made it nearly impossible to have an intelligent and civilized debate on the immigration issue. But his opponents are fortunate about this, since they don't want such a debate. They would lose it. For the logic of their position is that the United States shouldn't even be a country.

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Connecticut's latest sad deportation case is that of Joel Colindres, an illegal immigrant living in New Fairfield with a U.S. citizen wife and two young U.S. citizen children. He says he came to the United States from Guatemala in 2004 to escape violence and persecution, surrendered to immigration authorities in Texas, and got regular stays of deportation until recently. Now the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency may expel him in a few days.

Presumably Colindres enjoyed the infamous "catch and release" policy of previous administrations, whereby, rather than being sent back immediately, illegal immigrants were given years to stay in the country, marry and start families to use as hostages against deportation by future administrations if their overused claims of fleeing persecution were ever doubted. Indeed, most illegal immigrants from Latin America are really only economic refugees, not political ones.

While it may be hard to see the point of deporting an illegal immigrant who has a citizen wife and children, there is one. It is to frighten and deter other illegal immigrants and induce their Democratic supporters to accept the obvious political compromise -- another immigration amnesty like the Simpson-Mazzoli Act of 1986, which promised but never delivered border security, in exchange for another such promise, this time the president's border wall. But erasing the border remains more important to the Democrats than legalizing the illegals and preserving families.


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

After some decades of steep decline, parts of New Haven have become much more prosperous, and, well, gentrified, in the past couple of decades, including this stretch of upper State Street.

Chris Powell: The Devil in Weimar New Haven

The New Haven Green in happier times.

While it is home to a renowned university, Yale, New Haven often seems as anti-intellectual as any place on the planet, on account of the city's street theater, which isn't so funny anymore as it evokes the political disintegration of Germany's Weimar Republic, when Nazis and Communists rioted until democracy gave way.

On July 8, there were rumors that "right-wing" groups would rally on New Haven's green. So hundreds of counter-protesters got there first. According to the New Haven Register, what was nearly a riot developed as the counter-protesters confronted the half-dozen or so supposed right-wingers who showed up. One of the supposed right-wingers, who said only that he was "anti-socialist," was told by the counter-protesters to leave the green and as obscenities were shouted at him he was shoved and kicked and his hat was grabbed from his head. Police made several arrests for disorderly conduct.

Afterward Mayor Toni Harp issued a statement: "We were in no way supportive of any assembly that intends to incite fear, hatred, and violence. New Haven is and remains an inclusive city and I personally take responsibility for ensuring that this is the case."

But how "inclusive" is a city that assaults and runs out of town anyone merely suspected of planning to disagree with the local mob? Of course this kind of thing is happening throughout the country, as left-wingers and right-wingers spoil for such fights and sacrifice the law for a chance to strike a blow.

The left started the trend years ago with political correctness. Donald Trump trumped it with the hatefulness and vulgarity of his presidential campaign. Now the left is trying to trump Trump with political violence, forgetting that when guns are outlawed, only Trump will have guns. Maybe this situation will give old-school liberals pause about the powerful executive style of government that they long have celebrated.

In any case the country will be lucky if the current chief executive continues to be too incoherent and incompetent to play Caesar. Indeed, the country will be lucky simply to maintain the rule of law through the next 3½ years as even people sworn to its impartial enforcement discard it quickly to smite their political adversaries, as Connecticut's secretary of the state, Denise Merrill, did last week by refusing the Trump administration's request for elections data that was public until the administration asked for it.

If Trump really is the Devil this would be a good time for television networks to broadcast the brilliant 1966 movie of Robert Bolt's play about the Catholic martyr Sir Thomas More, A Man for All Seasons.  Paul Scofield's More memorably reprimands his daughter's suitor, Roper, a fanatic not unlike those of today:

ROPER: So now you'd give the Devil benefit of law!

MORE: Yes. What would you do? Cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil?

ROPER: I'd cut down every law in England to do that!

MORE: Oh? And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned round on you -- where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This country's planted thick with laws from coast to coast -- man's laws, not God's -- and if you cut them down -- and you're just the man to do it -- do you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I'd give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety's sake.

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