Chris Powell: Hartford doesn’t need hockey and state’s ‘values’ don’t help
At the XL Center, in Hartford.
— Photo by Enterprise8875
MANCHESTER, Conn.
Some people think that Hartford's decline began in 1997, when the city's National Hockey League team, the Whalers, left for North Carolina. Gov. Ned Lamont seems to be one of them, though the city's plunge into poverty and dysfunction started at least 30 years earlier.
For a few years in the 1980s and '90s the Whalers did manage to fill some downtown Hartford restaurants and bars on game nights as the team played at the Hartford Civic Center Coliseum. But most Whalers fans were suburbanites who quickly went back home, doing nothing to improve the city's demographics. Even with a National Hockey League team the city kept losing its middle class.
Maybe NHL hockey could help Hartford a little more now since, thanks to a bailout from state government, the city has built a lovely minor-league baseball stadium near the coliseum, renamed the XL Center. With baseball in the warmer months and hockey in the colder ones, and with the housing the city is striving to restore downtown, maybe more middle-class people could be induced to live in the city again.
But hockey is an acquired taste and the governor's enthusiasm for it in Hartford is not supported by history. The Whalers seldom filled their arena and the joke was that each game was like a Grateful Dead concert -- the same several thousand people.
When the other day the governor said his administration is “ready” for the return of big-league hockey to Hartford at the XL Center, with the possible relocation of the Arizona Coyotes, he couldn't have been serious. While state government is appropriating $100 million to renovate the arena, the project already is expected to run $40 million over budget, and a new team's likely demand for government subsidies has not been acknowledged, much less addressed.
Indeed, in 1996, as the Whalers demanded that state government build them a new arena even as they couldn't fill the one they had, the Journal Inquirer calculated that between financial bailouts of the team, discounted and unpaid state loans, and free use of the coliseum, state government was subsidizing the team by $32 per ticket sold, or $1,400 per spectator per season. This shouldn't have been surprising, since the Whalers had only three winning seasons out of 18 in the NHL. (The Coyotes have had only two winning seasons in their last 10.)
How much per ticket will Connecticut have to subsidize another round of NHL hockey in Hartford, and where will the money come from? The remnants of state government's federal emergency money are already being claimed many times over.
Improving Hartford's demographics is a worthy project, but hockey isn't likely to accomplish even a tiny fraction as much as a few new supermarkets would, and subsidizing new supermarkets for a while probably will be necessary to make the city's notorious “food desert” bloom.
Like other Southern states, North Carolina has been enjoying more economic and population growth than Connecticut, but three Democratic state senators here have an idea for reversing the trend.
They note that North Carolina's Republicans have given their nomination for governor to Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson, a nutty Bible thumper, so the Democratic senators -- Senate President Pro Tem Martin M. Looney, Majority Leader Bob Duff, and Deputy Senate President Joan Hartley -- have urged Connecticut's economic development commissioner to appeal to North Carolina businesses to flee their state's impending nuttiness by moving here.
Duff says, "A lot of people come to Connecticut because they like our values."
Unfortunately those "values" lately include government employee union control of public finance, high taxes, high electricity prices, ever-increasing mandates on business, nullification of federal immigration law, racial preferences, abortion of viable fetuses, boys impersonating girls in sports, sex-change therapy for minors, the concealment by schools from parents of the gender dysphoria of their children, pervasive euphemizing, and politics less competitive than Russia's.
Bible thumping may be easier to live with.
Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years (CPowell@cox.net).
Chris Powell: Oh, no, not back to big-time hockey in Hartford!?
MANCHESTER, Conn.
What are Hartford's big problems? Connecticut Gov. Dannel Malloy suggests that they are the lack of a big-league hockey team and a deficient formula for state financial aid to the city's school system. But Connecticut has been there, done that, and gotten the bill if not the T-shirt. Proposing to spend $250 million to renovate what used to be the Hartford Civic Center arena -- now the XL Center, naming rights having been sold -- the governor is soliciting the New York Islanders to leave their arena in Brooklyn.
It's unclear why the Islanders would respond with anything except a laugh, since Hartford proved itself unable to support big-league hockey when the Whalers departed, in 1997. As state government began contemplating still another subsidy for the Whalers in 1996, the Journal Inquirer reported that the team had gotten at least $67 million from the state since 1992 and that this had equated to a subsidy of about $32 per Whalers ticket purchased over five years.
While it thought that it had plenty of money to subsidize hockey back then, state government was failing to put aside the money necessary to maintain the solvency of the state employee pension fund, whose unfunded liabilities now are cannibalizing the rest of state government. Still the governor imagines that the state has money to subsidize hockey in Hartford. As for state aid to municipal schools, the governor's proposal on the subject seems to be part of a scheme to balance the state budget by cutting aid to all but the most impoverished cities and towns.
This will force most towns either to raise property taxes or get concessions from their municipal employee unions, the largest of which represent teachers. What the governor proposes may be fairer taxation, but people being taxed more still will be right to resent it, because state government has been tinkering with its school aid formula since the state Supreme Court decision in Horton v. Meskill, in 1977 without any substantial improvement in educational results in the schools that were supposed to be helped. Connecticut's evidence of almost 40 years is that school financing has little bearing on student performance -- that student performance is mainly a matter of parenting, with most children in poor cities and towns being products of the welfare system and thus having no fathers and only incompetent mothers.
Almost four decades have passed since Connecticut began its school-aid formula approach to education. The only reason to continue that approach is to delay recognizing the social problem and welfare policy's responsibility for it.
BANKRUPTCY WON'T VAPORIZE HARTFORD
In an editorial the other day The Hartford Courant called on the rest of the state to rescue Hartford city government from its insolvency, as if state government isn't even more insolvent. The Courant gave the impression that if Hartford filed for bankruptcy, as Mayor Luke Bronin has said the city might have to, all the good things in the city would disappear, causing a lot of damage to the suburbs.
Of course, such suggestions are nonsense. Bankruptcy would leave Hartford with its hospitals, museums, and colleges -- would leave the city even with the incompetently built minor-league baseball stadium city that government decided to undertake at a cost of $50 million (now probably more than $70 million) shortly before discovering that city government was facing a budget deficit of equal size.
No, bankruptcy would merely restructure the city's debts, which are owed primarily to its employees and retired employees and bondholders -- the parties who long have enabled and profited from the financial irresponsibility of city government. In a bankruptcy they would have to return some of their profits -- that's all.
Chris Powell is managing editor of the Journal Inquirer, in Manchester, Conn.