Don Pesci: Using Conn. tolls as an escape hatch

Connecticut Gov. Ned Lamont threw up his hands in a gesture of surrender and took a pause in his ceaseless efforts to rig Connecticut with a new revenue source – tolls – so that his comrades in the General Assembly would not have to apply themselves diligently during the next decade to balancing chronic deficits through spending cuts. A new revenue source would buy progressives in the legislature about ten years of business-as-usual slothfulness. It is their real hedge against spending reductions.

“I think it’s time,” Lamont said at a hastily called news conference, “to take a pause” and -- he did not say -- to resume our tireless efforts next year, after the November 2020 elections have been put to bed. The specter always hanging over the struggle for and against tolls always has been the upcoming elections, when all the members of Connecticut’s General Assembly will come face to face with the voter’s wrath. The prime directive in state politics is to get elected and stay elected, without which all ideas, hopes, dreams, and the vain strutting of one’s hour upon the political stage, are evanescent puffs of smoke.

“Gov. drops tolls plan” ran the front page, above the fold headline in a Hartford paper, underscored with a sub-headline, “Democratic Senate leaders are still open to a vote on controversial legislation.” The word “controversial” in that headline is a massive understatement. The best laid toll plans of Lamont and leading Democrats in the General Assembly were torn asunder by a volcanic eruption of disgust and dismay that Speaker of the House Joe Arsimowicz and President of the Senate Martin Looney seem convinced will disappear within the following year. Their experts no doubt have counseled them that the lifespan of political memories in Connecticut is exceedingly short; by November, all the Sturm und Drang over tolls will have been dumped onto the ash heap of ancient history.

No one will recall these bitter fighting words from Lamont, “If these guys [Lamont’s Democrat co-conspirators who had been giving him assurances that there were enough votes in the General Assembly to pass his re-worked toll plan] aren’t willing to vote and step up, I’m going to solve this problem. Right now, we’re going to go back to the way we’ve done it for years in this state when we kept kicking the can down the road."

By the expression “kicking the can down the road” Lamont meant to indicate that the Democratic-dominated legislature and preceding governors had not, unlike him, attacked transportation issues, not to mention massively dislocative state workers’ pension obligations, with energy and dispatch. We are back to borrowing money to pay for transportation and road repair because – Lamont did not say – his Democrat comrades in the General Assembly had in the past raided dedicated funds, transportation funds among them, in order to move from laughably insecure “lockboxes” to the General Slush Fund monies necessary to patch massive holes in budget appropriations and expenditures caused by inordinate spending.

The real political division in Connecticut is not, and perhaps never has been, between Democrats and Republicans. The dissevering line runs between progressive politicians who, victims of their own past successes, are not discomforted by ever-increasing taxes and spending – which go together, like the proverbial horse and carriage – and those who are beginning to suspect that the usual political bromides only sink the state further in a mire of political corruption and anti-democratic but successful political verbiage that makes no sense when examined closely. In the post income tax period, Connecticut entered into a perilous and fatally repetitious Groundhog Day, and those who might have opened the eyes of the public, reporters and commentators, were fast asleep.

Tolls are, in fact, an escape hatch for politicians who want to deceive their real employers, voters, into swallowing the fiction that less money for the masses and more for the politicians will usher in a progressive Eden, whereas inordinate revenue infusions only relieve politicians of the brutal necessity for spending cuts.

The general perception among all groups opposed to tolls and other revenue boosters appears to be: not one cent more in net revenue. For the benefit of the real state, not Connecticut’s administrative apparatus, the General Assembly must show in an indisputable and public manner that it intends to inaugurate real, lasting, spending reforms. The General Assembly is making a serious political mistake if it assumes that all the ruckus of the past year surrounding tolls is only about tolls. It is about the General Assembly and present and past governors who have closed their eyes and ears to the havoc they have caused and the wounds and injuries they have visited upon our beloved state.

Don Pesci is a Vernon, Conn.-based columnist.

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.

Don Pesci: On the trail of the Connecticut toll campaign

Tolling in Connecticut is what the advertising men would call a tough sell, and it helps in circumstances such as these to bring in some political spin doctors to assist in the delivery.

Many people in Connecticut, almost certainly a majority, do not want tolls. On May 9, No Tolls Connecticut delivered to the governor’s office a “No Tolls” petition signed by 100,000 people.

Candidate for governor Ned Lamont said during his campaign he would favor tolls only if people outside the state, truck drivers mostly, would be depositing their mites in Connecticut’s revenue collection basket. He said this several times while the TV cameras were rolling.

Later Lamont changed his mind, always the prerogative of pretty women and ambitious politicians. But Lamont’s reversal – which came shortly after he had won his gubernatorial campaign – could not be justified as a “misspeak.” He could have used the services of a good narrative builder right there, but Roy Occhiogrosso, former Gov. Dan Malloy’s flack catcher and narrative builder, perhaps was busy hauling in the dollars from his other clients.

According to Occhiogrosso’s Global Strategy Group bio, “Roy returned to GSG – where he was a partner from 2003 to 2010 – in 2013, after serving for two years as senior adviser and chief strategist to Connecticut Governor Dan Malloy. Roy believes that, at some level, everything is about communications. And that if you communicate proactively and properly – using traditional and new media, and social media, internally and externally – you can win your fights and avoid problems.”

Some elements of Occhiogrosso’s strategy on tolls have been activated by Lamont, and no doubt Occhiogrosso will be able to spin some profit from the toll contretemps. He is not alone in supposing that a well-constructed narrative – the bulk of American politics these days is narration, story building – can overcome not only populist opposition but reality itself.

Joining the tolls-are-good-for-you effort are, according to Jon Lender’s piece in The Hartford Courant, a number of Global Strategy Group strategists. The group has produced a “23-page document, entitled ‘Connecticut Campaign for Transportation, 2019 Legislative session,’” that fell into Lender’s hands, and he publicized the private communique; it’s what good investigative reporters do.

Part of the difficulty with tolling is that nearly everyone in Connecticut understands a toll to be a consumer tax. And, to put it in blunt non-narrative, populist terms, people in the state have had it up to their ears with taxes.

First there was the income tax -- necessary, people were told by political narrators, to bring backward Connecticut into the 21st Century. Prior to the income tax, the state relied on consumption taxes, which were, said the political narrators, regressive.

Then Malloy – and Occhiogrosso – came ambling down the road and increased both income taxes and consumption taxes to pay off debts incurred by General Assembly politicians, mostly Democrats, who had invested not a penny into the state employees’ seriously under-financed pension fund for about 30 years after the fund had been created. Numerous “lockbox” funds then were raided by the same cowardly politicians, the appropriated loot dumped into the General Fund. Naturally, Malloy and company were forced to raise taxes to pay off mounting debt. Malloy was followed by Lamont, a protégé of former Gov. Lowell Weicker, who called Weicker to ask himj how he had managed to get an income tax through a then moderate- Democrat opposition in the General Assembly.

The 24-page secret communique suggests remedies to overcome mounting and entirely predictable opposition to tolls, and there is reason to believe that Lamont already has adopted some suggestions: “To overcome resistance, a strategy would be developed ‘to drive legislative support for a tolling concept that will maximize revenue while holding CT citizens as harmless as possible (example: resident discount)… Convincing the legislature to vote for a comprehensive tolling bill — one that includes trucks and cars, albeit with a substantial discount for CT drivers, won’t be easy.

‘‘Opponents have already framed this in simple terms: ‘it’s another huge tax increase.’ In order to win this fight we’re going to have to first reframe the debate — so that’s about ‘jobs and economic development,’ and not just another tax increase… ‘ Government Relations Tactics’ would include: showing legislators ‘how money earned via tolls can significantly improve their specific districts — driving the correlation between tolls and local improvements to infrastructure; highlighting the ‘vs.’ factor by using ‘polling data to share statewide how CT residents feel when you compare tolls to an increase in gas taxes, property taxes, car taxes, etc.’ and providing ‘legislative leadership the necessary political data to ‘whip’ their caucuses’ into support for tolling.”

Getting an unpopular measure passed through the legislature requires an almost religious faith in the power of deconstructing and reconstructing emotion-based “narratives.” The palpable, ruinous consequences of further tax increases can always be buried in a coffin of fanciful – and costly – propaganda.

Don Pesci is a Vernon, Conn.-based columnist.

Chris Powell: Hiding criminal records doesn't help ex-cons

Most people who go to prison in Connecticut, even for a short time, will have a hard time rebuilding their lives. At best they will be considered damaged goods, necessarily inferior to job and housing applicants who have not been in prison. At worst they will be considered criminals still, since within a few years most former convicts are sent back to prison for one reason or another.

An ex-convict who can't obtain housing and a job soon upon his release is almost compelled to return to crime. So the solutions being advocated by leading liberals in the General Assembly are to conceal criminal records, at least for nonviolent offenses, and to forbid landlords from refusing to rent to former offenders solely on the basis of their criminal history.

But the problem with convicts returning to society goes far beyond the accessibility of criminal records. For most former offenders lack education and job skills and had terrible upbringings, and many suffer learning disabilities. This is why many turned to crime and especially drugs in the first place, and just as much as their criminal history, if not more so, their lack of job skills is why they are considered undesirable employees and tenants.

By contrast, anyone returning from prison after a drug conviction who nevertheless has some education and job skills -- say, an engineer, meat cutter, plumber, or computer programmer -- won't have nearly as much trouble finding a job and a home. Employers and landlords will be far more receptive with someone who has the skills to support himself by honest work.

Keeping employers and landlords ignorant of criminal records won't confer education and job skills on ex-cons. If they come out of prison no more employable than when they went in, enforcement of ignorance about their criminal records will do them little good. Even if they find an apartment, without a job paying enough to sustain it they may be back to crime and prison soon enough anyway.

So rather than demonstrate contempt for the public by enforcing ignorance of criminal records, state government should pursue several other policies with former offenders.

First, the state should repeal drug criminalization, which ensnares most young offenders and has proven futile anyway. Second, the length of criminal sentences should be tied to an offender's gaining education and job skills. And third, state government itself should provide basic jobs and rudimentary housing to former offenders as long as they can't get them on their own.

Of course the latter policy would cost some money, but then current practice -- to release prisoners without job skills and housing and watch haplessly as most go back to prison in a few years -- already is more expensive.

xxx

A REFERENDUM ON TOLLS?: Republicans suddenly have received a great opportunity to give meaning to the five special elections being held Tuesday to fill five vacant seats in the General Assembly, three in the Senate and two in the House. All the districts are so heavily Democratic that their occupants felt comfortable abandoning them soon after their re-election so they might accept appointment to executive positions by Governor Lamont.

That is, can the Republican candidates turn the elections into referendums on the governor's reversing his campaign position and endorsing general tolling on state highways?

Are even voters in Democratic districts upset enough by how fast the governor repudiated what he told them during the campaign?

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

Chris Powell: Tolls another way to avoid tough decisions

According to the Democratic legislators who form the majority on the  Connecticut General Assembly's Transportation Committee,  the Nutmeg State needs to restore tolls on its Interstate Highways. The Democrats argue that state government's transportation fund is inadequate for the improvements needed, that all nearby states have imposed tolls, and that out-of-staters and truckers travel through Connecticut for free. Indeed, the Democrats predict that half the revenue from tolls would be paid by out-of-staters and truckers.

Of course, that means that the other half would come from state residents. But even as the Democrats tout the technology that would let tolls be collected by electronic means without slowing and endangering traffic as toll booths used to do, they do not propose programming such a new system to exempt Connecticut's residents from the tolls. That is, the Democrats are after Connecticut's money as much as the money from out of state and are using out-of-staters and truckers as political cover for another tax increase.

Ironically, even as the Transportation Committee was voting along party lines for tolls, Governor Malloy was announcing that a study had concluded that tourism is crucial to Connecticut because it contributes nearly $15 billion to the state's economy every year. No one explained how charging tolls helps tourism.

As a tax increase on state residents, tolls will serve mainly to relieve pressure on state government to economize generally. Thus tolls will help preserve all sorts of excesses, like the six minor paid holidays enjoyed by state and municipal employees (such as Columbus Day) that are not enjoyed by many  people in the private sector, the thousands of state and municipal government salaries that exceed the governor's own, the binding arbitration of government employee union contracts, and welfare benefits for childbearing outside marriage.

Avoiding such structural changes is the dearest hope of many legislators.

At least the legislature's Education Committee has noticed one of those excesses: the law that forbids most municipal school systems from reducing their spending as student enrollment declines. Connecticut's school enrollment has been declining for years even as school spending has kept rising, for the law's objective has been to ensure that all savings from declining enrollment are paid as increases in compensation for members of teacher unions rather than returned to taxpayers.

But now that the governor proposes to slash state financial aid to most school systems and transfer the money to the worst-performing city school systems (as if any amount of money will ever improve education much for parentless children), legislators see a chance to serve the unions even while having to take something away from them.

That is, with the governor playing the bad cop with school aid, threatening mass layoffs and program eliminations in most towns, the legislature can play good cop by restoring some aid while letting towns keep the savings from declining enrollment. Teachers might lose only their raises instead of their jobs.

Neither the governor nor the Education Committee has yet addressed the latest Superior Court finding that state government's formula for school aid is unconstitutional because it is "irrational."

But that case will be on appeal to the state Supreme Court for a while, and maybe, having prompted, with its decision in Horton v. Meskill in 1977, 40 years of legislative tinkering with school-aid formulas only to accomplish nothing, the court at last will recognize that nothing about school aid formulas is rational because the only thing that matters much to a child's education is his home life.
 

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

Raimondo's road reality: Tolls are the fairest way to pay to fix them

Excerpted from the Sept. 15 Digital Diary column in GoLocalProv:

Rhode Island Gov. Gina Raimondo is (sadly) quite right to drop the very expensive ($595 million) plan to create an attractive boulevard to replace the ugly Route 6-10 Connector and knit some neighborhoods back together. She rightly says that the priority must be on fixing the dangerously decrepit bridges there as soon as possible. This is, after all, one of the region’s busiest stretches of highway.

It is, of course, too bad that this decades-old  highway project split apart neighborhoods when it was built. This was typical of the highway mania of the time, before pedestrians, bicyclists and public-transportation started to gain more respect for environmental and socio-economic  reasons.

The late Massachusetts Gov. Frank Sargent deserves much credit for his refusal back in the ‘70s to let Route 95 be plowed straight through Boston,  which would have ripped many neighborhoods. At the time, many said that his action would hurt Boston by making it less highway efficient. But in fact by saving  well-functioning neighborhoods and encouraging mass-transit use, it made the city more attractive and prosperous.

The 6-10 Connector crisis reflects our slob culture: While public officials like to ribbon-cut new bridges and other public projects, they don’t want to take the heat for the taxes needed to pay to maintain them.

Similar things happen in the private sector, especially at colleges, universities, museums and hospitals. Rich people want their names on buildings whose construction they help finance but they tend not to be interested in giving money for the boring and mostly anonymous work of repair. So institutions often find themselves in a fiscal bind within a few years of a building a “naming opportunity’’ that is starting to fall apart.

And, of course, the politicians are loathe to take the heat for imposing or increasing tolls, even though tolls, as user fees, are the fairest way to pay for transportation-infrastructure upkeep. And many in the public are just as myopic. Recall the uproar when Governor Raimondo mostly successfully proposed a system of  truck tolls to help pay for repairs, and yet trucks do 80-90 percent of the damage to Rhode Island’s highways and bridges.

As for the 6-10 Connector, one can hope that as the bridges are repaired that some new roadside landscape can make the stretch less depressing.

-- Robert Whitcomb