Child neglect is vast in Connecticut and DCF may not be so bad

By CHRIS POWELL

Beating up on Connecticut’s Department of Children and Families is easy and politically satisfying. Child neglect and abuse are rampant and worsening in the state and are beginning to overwhelm the agency’s social workers again, if not yet quite as much as the staff was overwhelmed when it was under federal court supervision from 1991 to 2022.

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Connecticut’s Hearst newspapers quantified the problem the other day, reporting that the deaths of 62 children in the state since January 2025 came under DCF investigation and the circumstances of about 20 of the children had been reviewed by the agency in some way before they died.

Distressingly, neither DCF nor police have yet offered an explanation of the circumstances around one of those deaths, that of a 3-year-old Manchester girl who was struck and killed by a car as she crossed a thoroughfare unaccompanied at about 4:30 in the morning on June 10. Apparently she is to be officially forgotten.

Three days later Governor Lamont reminded Connecticut that the government has arranged for free meals to be available to all children at various locations throughout the state while schools are on summer recess. As for getting the children to the free meals and back home, the program makes the big assumption that, unlike the Manchester girl, they have competent adult supervision.

It’s not DCF’s fault that Connecticut has thousands of households not competent to take care of their children. Many of these households are fatherless; many are headed by people with mental illness or a drug, alcohol, or gambling addiction, or people who are undereducated and whose ability to make a living doesn’t match the child-raising responsibilities they undertook. Inflation and the rising cost of housing, a large part of which is ever-increasing property taxes — the rising cost of government itself — may keep them from ever getting out of the hole they dug for themselves.

DCF social workers review such circumstances knowing that no children should have to live where household competence is marginal and their health and safety are at risk. But the social workers also know that removing children from such homes risks psychological harm to them and political harm to the agency. The social workers soon learn that their judgments are easily questioned — that they may always be damned if they do and damned if they don’t.

It’s not a happy job and many tire of it quickly, just as many teachers in Connecticut’s impoverished cities and inner suburbs are demoralized by the misbehavior of their unparented students and the difficulty of keeping order in their classes. These teachers become eager to leave for positions in towns with better-parented students and higher pay.

It is often said that DCF is broken, and investigation of its most troubling cases typically finds negligence or bad judgment. But if DCF is measured by the breadth of child neglect and abuse in Connecticut, the agency might seem to be an almost miraculous success.

For a good indicator of that neglect and abuse is the rate of chronic student absenteeism in the state’s schools. About 17% of students meet the chronic threshold, missing 10% or more of their classes. That’s about 83,000 students who are neglected at home if not abused too. Chronic absenteeism in the cities, which have more poverty, more danger to children, and a disproportionate number of DCF cases, is closer to 25% or even 30%.

Twenty fatalities in a year and a half in a population of at least 83,000 neglected children constitute a fatality rate of less than three-tenths of 1%, or two-tenths of 1% per year. 

Until Connecticut is ready to remove tens of thousands of neglected children from deficient homes and put them in group homes, modern orphanages, or ready otherwise to address the social disintegration being engendered by the excesses and perverse incentives of the welfare state, how much better can a child-protection agency fairly be expected to do — if it can even keep finding people willing to try to deal with it?

Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years. (CPowell@cox.net)

Legislators try blackmailing Yale to save discriminatory admissions

By CHRIS POWELL

It shouldn’t be shocking that the U.S. Justice Department is investigating Yale University in New Haven for illegal racial discrimination in its admissions practices. Higher education long has been discriminating that way and helped concoct a euphemism for it — “affirmative action” — a euphemism that fortunately no longer intimidates the Trump administration. 

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In 2023 the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that Harvard’s admissions policy discriminated illegally by race. So it’s a fair issue, and Yale says it is cooperating with the investigation and pursuing a settlement. 

But rather than acknowledge the issue’s legitimacy, some people are getting hysterical. They say academic freedom is at stake, but there is no academic freedom to violate civil rights law.

A group of Yale professors has threatened to sue the university if it reaches a settlement with the government on admissions policy, as if some law says professors can run the university instead of its administration.

And now eight state legislators are actually trying in public to blackmail the university out of considering a settlement. In a letter sent last week to Yale President Maurie McInnis, the legislators said they might try to reduce the university’s state tax exemption if it settles with the Justice Department.

Apparently it’s of no concern to the legislators that the university might be breaking civil rights law and thus be incurring much liability in its governance and finances. 

But there’s an even bigger irony in the legislators’ blackmail. For Yale’s tax exemption should be reduced irrespective of the admissions policy issue, and the General Assembly should have acted accordingly long ago.

About 56% of real estate in New Haven is exempt from city property taxes, and about 43% of that exempt property is owned by the university. The university recently agreed to increase the voluntary annual payment it makes to the city but this amount is a small fraction of the many millions of dollars Yale would pay additionally if its property wasn’t tax-exempt. The university’s tax exemption is a huge burden not just on city government but state government as well, since New Haven is an impoverished city and largely a financial ward of the state.

Of course the university’s contribution to the city and all southern Connecticut — in employment and spending — is huge as well. Indeed, without Yale, New Haven might slide into Long Island Sound.

Nevertheless, Yale’s property tax exemption is just too disproportionate, especially since the university’s endowment, worth around $44 billion, is the second largest university endowment in the country, second only to Harvard’s.

So it’s pathetic that those eight legislators can contemplate doing the right thing on the property tax issue only if can’t coerce Yale into taking a position that, while politically correct, might break federal law and incur great financial and administrative liability.

Historically the university has had a close relationship with government in Connecticut — beginning with the colonial government, which chartered Yale in 1701 and supported it financially in part to educate potential government officials. That close relationship endures insofar as Connecticut’s governor and lieutenant governor still automatically become members of the university’s Board of Trustees. 

Governor Lamont and Lt. Gov. Susan Bysiewicz may not yet have taken their ex-officio trusteeships seriously, but now that those eight legislators — all Democrats, like the governor and lieutenant governor — are using their offices to blackmail the university into breaking federal law, a rebuke from the top of state government may be in order.

* * *

REQUIRE ‘e-VERIFY’: If enforcement of federal immigration law sometimes seems too sudden and cruel, it doesn’t have to be that way. 

Illegal immigration might be stopped quickly in Connecticut if state government required employers to use the federal government’s “e-Verify” system to confirm or deny a job applicant’s eligibility to work in the United States, and if employers hiring illegal immigrants were prosecuted vigorously and punished severely.

But strangely the people who protest the cruelty of immigration law enforcement oppose requiring use of “e-Verify.” They want illegal immigration all the same.

Chris Powell has written about Connecticut overnment and politics for many years. (CPowell@cox.net)

Tired of mentally ill defendants, courts consider something new

By CHRIS POWELL

Connecticut’s courts are tired of dealing with criminal defendants who are mentally ill but not criminally insane. State government has a place for the latter sort of criminals: Whiting Forensic Hospital in Middletown. But they are a small subset of the mentally ill, criminals so sick that they are not responsible for themselves. 

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Most criminal defendants who are mentally ill and convicted of serious crimes end up in Connecticut’s prison system — which may be even more tired of dealing with the mentally ill than the courts are. The prisons are full of people from what the politically incorrect past properly called broken homes, people whose upbringing was miserable, who didn’t get a decent education and entered adulthood fit only for menial work, people to whom crime and drug abuse seemed the most practical way of life, and people with learning disabilities.

The prison system does what it can with those people but it’s not terribly effective, since most released prisoners return to crime and are back in prison within a few years even as many released prisoners also return to crime but aren’t caught. 

Connecticut’s courts strive to avoid putting people in prison, knowing how prison can damage and handicap troublesome people even more. But the state is full of repeat offenders who should have been locked up permanently after multiple convictions, and at some point the public simply has to be protected. The public is not as protected against repeat offenders as it should be, but prison is expensive and most legislators and governors have preferred to have the public pay for repeat offenders by enduring more crimes than pay with taxes for imprisoning more criminals.

So since the governor and General Assembly seem indifferent to the mental illness problem faced by the courts and prisons, the Judicial Department has bravely undertaken to try to do something about it on its own.

This month Chief Justice Raheem L. Mullins announced a committee to plan the creation of an experimental “behavioral health court” to be based in New Haven and potentially expanded statewide.

The committee will include judges, police officials, medical and addiction experts, educators, and people who have gone through mental illness and addiction themselves. One of the judges, Dan Klau, lost a daughter to drug addiction and mental illness, and not for lack of trying to help her. Indeed, nearly everyone knows someone who is mentally ill or addicted; the problem is getting worse in Connecticut even as state government, in its relentless pursuit of tax revenue, increasingly facilitates drug and gambling addiction.

Mentally ill or addicted people “might initially come to court for minor incidents,” the chief justice says. “However, without proper intervention, their conduct can spiral out of control, especially if they choose to self-medicate with alcohol or illegal drugs. Our goal is to triage these individuals and get them help before they inflict irreparable harm on themselves or someone else.”

The chief justice hasn’t defined a particular format for the behavioral health court, leaving that to the committee. Getting people “the help they need” is a cliché that needs definition too. 

There are many other questions. Judges already have great discretion in sentencing and can condition sentences and probations on a defendant’s cooperation with various treatments, but how well do they work? If judges made enough use of their discretion in sentencing the mentally ill and addicted, and if enough treatment was available and worked, would a behavioral health court be needed?

Would a behavioral health court be just another mechanism of what state law euphemizes as “accelerated rehabilitation,” the gradual erasure of a defendant’s responsibility, and the release of more repeat offenders? Who would audit the results of the court to prevent it from becoming such a mechanism? How much would the court cost, and, if it worked, how much might it save?

The committee should answer these questions. In any case it aims to confront a longstanding disaster the rest of state government has been happy to overlook. 

Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years. (CPowell@cox.net)

Democrats would ‘abolish ICE’ but not illegal immigration

By CHRIS POWELL

Most Democratic candidates for high office in Connecticut are pledging to seek to abolish the federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency. “Abolish ICE” or “Stop ICE” appears on much of their campaign material.

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But the Democrats don’t say whether and how, once ICE is abolished, the federal government should continue to try to control the country’s borders and the admittance of foreigners, nor whether anything should be done to apprehend and deport people who have entered the country illegally. Fortunately for the Democrats, journalists don’t ask them about this.

The Democrats’ implication with “abolish ICE” and “stop ICE” is that everyone who entered the country illegally and has not made too much trouble should receive an amnesty. Their euphemism is a “path to citizenship.” But they are not pressed about this either.

Ever timid on bigger issues, Connecticut’s Republican candidates don’t address these questions either, thereby encouraging journalists to keep failing to put critical questions to the Democrats, who run the government here.

It is especially telling that no Democratic candidates purporting to want to “stop ICE” ever call for stopping illegal immigration itself. So it may be fairly assumed that most Democratic candidates don’t mind illegal immigration or that they even tacitly support it for the advantage it promises their party in state and congressional redistricting.

Yes, immigration law enforcement sometimes involves violence, and some incidents have been fatal. ICE agents sometimes act without restraint — just as ordinary police officers sometimes do. But many of these violent incidents have involved resistance and obstruction to immigration enforcement, and not just resistance and obstruction by people who entered the country illegally but also by people whose politics compels them to get in the way. 

Indeed, many if not most of the fatalities in immigration law enforcement have involved challenges to or attacks on immigration agents made by people looking for trouble, people who seem to figure that if enough trouble is made, the federal government will give up on enforcing the law and return to the previous administration’s policy of open borders.

Holding all important offices in Connecticut, Democrats are obliged to answer for themselves. They may be glad that they are seldom asked to.

* * *

Politics has always been largely a matter of striking poses rather than getting important things done, but the other day Governor Lamont, Lt. Gov. Susan Bysiewicz, and state Treasurer Erik Russell provided an especially extreme example of empty posturing. They called a press conference to announce state government’s activation of what is being called a “safe harbor” fund to be drawn upon by people in other states who want to come to Connecticut for abortions and sex-change therapy they can’t get at home. 

The fund would pay for travel, lodging, and the medical procedures themselves. It has received no state appropriation but has been opened with $25,000 in outside donations from advocates of abortion and sex-change therapy, with more donations hoped for. While the governor, lieutenant governor, and treasurer seem to think that abortion and sex-change therapy are always good, even when they involve fetuses capable of surviving outside the womb and children undergoing irreversible surgery, the outside donations will allow state officials to distance themselves a little from treatments that will offend some people. 

But state money still will be involved when the “safe haven” fund finances abortions and sex-change therapy for minors, at least insofar as the treasurer’s office will administer the fund. So if state government is going to facilitate discretionary medical treatment for out-of-staters, it is fairly asked why this is being done when so many people in Connecticut, including children, don’t yet have access to important medical care. 

Indirectly acknowledging this lack of medical care for the state’s own residents, commercials for the governor’s re-election campaign proclaim his support for “universal health care.” If “universal health care” for state residents is so compelling, facilitating abortion and sex-change therapy for out-of-staters is not. It’s just politically correct, a pander to the ever more extreme political left.

—

Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years. (CPowell@cox.net)

-END-

Why so much special education? And minimum wage bunk

By CHRIS POWELL

Connecticut is facing another expensive anomaly. The state’s Hearst newspapers report that while public school enrollment has fallen substantially since 2006, from 578,500 to 498,000 students, a decline of 14%, students receiving “special education” — students who have intellectual and physical disabilities — have increased by 39%, from 68,500 to 95,000.

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According to the Hearst report, the percentage the increase in Connecticut’s special education population is larger than the increase in most states.

Special education requires schools to develop individual education plans for each student and usually to provide additional services on top of that. Since special-ed students are found disproportionately in the schools of poorer municipalities, and since state government only partially reimburses special-ed costs, the burden on those schools and municipalities is heavy and drives up local property taxes.  

What’s going on?

Authorities on special education surmise that it’s a matter of more advanced diagnosis — that health conditions that would not have been noticed years ago are now being diagnosed and susceptible to treatment. Such has been the case with other ailments over the years.

But the extreme disparity between the decline in public school enrollment and the increase in special education diagnosis — enrollment down 14% and special education cases up 39% in 20 years — suggests that something else is at work as well.

Child neglect and abuse and chronic student absenteeism also have worsened substantially in Connecticut in recent decades, disproportionately in the same places where special education cases have increased — the impoverished cities and inner suburbs. Correlation is not necessarily causation, but where households are poor, children live with only one parent, and parenting is weak — common conditions in the cities and inner suburbs — physical and mental impairments may not be as readily noticed and treatment not as readily sought. 

So it is fair to suspect that the explosion in special education costs is part of the price society is paying for welfare policy’s destruction of the family.

At least Governor Lamont now concedes that it might be best for state government to assume all municipal costs of special education. That would be an excellent form of progressive tax relief, if the savings on the municipal level weren’t just quickly diverted to increased compensation for unionized municipal employees. 

Even so, how extreme must the increase in special education expenses get before state government formally asks itself, as through a legislative investigation: Where are all the troubled and handicapped children coming from?

* * *

Connecticut U.S. Sens. Richard Blumenthal and Chris Murphy seem to think they have the solution for the country’s worsening poverty. Their Living Wage for All Act would raise the federal minimum wage to $25 per hour for large employers by 2032 and for all others by 2039.

Business people and others who inhabit the real world can only wince at this.

For Blumenthal and Murphy don’t propose to regulate the other expenses of business, expenses that bear on what businesses can afford to pay their employees. Nor can Blumenthal and Murphy guarantee that any employee will produce $25 an hour in value for his employer. The legislation has been ridiculed as a vast government subsidy to the robot design and manufacturing industry.

But there may not be much reason to take the legislation seriously. Blumenthal and Murphy may be just striking another pose to ingratiate themselves with the political left. For since the national debt keeps rising fast and there is no political will to curb it, the debt will keep being paid with the tax called inflation, and so by 2032 and especially by 2039 even $25 per hour may be a poverty wage.

Indeed, the best thing government could do for the working class would be to stop inflation.

The silly premise of the Blumenthal-Murphy legislation is the premise of the slogan that often appears on union picket line signs: “One job should be enough.” Yes, that would be nice. But any one job? Then what would be the incentive to increase one’s work skills after high school?

Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years. (CPowell@cox.net)

-END-

Indignation industry triumphs at New London’s post office

By CHRIS POWELL

Connecticut has been just about conquered by the indignation industry, as was indicated again the other day when the post office in New London inadvertently offended a customer — the president of the city’s chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People — because its doorbell chime happened to play, among other songs, a few bars from “Dixie” during the Juneteenth holiday weekend. The customer complained that “Dixie” is racist because it was sung in minstrel shows and was adopted as an anthem by secessionists during the Civil War.

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Instantly intimidated, the post office got rid of the chime’s “Dixie” melody. But the complaint was just a matter of guilt by association.

There is nothing racist about “Dixie.” Its lyrics are a simple celebration of the South. Many inoffensive songs originated with or were popularized by minstrel shows. While secessionists adopted “Dixie,” they weren’t the only ones who liked it. It was written by a Northerner prior to secession, first became popular in the North, and the great liberator himself, the destroyer of slavery — Abraham Lincoln — declared it a favorite song.

At the White House on the day after the surrender of the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia, the president told a serenading crowd: “I have always thought ‘Dixie’ one of the best tunes I have ever heard. Our adversaries over the way attempted to appropriate it, but I insisted yesterday that we fairly captured it. I presented the question to the attorney general, and he gave it as his legal opinion that it is our lawful prize. I now request the band to favor me with its performance.”

The band did so, and the song is still enjoyed by people of good will even if some people of bad will might like to make hateful use of it.

Music and lyrics can stand on their own. 

Francis Scott Key, author of the “The Star-Spangled Banner,” the poem that, set to an old British melody, became the U.S. national anthem, was a slave owner and as federal attorney for the District of Columbia persecuted abolitionists. But there is nothing racist in his poem, which, if somewhat ironically in light of the author’s background, proclaims “the land of the free.”

The German composer Richard Wagner hated Jews. But he is associated with hatred of Jews less because of his operas, which are not explicitly anti-Jewish, than because Adolf Hitler fervently promoted the composer’s work as part of the Nazi movement. Even today performing Wagner’s operas is informally banned in Israel.

Mark Twain joked that Wagner’s music “is better than it sounds.” Twain might agree that while the melody and lyrics of “Dixie” are better than the politics of some people who liked them or still do, the singer and the songwriter are not necessarily the song.

Besides, to live in Connecticut and be offended by a few bars from “Dixie” played by the post office door chime may require one to be almost blind to many worse things. Even as the controversy in New London was developing, a national survey reported that Connecticut is among the most racially and economically segregated states. The racial performance gap in the state’s schools long has been notorious, along with the state’s big racial disproportions in poverty, housing, crime, imprisonment, and health.

Ever preening in self-righteousness, political correctness celebrates its intimidation and shaming of people who have meant and done no harm. So it might have been better if a postal clerk in New London had dared to tell the customer who complained about the door chime that Juneteenth is not what it is said to be — the anniversary of the end of slavery in the United States — but just a P.C. contrivance, since slavery actually continued in the United States for six months beyond June 1865 until the 13th Amendment was ratified on December 6. That’s the day for celebration, with “Dixie” on the musical program, as it was for Lincoln.          

Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years. (CPowell@cox.net)

Bronin didn’t fix Hartford; and ‘fair’ just means ‘more’

By CHRIS POWELL

What’s the point of former Hartford Mayor Luke Bronin’s candidacy for the Democratic nomination for Congress in Connecticut’s 1st Congressional District?

Of course Bronin’s immediate objective is to defeat the incumbent Democrat he is challenging in a primary, U.S. Rep. John B. Larson, who has represented the district since 1999. But why must Larson be replaced when the 1st District will elect a Democrat again no matter who wins the party’s nomination?

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Bronin doesn’t say Larson is wrong on any issue important to Democrats. The two agree on nearly everything, the more so every day as they pander to the extreme liberals expected to constitute the most voters in the primary. 

The problem with Larson, Bronin says, is that, at 77, he is old and tired, though Larson has been campaigning furiously after being shocked by Bronin’s challenge. President Trump “is out of control,” Bronin says, but Democrats “keep doing the same thing. We need to bring a whole new kind of energy to this fight.”

But what exactly should Democrats do differently? Bronin doesn’t say. He implies that it would be enough just to elect him and thereby discard Larson’s great seniority in Congress on the eve of regaining a Democratic majority in the House.

Bronin is well-connected to wealthy Democrats around the country, probably will raise more campaign money than Larson by primary day, and is doing a lot of advertising emphasizing what he sees as his successes as mayor of Hartford from 2016 to 2024. Hartford has had worse mayors but the claim of some of Bronin’s advertising — particularly the claim that he “straightened out a bankrupt city” — is ridiculous.

A $500 million bailout from state government, not Bronin’s adept administration, is what kept Hartford out of the bankruptcy that might have been the best way to straighten out the city. Even as Bronin’s television commercial with the “straightened out” claim was airing last week, Hartford was making the same old distressing news.

A story in Connecticut’s Hearst newspapers was headlined: “About 50 gunshots fired in Hartford early on Fourth of July, police say.”

The Connecticut Mirror had this headline: “Police escort former Hartford treasurer off city property.” She had resigned abruptly amid suspicion of scandal.

With wonderful irony Bronin’s “straightened out” commercial was inserted into a report on the internet site of WTNH-TV8 in New Haven that was headlined: “2 dead, teen injured in stabbing, shooting in Hartford.”

Of course Hartford hasn’t been “straightened out” any more than Connecticut’s other cities have been. They are still, by design, poverty factories with little capacity for self-government. It’s a problem of demographics, the concentration and perpetuation of poverty by welfare and education policies. 

Bronin and the other mayors aren’t to blame for that problem. But only Bronin is pretending to have solved it, and only he has used his mayoralty mainly to advance himself politically.

Doing “something different” for the Democrats would start with regaining the House majority. So why should the party be spending millions to determine a nomination in a district sure to elect a Democrat again anyway? Why not spend the money in competitive districts where the next majority will be decided?

Is Bronin’s ambition more important than that?   

* * *

Democratic campaigns in Connecticut and throughout the country are tedious for their clichéd calls to make “the rich” pay their “fair share” of taxes. Governor Lamont and his challenger in the Democratic primary for governor, Hamden state Rep. Josh Elliott, are working this cliché very hard.

But exactly who are “the rich,” exactly what is the “fair share,” and how is it to be calculated? 

Everyone agrees that “billionaires” constitute some of “the rich,” but candidates are seldom clear about who else might make that infamous cut. No one explains the criteria for calculating a “fair share.” 

That’s because as a practical matter “fair share” is just the Democrats’ euphemism for “more,” and a proper calculation is impossible, because if “fair” was ever achieved, higher taxation would be foreclosed as unfair.

Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years. (CPowell@cox.net)

Can Elliott make waste and fraud an issue in primary for governor?

By CHRIS POWELL

Maybe Hamden state Rep. Josh Elliott, challenging Governor Lamont’s renomination in the Democratic primary August 11, has their party perfectly figured out. Elliott speaks almost entirely of enlarging government, increasing its dependents, taxing and spending more, and giving government more power over the economy and society generally. 

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Elliott seems to presume that most Democrats who will vote in the primary are members of the government class or aspire to become members and that they can be convinced that he really will do more for them than Lamont has done, even as the governor often announces new subsidies for one group or another, also seeming to presume that the primary will be decided by the government class and its aspirants.

So is there any other constituency in the Democratic Party these days — like a constituency for plain old honest, efficient, transparent, and effective government, government that actually accomplishes what it purports to do?

This month an anti-poverty nonprofit organization in Waterbury, New Opportunities Inc., was found for the second time to have misused state money, this time nearly $3 million, to conceal various financial losses. The misconduct was discovered not by government auditors but only because last December electric utility Eversource reported that a check from the organization for $1.5 million, money for home heating assistance, had bounced.

Is this the only recent misuse of state money awarded in the name of alleviating poverty? The recent scandal of state grants arranged by state legislators as political patronage for nonprofit groups suggests that more auditing of state-financed nonprofits is in order.

A few days ago the state Medical Examining Board recommended canceling the $71,000-a-year disability pension of a Republican state senator, Paul Cicarella of North Haven, because he is not really disabled after all and for years has been earning good incomes in other jobs, including his legislative job, despite the supposedly disabling fall he suffered as a prison guard.

State Comptroller Sean Scanlon is trying to clean up the disability pension mess and it is said that Cicarella broke no law. But is it likely that he is the only former state employee to have exploited the laxity of the system? What would an in-person examination of all disability pensions find? No one seems to be calling for one.

There have been many scandals of mismanagement during Governor Lamont’s 7½ years in office — not necessarily more than in previous administrations but enough to constitute valid issues in the campaign for governor. Maybe Republicans will raise some eventually, but if Elliott doesn’t raise some in the Democratic primary — and he hasn’t done so yet, though the offender in the recent pension case is a Republican politician — the indifference may be taken as confirmation that no Democrat running for governor sees anything to be gained by making state government more honest and efficient.

At least the Yankee Institute has been noticing many financial management lapses in state and municipal government. 

Yankee’s Meghan Portfolio has even proposed that the General Assembly and governor should address these lapses with new legislation that she deliciously would name after former New Britain Mayor Erin Stewart, whose grifting with her city credit card was exposed just in time to prevent her from getting the Republican nomination for governor.

Portfolio would call it “ERIN’s Act” — the Expenditure Records and Information Notification Act. It would require executive branch agencies to post on the internet the purchases government officials make with government credit cards.

Portfolio notes that many recent reports by the state auditors have found misuse of such credit cards, sometimes even after misuse had been identified in previous audits, failures including “missing receipts, inadequate supporting documentation, unauthorized card users, untimely reconciliations, purchases lacking proper approval, split transactions, and failures to comply with established policies.”

Of course nothing can force government administrators to look at the credit card records they have been ignoring. But posting them on the internet at least would make what’s left of investigative reporting easier.

Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years. (CPowell@cox.net)

Poll finds strong undercurrent of dissatisfaction with Lamont

By CHRIS POWELL

Most political observers believe that Governor Lamont will win re-election easily, if the leftist faction of the Democratic Party doesn’t dump him in the primary for renomination in favor of Hamden state Rep. Josh Elliott.

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The governor is believed to be popular. He has great inherited wealth and can spend virtually infinite amounts on his campaign. President Trump is unpopular in Connecticut and though he is not on the ballot this year he is still expected to taint the entire Republican ticket. That ticket is undistinguished and its leader, Greenwich state Sen. Ryan Fazio, either is not yet making himself heard or else has little to say.

But while it received little notice, the most recent Nutmeg State poll, conducted by the University of New Hampshire Survey Center with 946 respondents, implied contrary possibilities.

On a general election ballot the poll gave the governor a solid lead over Fazio, 49% to 36%. But the governor’s job performance was approved by only 49% and disapproved by 44%. Only 21% strongly approved the governor’s performance.

More telling, poll respondents were evenly divided at 44% on whether Connecticut is heading in the right or wrong direction. Predictably, “right direction” drew 74% of Democrats while 87% of Republicans said “wrong direction.” But remarkably unaffiliated voters overwhelmingly responded “wrong direction,” 61% to 25% — and uaffiliated voters are the largest voter group in the state at 42%, 35% of voters being Democrats and just 22% being Republicans.

If the poll is valid, the state has a substantial constituency believing that, despite the many commercials already being broadcast by the governor’s campaign, happy days are not here again, a substantial constituency that might be receptive to alternative policies and personalities.

If Republicans ever tried to address this constituency the governor might have more to worry about than Elliott and his lefties.

Recent news reports have raised the questions of why political parties in Connecticut don’t have more primary elections and why the primaries we do have are “closed,” limited to party members, rather than “open,” primaries in which anyone can vote regardless of party affiliation.

The answer to the first question is terrible. The state’s political party organizations — municipal party committees — want to keep the nominating power close to themselves. They tend to resent what they see as interference by ordinary party members. That is, they resent democracy. 

So any candidate for a party nomination who is not favored by party committees can qualify for a primary only by winning 15% of the votes at a nominating convention or by collecting the signatures of party members on petitions and submitting them to municipal clerks or the secretary of the state. For any important nomination the number of signatures needed to qualify may be in the thousands. This process is usually tedious and expensive, so there aren’t many primaries.

There is one halfway valid reason for this undemocratic system: the danger that extremist candidates could win primaries by mobilizing a small minority of party members to vote while the great majority of party members aren’t paying attention and neglect to vote. The danger is real, but only because Connecticut has no habit of holding primaries. People aren’t used to them. Primaries are not a regular part of the electoral process every year.

That problem could be solved by making primaries automatic — by having them prior to every election, even if there is no formal competition for a nomination — while easing requirements for getting on the ballot. But this would entail the expense of a whole second election every year, and there may not be enough civic engagement left in the state to justify it.

As for “closed” primaries instead of “open” ones, primaries in which people who are not party members can vote facilitate political sabotage and indeed may make it impossible for any party to define itself. Since joining a party is so easy, just as leaving a party is, demanding only simple enlistment or resignation, “closed” primaries are no impediment to  democracy.   

Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years. (CPowell@cox.net)

Will Connecticut have a campaign or just Lamont’s commercials?

By CHRIS POWELL

Governor Lamont may have the campaign for governor all to himself. His vast wealth is being deployed again and is stuffing Connecticut’s airwaves and internet channels with commercials and deluging journalist e-mailboxes with press releases. 

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While the governor’s challenger in the Democratic primary, Hamden state Rep. Josh Elliott, has almost qualified for $3.75 million in state Citizen Election Program campaign funds, he hasn’t received the money yet and so hasn’t deployed it yet even as the primary is only six weeks away, on August 11. People who are eager for state government to grow and spend know that Elliott is their candidate and don’t need advertising to push them, but the volume of the governor’s advertising may be effective with other Democratic voters even if it never criticizes Elliott directly.  

Meanwhile the Republican nominee for governor, Greenwich state Sen. Ryan Fazio, lets most days go by without having anything to say, not even via “earned” news coverage. This is too bad, since news reports frequently expose mismanagement in state government. Even the governor’s press releases and commercials should prompt some talking back from his rivals but aren’t getting any.

For example, Lamont recently joined nine other governors in opposing federal legislation that would immunize oil and natural gas companies against state laws seeking to fine them for the pollution caused by use of their fuels. The silly rationale for these state laws is that oil and gas producers fooled the public into thinking that oil and gas are pollution-free, as if, since the industrial age began, nobody ever noticed what was coming out of smokestacks and tailpipes, and as if every state government and the federal government didn’t accept that pollution is the price of the most practical forms of energy and didn’t happily tax them rather than outlaw them.

Of course the oil and gas producers didn’t burn most of their fuels themselves. Ordinary people did — the constituents of the governors who, like Lamont, now want to blame the producers for pollution. Also, of course, those governors are not prepared to give their constituents much practical alternatives to oil and gas. They want to pretend that conventional fuels are the result of an evil conspiracy of plutocrats and not the result of longstanding policy.

Lamont and the other governors opposing the federal legislation to foreclose state laws punishing oil and gas producers are scapegoating and demagoguing. One proof of this is Lamont’s failure to propose legislation to prohibit use of oil and gas in Connecticut. Like the other governors opposing the federal legislation, Lamont doesn’t want to outlaw oil and gas and thereby stop pollution; he wants to tax them more in the name of recovering the damages of pollution, which could never be quantified specifically in regard to any particular producer.

Lamont is airing a commercial in which he claims to be protecting Connecticut against President Trump’s “chaos.” Trump is indeed producing chaos in Washington and around the world but Connecticut has plenty of its own chaos that has little to do with the president. 

Apart from all the mismanagement and even corruption in state government, every week brings the usual murders, shootings, and stabbings, as well as incidents of child abuse and neglect that are overwhelming the state’s child protection agency; more reckless and even crazed driving; fires in dilapidated housing in the impoverished cities; worsening drug and alcohol abuse; and more psychotic episodes from troubled people. Trump didn’t cause those things. Neither did the governor. But getting them under control in Connecticut is the governor’s responsibility, not Trump’s.  

Another Lamont commercial says he wants to end “corporate welfare.” But he has been governor for 7½ years and if Connecticut still has corporate welfare, he must approve of it. 

Connecticut should discuss these things. But the only thing Elliott seems to find wrong about state government is that it doesn’t spend enough enriching the government class. As for Fazio, for the state to know what he thinks, he’ll have to show up.     

Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years. (CPowell@cox.net)