‘Best schools in America’ don’t include New Haven’s

By CHRIS POWELL

A hearing last week before New Haven’s Board of Alders about the city’s schools sure didn’t match the television commercial being broadcast by Governor Lamont’s re-election campaign, wherein the governor boasts that Connecticut’s are “the best schools in America.”

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Connecticut shouldn’t punish former offenders so much

Lamont buries college scandal, says spending equals learning

Students, parents, and teachers at the hearing complained vehemently about the longstanding decrepit conditions of New Haven’s schools, including rodent infestations, mold, dirty restrooms, a lack of ventilation and air-conditioning, classroom temperatures sometimes approaching 90 degrees, and hopelessly backlogged repair orders.

School Superintendent Madeline Negron confirmed everything. “No child should be in the conditions that we have children in,” she admitted. She hopes the school system’s transition from an outside contractor for facilities management to the school system’s own facilities management office will address problems better, but added that more money will be needed.

While New Haven Mayor Justin Elicker is a member of the city’s Board of Education, he didn’t attend the hearing on school conditions. Asked about it the next day by the New Haven Independent, he acknowledged that conditions in many city schools are “unacceptable” but said they aren’t city government’s fault.

“Our schools have been underfunded for decades,” the mayor said, and “underinvestment has created real challenges” in maintaining them. “That’s why New Haven has been leading the charge with our state delegation, other municipalities, and partners to dramatically increase state funding.”

That is, the awful conditions of New Haven’s schools are the fault of state government — the entity whose chief executive is spending millions of dollars of his own money in his re-election campaign to tell state residents that, among other things, they already have “the best schools in America.” 

While the governor is out campaigning every day, he didn’t attend that Board of Alders hearing either. And while the governor and the mayor are both Democrats, along with the president of the state Senate, New Haven’s Martin M. Looney, and while state government and city government have been controlled by Democrats for many years, and while they always clamor for and arrange more money for the cities, including New Haven … somehow they still can’t get the rodents and mold out of the city’s schools or air-conditioning into them, even as the Lamont administration lately has found hundreds of thousands of dollars for no-show jobs for high-level flunky failures like Terrence Cheng and Miguel Cardona.

New Haven and Mayor Elicker are not blameless in this. For New Haven, whose schools are decrepit not only physically but academically as well, with disastrously high rates of chronic absenteeism and disastrously low rates of student proficiency, long has been the center of the movement to erase the country’s borders and thereby fill Connecticut with illegal immigrant children who don’t speak English and cause schools immense extra expense for bilingual and remedial education.

The movement began in New Haven in 2007 when city government started issuing identification cards to illegal immigrants to facilitate their lawbreaking. Today the movement controls state government, having persuaded it to enact the so-called Trust Act to impede federal immigration enforcement. The movement also has induced most elected officials in the state, from the governor and Attorney General William Tong on down, as well as most news organizations, to refuse to distinguish between legal and illegal immigrants.

Despite the huge educational expense of illegal immigrant children, no elected official participating in the open-borders movement has ever proposed appropriating formally for it. That much honesty would call attention to the problem. 

New Haven can’t maintain its schools or properly educate its own citizen children in part because it has chosen to spend money facilitating illegal immigration — and now the city wants to shift still more of its illegal immigrant expense to state government, which also refuses to appropriate frankly for facilitating illegal immigration, lest questions be asked.  

This doesn’t make illegal immigrants bad people, though some are. They respond to the incentives they get from “sanctuary” states and cities like Connecticut and New Haven. But it does make many elected officials look like ridiculous phonies. 

—

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

-END-

Another gun control law won’t get tough on crime

By CHRIS POWELL

Police provide basic information following most serious assaults or murders in Connecticut, and to prevent panic they often add that there is “no threat to the public” and that the assault or murder was “an isolated incident.”

But nearly every day Connecticut is full of “isolated incidents” that, if taken together, would constitute a crime wave, and while the perpetrators of the day may not be imminent dangers to others, they probably will pose danger to others eventually.

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For as is often indicated by news reporting about crime, Connecticut is full of chronic offenders who aren’t in prison. Indeed, news reports about an arrest for a serious crime often disclose that the accused has “a long criminal record,” though such reports seldom provoke indignant demands from the public to know why the chronic offender was free.

Many years ago some politicians in Connecticut portrayed themselves as “tough on crime,” but today it’s hard to find any politician pressing the crime issue, especially in regard to chronic offenders. While serious crime is said to be declining and the state’s prison population has fallen from a high of about 20,000 in 2008 to just less than 11,000 today, a drop of about 45%, this may not be so comforting.

For most serious crime charges long have been and continue to be heavily discounted in the criminal-justice system through plea-bargaining, which prosecutors and judges believe is necessary to prevent the system from being overwhelmed. They know that the courts are only as effective as they are ready for trial, and only a tiny fraction of criminal cases go to trial, because the system isn’t so ready. Criminals expect plea bargains.

Connecticut would have plenty of room for locking up chronic offenders if it wanted to reopen the prisons that have been closed in recent years. But the state’s Democratic administration accepts the damage done by chronic offenders because it is offset by savings in the prison budget and because imprisoning more people would worsen racial disproportions in the prison population. Suppressing those racial disproportions helps elected officials overlook the racial disproportions in crime itself and the poverty and educational failure that cause them.

Indeed, the obsession of the Democratic state administration with gun ownership is a distraction from the crime issue. 

A new state law seeking to ban the sale of certain Glock brand guns was suspended in federal court last week and likely will consume hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal expenses over the next year or two even as the law would do little against crime if it was enforced.

The law would ban sale of certain Glock pistols that can be converted to full automatic firing with an inexpensive plastic attachment that already has been outlawed. Full automatic firing — firing in which a single sustained pull of the trigger discharges all the bullets in the gun — is what machine guns have, and ownership of machine guns is virtually prohibited by federal law. No one outside the military should have one, especially now that the country grows crazier politically and the threat of terrorism rises.

But Glocks are not machine guns unless they are modified, the manufacturer has changed its design so its new pistols can’t easily be modified, and the automatic-firing feature of modified Glocks has seldom been used in crime. Glocks are used in crime just because, like most other guns used in crime, they are handguns. So the new law against old Glocks would have little impact on crime.

Similarly, the new law’s only inconvenience to gun owners is that it would prevent owners of older Glocks from selling them to registered gun dealers, diminishing the resale market. But the older Glocks still could be sold or traded privately. So the new law would hardly impair Second Amendment rights.

Crime might be reduced by increasing the criminal-justice system’s readiness for trial, by not plea-bargaining gun charges, and by permanently jailing chronic offenders. But that would cost money, while posturing about machine guns is free. 

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

Connecticut shouldn’t punish former offenders so much

By CHRIS POWELL

Connecticut coddles many criminals. Someone may be convicted of a half-dozen or more offenses in separate incidents over a period of years and still not be locked up at all, much less be deemed incorrigible and locked up for good. 

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Despite all the prattling done by the state’s liberal politicians about guns, at last count most gun crime charges were being plea-bargained away in favor of guilty pleas to charges like robbery and assault, crimes that are mistakenly considered more serious. If gun crimes were prosecuted more vigorously, there probably would be much less gun crime.

But last week a report from the Connecticut Mirror demonstrated how state law is inflicting unnecessary cruelty on former offenders and even punishing them for rehabilitating themselves.

The report highlighted the case of a North Branford couple who had done serious prison time, the woman for drug offenses, the man for assault and larceny. Upon their release they met in a program for former offenders and married married. They supported each other, stayed out of trouble, got jobs, bought and renovated a house, and showed that troublesome people sometimes can rehabilitate themselves. 

But when the man died and the house passed to his wife, state government determined that his estate owed the state $233,000 as repayment for the cost of his incarceration.

Shocking as this was to the widow, Connecticut has enforced such a law for many years. The widow could discharge her late husband’s debt only by selling the house and taking an apartment whose rent was higher than her former mortgage payment.

The law is fair to a certain extent — the extent involving financial windfalls. After imposing serious costs on society, former offenders shouldn’t get rich through no substantial efforts of their own. They should be required to cover the cost of their imprisonment if they come into big money via things like lottery winnings, lawsuit settlements, damage awards, major inheritances, and such. 

In a case that may raise similar issues, a man who had done prison time in Connecticut and was the father of a young girl who was murdered, apparently by family members, is suing the state Department of Children and Families on behalf of his daughter’s estate, even though he had abandoned the girl and her mother long before the murder. If the estate wins a lot of money, he might have to repay the state for his prison costs but still get rich in the name of the daughter he abandoned.     

But the house owned by the North Branford woman and her late husband was not the product of a windfall. It was something they earned honestly through years together. While the house can be construed as an inheritance for the surviving spouse, it came to her only at the cost of her husband’s life.

Each year state government recovers about $3.3 million in incarceration costs from hundreds of former prisoners. It’s a substantial amount that shouldn’t be foregone lightly.

But few former prisoners have substantial assets and so most aren’t billed. Most former prisoners struggle to re-establish themselves in life, and the more they are ground down by circumstances, the less incentive they have to live honestly and not return to crime. Indeed, prison is usually a profound punishment long after a prisoner’s release, and most former prisoners do return to crime within a few years. 

Upon their release most prisoners are unaware of their liability to repay the state for their incarceration if they ever succeed financially, and if, in fairness, the Correction Department started warning them about it upon their release, they might sense a millstone around their neck and lose enthusiasm for staying out of trouble. The state would be telling them: We’ll never let you succeed financially through your own efforts.

So the General Assembly should reconsider the incarceration costs repayment law. The law should continue to apply to true windfalls, but what former prisoners earn by their own efforts and commitment to rehabilitation should be exempted.

——

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

Lamont buries college scandal, says spending equals learning

By CHRIS POWELL

With her abrupt retirement Central Connecticut State University President Zulma Toro last week joined the parade of executives going out the door of the Connecticut State Colleges and Universities system, having declined to defend herself against complaints from subordinates about her abusive and unprofessional behavior.

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This week the resignation of the vice chair of the system’s Board of Regents, Juanita James, was discovered by journalists five days after it was delivered to Governor Lamont but not announced. James accused the system of a “dysfunctional culture and political infighting.” 

Toro and James followed Chancellor Terrence Cheng, who departed because of financial exploitation; Chancellor John Maduko, who departed because of sexual harassment; and Board of Regents Chairman Martin Guay, who bore responsibility for the board’s ineptness. 

The system’s general counsel, Karen Buffkin, has been on paid administrative leave for four months while her role in the Maduko scandal is investigated.

The colleges and universities system says the investigation of the complaints against Toro has been canceled because she is gone. But members of the Republican minority in the General Assembly argue that it should continue, since it might find more wrongdoing. That’s a good bet. 

But last week Governor Lamont, a Democrat in the thick of an election campaign, dismissed the idea of more investigation of Toro, saying the state didn’t need another expensive consultant’s report. At least the governor himself doesn’t need more attention to the problems of the colleges and universities system right now. 

State Sen. Derek Slap, D-West Hartford, co-chairman of the legislature’s higher education committee, said another consultant’s report might cost hundreds of thousands of dollars when everyone now already knows how to set the system straight. “I hope that nobody’s trying to use this as an opportunity to score political points six weeks before an election,” Slap said. 

But if an election campaign isn’t the right time to try to score political points, what is the right time — after the election, when it won’t make any difference?

Of course Republicans would like an elaboration of the scandal to boost their mediocre prospects in the campaign, what with President Trump acting ever more like a megalomaniac and inviting voters to repudiate his party. But a broad investigation of the colleges and universities system would be in the public interest even as there is no time for it before the election in November. 

There would be plenty of time for it in next year’s session of the General Assembly, but the legislature hasn’t investigated anything for years and if, as is almost certain, its Democratic majority is returned, the legislature won’t be any more curious.

As indicated by the huge payment Toro is receiving for accrued sick and vacation time — nearly $125,000 — quite apart from the luxurious retirement benefits due her and yet to be publicized, state government remains first of all a pension and benefit society, and a badly managed one at that.

* 

A new television commercial from the governor’s campaign wants people to think that public lower education in Connecticut is getting better.

“Connecticut has the best schools in America,” the governor says. Even if so that’s hardly high praise. Hartford schools graduate illiterates, New Haven’s are deteriorating physically and academically, and all city schools in the state have high chronic absenteeism and terrible student proficiency scores like the ones reported just the other day. 

“We got record funding for education,” the governor says, as if Connecticut will believe forever that spending equals learning.

The governor adds: “Next up, a pay raise for teachers. They deserve it.” But most teachers already get raises every year through their union contracts, and questioned about his pay raise assertion, the governor withdrew it.

Public education continues its decline throughout the country, except in a few formerly benighted Southern states that are trying, with some success, to end social promotion at third grade, thereby holding both students and parents accountable. More spending hasn’t been improving education in Connecticut. Replacing social promotion with accountability might.

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

Trump’s not alone buying votes; both parties in state are at it too

By CHRIS POWELL

President Trump may be the most grotesque politician trying to buy votes, what with his plan to have the federal government send $5,000 to every adult U.S. citizen if Republicans maintain their majorities in Congress after November’s election. But there’s plenty of vote buying in Connecticut as well.

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A federal judge’s negligence highlights Connecticut’s own

Despite her $500,000 compensation, a university boss is unaccountable

Governor Lamont and the Democrats promise more social programs and reimbursements to make up for the Trump administration’s cuts to federal welfare programs. 

The Republican candidate for governor, state Sen. Ryan Fazio, and the Republican minority in the General Assembly propose hundreds of millions of dollars in state tax cuts.

It’s all silly. 

The federal government is $40 trillion in debt, annual interest on which is greater than what the government spends on the military. As a practical matter the federal government is insolvent, with its debt so large that it can never be repaid in any practical sense, only inflated away with more devaluation of the dollar.

While Connecticut state government reports a budget surplus of $400 million, its unfunded pension liabilities still exceed $50 billion even though they have been reduced somewhat in recent years. In effect, whether with new social programs or tax cuts, state government will still be borrowing from its pension obligations, pushing those obligations deeper into the future where they will be paid by taxpayers yet unborn who never had the benefit of the pensioners’ services.

What is most telling is that there is so little effort to reduce government spending. 

On the federal level, the modest reductions the Trump administration and congressional Republicans have imposed on welfare spending have been far exceeded by increases in spending in other areas, like the military.

On the state level, the Democrats would never think of cutting spending, since they are the party of government for its own sake, no matter how ineffective.

Last week Fazio and state Republican legislators did propose some spending cuts, but apart from eliminating state government medical coverage for illegal immigrants, an incentive to illegal immigration, the bigger cuts the Republicans propose are problematical, like reducing Medicaid payments for indigent citizens, whose coverage is already marginal. 

At least it’s fair to assume that the Republicans would be inclined to spend less than the Democrats. 

The biggest problem is that the country and the state are living far beyond their means. That’s what the unpayable federal debt is about — the country’s having induced or coerced other countries to buy this country’s bonds, which are not financing new productive capacity but only current consumption. A quarter or more of what government in the United States spends probably would never be spent if the country had to pay for it by itself. 

That includes much of what state government spends, since so much of state spending comes from federal grants and reimbursements. 

Realizing that the United States has no political will to control costs, other countries are tiring of paying for U.S. overconsumption and are reducing their financing.

The ability of the federal government and state government to transfer their expenses to foreigners and future Americans is terribly corrupting. Elected officials aren’t compelled to prioritize and choose in budgeting as much as they should and so increasingly give their constituents the impression that they needn’t prioritize and choose as much either — or at all.

So every day American government becomes more like what the French economist Frederic Bastiat called government almost two centuries ago — “the great fiction by which everybody tries to live at the expense of everybody else,” a great game of cost shifting. 

Of course cost shifting is the purpose of welfare for the indigent. All progressive taxation is cost shifting as well, and a certain amount is sensible and fair. But it loses sense and fairness when it enables vast recklessness and plunder in government and the recklessness of individuals who are relieved by welfare of basic responsibility for themselves and so lose respect for society. 

The waste of money is bad enough. The corruption and social disintegration are worse.

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

Why isn’t Lamont’s nullification ‘too extreme’ for Connecticut?

By CHRIS POWELL

What is too extreme politically for Connecticut in the era of President Donald Trump and New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani?

According to a television commercial from Governor Lamont’s re-election campaign, the extremism is that of the Republican gubernatorial candidate, Greenwich state Sen. Ryan Fazio, who this year voted against legislation that purported to prohibit federal immigration agents from making arrests at schools, churches, and other supposedly sensitive locations.

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The commercial’s narrator, the pastor of a church in Norwalk who is Black, accuses immigration agents of arresting people “based on the color of their skin.” The pastor continues: “Thankfully, Gov. Lamont stepped in. He signed a law barring ICE agents from our churches and our schools. But Ryan Fazio sided with Trump to allow ICE into our schools and our houses of worship. I really can’t imagine him being governor. That is too extreme for Connecticut.”

But the legislation was and remains a fraud.  

Contrary to the pastor’s assertion, the law doesn’t prevent federal agents from entering schools and churches or any other places, for state law has no authority over federal law-enforcement agents doing their jobs, as the governor and the legislators who voted for the legislation know. The law is unconstitutional and unenforceable as the pastor himself might have noticed from the governor’s failure even to try to enforce it, since any enforcement would risk armed confrontation between the federal agents and state police. 

How ironic, then, for a Black pastor to take the same sort of “states’ rights” position that was made in defense of slavery and racial segregation. Claims of state supremacy over the federal government used to be considered too extreme politically for Connecticut.

But now that illegal immigration is politically correct and being used to alter legislative districting in favor of the political party that has created “sanctuary” states, claims of “states’ rights” are in fashion in the very region that courageously stood up against them when the Union and basic human rights were at stake.

Indeed, why isn’t the nullification being waged by the Lamont administration — the facilitation of illegal immigration and the interference with immigration law enforcement — also too extreme politically for the state? 

This issue deserves more serious treatment than it can get from a campaign commercial wrapping deception and racial demagoguery in religious sanctimony.

DEMAND MORE FROM STUDENTS: Public education officials in Connecticut long have refused to address or even acknowledge the problem of social promotion in the schools even as the few proficiency tests the state administers keep illuminating a vast number of students who never gain proficiency in English and math and thus enter adulthood equipped only for menial work.

Some people outside the education bureaucracy acknowledge the problem but think it is now so overwhelming that nothing can be done about it. After all, if academic proficiency was required for promotion of students, in many schools more students would have to be held back every year than would advance to the next grade.

But somehow a few Southern states lately have made progress with their most disadvantaged students by refusing to advance them past third grade until they become good readers. That has gotten the kids’ attention and that of their parents. In any case many students won’t ever meet academic standards unless their schools demand it on pain of some kind of penalty.

Other incentives for performance are easy to imagine. Participation in school sports and other activities outside the classroom could be made a privilege earned by better grades. High school diplomas could be imprinted with a student’s grades for each year of his education. Various kinds of diplomas could be awarded signifying student achievement levels, with the lowest levels signifying mere attendance or the lack of it, and employers could be encouraged to ask young job applicants to present their diplomas for review of their qualifications.

Results in student performance might be demanded from teachers and school administrators as well, adjusted for the disadvantages of the students they receive each year.

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

A federal judge’s negligence highlights Connecticut’s own

By CHRIS POWELL

Escaping the country on the eve of his sentencing for corruption in state government didn’t require much cleverness from former state representative and deputy state budget director Konstantinos Diamantis. Instead it required much negligence by U.S. District Judge Stefan Underhill and Connecticut’s U.S. attorney’s office.

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A jury convicted Diamantis of 21 federal charges involving extortion, bribery, conspiracy, and making false statements. The court and the U.S. attorney’s office knew Diamantis had both U.S. and Greek passports and presumably had or was entitled to Greek citizenship by descent, and before his sentencing he asked for permission to go to his ancestral homeland, purportedly to attend to family business. The judge denied the request. 

As a condition of granting him bond of $500,000 the court had required Diamantis to surrender his U.S. passport, which he did. But he claimed that he couldn’t surrender his Greek passport because he had sent it to Greece so family business could be processed in his absence. 

That story was laughable. After all, why wouldn’t a notarized copy of the data page of his Greek passport suffice?

But the judge and the U.S. attorney’s office accepted the story when the judge immediately should have revoked Diamantis’ bond and sent him to prison until he produced the missing passport.

Instead, his bond was continued and Diamantis scrammed with the passport, perhaps laughing all the way, since, while Greece has an extradition treaty with the United States, it generally refuses to extradite its citizens.

After his corruption racket and his passport racket Diamantis has undertaken another one. He left behind for publication a long memorandum claiming that his conviction resulted from a scheme by Governor Lamont, his wife, and her business associates to frame him. This was as ridiculous as Diamantis’ contention during trial that the payments he received from school building contractors weren’t bribes and extortion payments but consulting fees. That is, he admitted taking money from people with whom he was conducting state business.

But while Diamantis is a Democrat, he apparently hopes his claim of persecution by a Democratic governor will prompt President Trump, a Republican, to grant his application for a pardon, given Trump’s obsession with taking revenge against Democrats. Trump, a grifter himself, isn’t stupid enough to fall for Diamantis’ story but he might be reckless and hateful enough to play along with it.

While Governor Lamont placed Diamantis in the state budget office and trusted him to handle school construction grants, the governor was never complicit in any wrongdoing. He removed Diamantis when his corruption was exposed.

But this is another case of the governor’s being ill-served by subordinates in high positions, and it comes amid many other indications that competence and decency are not as strong in the Lamont administration as they should be. 

After all, complacency and opportunism are inherent in the one-party government Connecticut long has voted for.

But would a Republican administration be any better with personnel?

Connecticut’s last Republican administration ended 15 years ago, the Republican contingent in the General Assembly is small, and no major city in the state has a Republican chief executive. So the field of people experienced in government from which a Republican governor ordinarily might draw his department heads is limited. 

Of course no law requires governors to staff their administrations only with members of their own party — Governor Lamont’s tax commissioner is a Republican — but the Republican nominee for governor, Greenwich state Sen. Ryan Fazio, has been in the General Assembly only five years and is only 36. Capable as he may be, it is fair to wonder if he knows enough people with integrity who are qualified to help him run something as big, hidebound, and self-serving as state government, which has little real management, since nearly everyone in it is unionized.

Power corrupts everyone, not just Democrats. But then Republicans could argue that becoming corrupt usually takes time and that, having been out of power so long, they might be trusted for a few months anyway.

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

Despite her $500,000 compensation, university boss is unaccountable

By CHRIS POWELL

Do Governor Lamont, state legislators, and people who care about Connecticut’s public life watch local television newscasts? Maybe that is part of trying to be good citizen even as most of local TV news is tedious stuff about which no one except the people immediately involved will or can do anything. 

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A fire 30 miles away, murders in impoverished Bridgeport, a car crash 40 miles away, murders in impoverished Hartford, a bank robbery 50 miles away, murders in impoverished Waterbury, a drug bust in impoverished New London, multi-million-dollar awards for mistaken murder convictions in impoverished New Haven — such reports may be relieved only by reports about clever and hungry bears burglarizing houses.

But occasionally local TV news captures something serious about which somebody in authority could do something, even if elected officials will not respond to it any more than they respond to the ordinary daily horrors. Such was the case last week when a reporter for WFSB-TV3 in Hartford, Cassidy Williams, tried following up on the numerous public allegations of unprofessional and even unhinged behavior by the president of Central Connecticut State University in New Britain, Zulma Toro.

Williams repeatedly had sought to question Toro about the allegations but couldn’t get through by telephone. So the reporter went looking for Toro in person at the university and encountered her in a parking lot. Video broadcast on WFSB showed the reporter trying to ask Toro a question as the university president breezed by, got in her car, and abruptly drove off, though a polite “I have no comment today” would not have delayed her excellency’s dinner.

In addition to being courteous, presidents of public universities are obliged to account to the public for their conduct in government office, though Toro’s brazen refusal to account for herself seems to have evoked no dismay from anyone in state government. Indeed, if Toro can’t account to the public for her conduct on the job, she is not fit to lead a public university, especially since, as the Connecticut Examiner reported, her annual salary is $453,533 and additionally she enjoys stipends of $25,000 for housing and $18,000 for a car. Add her retirement benefits and Toro’s annual compensation well exceeds $500,000. But not even that much money buys a little accountability from her.

Fair questions about Toro go beyond the complaints of unprofessional conduct. 

The Examiner reports that Toro is the only one of the four regional state university presidents not to have a written employment contract. This looks like an oversight and has not been clearly explained by the Connecticut State Colleges and University system. While Toro is registered to vote in Burlington, she is driving a car registered and plated in Florida, which imposes no property taxes on cars, and has not paid property taxes on it in Connecticut.

Many former Connecticut residents who have moved their primary residence to Florida return to Connecticut in the summer driving cars with Florida plates. That’s legal. But to evade property taxes many Connecticut residents have registered their cars in other states without really living there. The racket is notorious and some towns have cracked down on it. Apparently Toro hasn’t noticed or cared. 

In the last 14 months the two previous heads of the university system, the “chancellors,” left office because of scandal — one financial, the other sexual harassment — and the chairman of the system’s Board of Regents, exposed as inept, resigned in May a month after the second “chancellor” departed. Now the university system says it is investigating Toro. Of course she is entitled to due process, which includes facing her accusers. But the video of her sullenly scurrying away from accountability may be all the public needs to know about her.

The governor got off easy with the first three major recent departures from the CSCU system. So maybe someone in the state Capitol press corps could ask him what he thinks about Toro’s unaccountability. He could look like he pays attention and sets standards.

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

State pension fund’s gains do little for the private sector

By CHRIS POWELL

Connecticut state government’s pension fund increased in value by 15% during the fiscal year just ended, state Treasurer Erick Russell announced the other day, and its unfunded liabilities, while still in the billions of dollars, are being reduced steadily, even though its total liability still increases with the generous raises the Democratic state administration keeps bestowing on unionized state employees, the party’s army.

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Altogether this is progress for which Governor Lamont, the General Assembly, and the treasurer can take credit, especially since many Democratic legislators are starting to resent it and want to put less money into the pension fund so more can be spent on social programs.

But not everything here is worth celebrating. 

For while the improving solvency of the pension fund is a mark of better public administration, the fund itself provides no benefit to the public. It’s a benefit only to state government employees and retirees — and to the politicians who rely on them at election time. 

State government began offering pensions to its employees decades ago in large part to compensate them for salaries that were low compared to those in the private sector. Today’s state employees are substantially better compensated than private-sector employees when wages, insurance benefits, paid time off, pensions, and job security are calculated. 

Few people outside government in Connecticut would assign state employee pensions the priority they get. Most people would give a higher ranking to things like transportation, education, and public health. But there have been no improvements in those areas that can match the improvement in the state pension fund’s solvency. With Connecticut’s agenda the contentment of government’s own employees comes first.

Most private-sector employers in the state manage to assemble adequate workforces by offering ordinary 401-k and individual retirement account pensions — “defined contribution” plans in which employees rely on their own investment skill or that of advisers for the benefits they receive. By contrast, state government’s pensions are mostly “defined benefit” plans carrying a state guarantee of benefits.

Fairness would put everyone in the same class, but politics in Connecticut requires a privileged class. State employees have earned their privilege not with the special value of their work, though some is indeed special, but with their political activism as a special interest. The public is taxed to pay for this privileged class — taxed to pay for a benefit it will never itself receive — because, as the journalist James Reston wrote, the first rule of politics is the indifference of the majority. Most people pay little attention to government and so pay more for it.

Another reason for not celebrating too much about the improvement in the pension fund is that it results largely from inflation. With the federal government creating money like crazy through deficit spending, the value of most assets has increased far faster than private-sector wages have increased. 

While it is not widely understood, inflation is government policy, not some force of nature — policy that profits the owners of property, like real estate, stocks, and businesses, and penalizes mere wage earners and especially young people trying to establish themselves.

Last month Connecticut’s Hearst newspapers reported that “starter” homes in the state — homes in the bottom third of prices — now have a median price of $300,000 and that their prices have risen three times more than median incomes in the last decade. Homeowners and landlords love the unearned capital gains but they come at a big cost to others.

The new annual “ALICE” report from Connecticut’s United Way organization — a report about people who are “asset-limited, income-constrained, yet employed” — says about 40% of the state’s residents, 570,000 households, are financially unstable and unable to afford essentials like housing, food, transportation, and child care.

Not that they’ll put it all together as they struggle to make ends meet, but how should the ALICE people react to the celebration of the state employee pension fund and the rising costs of housing and local education that result from state government’s encouragement of illegal immigration?

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

Connecticut doesn’t yet realize good careers start with literacy

By CHRIS POWELL

Governor Lamont’s creation of a $250,000 political patronage job for former U.S. Education Secretary Miguel Cardona as a consultant to the Connecticut Career Pathways Commission, which the governor created by executive order in April, isn’t the silliest thing about the commission.

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The governor wants the commission, comprised of volunteers, to devise a five-year plan “to ensure that Connecticut has a modernized career pathways system incorporating all the latest innovations in artificial intelligence, automation, and global competition,” thereby providing students and jobseekers “with the tools needed to obtain good-paying, long-lasting careers” and enabling them to “quickly adapt as state-of-the-art innovations are developed.”

That wordy mission statement might be summarized to say simply that young people should get a good education so they can prosper in a changing economy. No one is likely to disagree with that — not in principle anyway.

But practice is something else. For even as the governor’s gift to Cardona was ferreted out by the Connecticut Mirror — the governor’s office never announced it, since it was likely to prove embarrassing — the state Education Department announced the usual set of dismal proficiency test results for students in Grades 3 through 8 in Connecticut’s schools. 

The test found that among students from poor households, only 33% are proficient for their grade level in English and only 27% proficient in math. Among students from households that are not poor, only 66% are proficient in English and only 63% proficient in math.

That is, more than two thirds of Connecticut’s students from poor households are far behind where they should be, and more than a third of students for whom poverty is not an excuse are far behind as well.

Nevertheless, in accordance with longstanding educational practice in Connecticut, all unproficient students will be advanced to the next grade, reassuring them that they needn’t learn anything in school and that there is no embarrassment in ignorance.

To people outside government, the first steps on the “modernized career pathways” the governor wants might seem to be proficiency in literacy and numeracy. But maybe the education bureaucracy, the governor, and the former education secretary believe that, in the near future, artificial intelligence and automation will make literacy and numeracy obsolete for humans and those skills can be left to robots.

Connecticut doesn’t need a Career Pathways Commission. It needs a commission, a legislative committee, a state education commissioner, or anyone in authority to investigate what happened to standards in public education and to figure out what must be done to bring them back before the robots take over and snicker at all the people wondering what happened.

But since he is campaigning for re-election the governor moves on to other things quickly every day. Last week he announced that in October state government’s CT Rail operation will add four weekday trains to its Shore Line East service between New Haven and New London.

State government’s expansion of passenger train service to connect the Metro-North railroad hub in New Haven with Hartford, Springfield, and New London has been nice, and adding trains between New Haven and New London should make the service more useful and increase patronage. 

But the governor’s happy announcement neglected to note that while all passenger rail service is subsidized by government, just as all automobile travel is subsidized, at last report every Shore Line East passenger was being subsidized spectacularly by state government: $184 per ride. The Hartford Line’s per-passenger subsidy is spectacular too at $78, while the Metro-North railroad, being the busiest commuter railroad in the country, holds its per-passenger subsidy down to $6.48.

The area between New Haven and New London is largely rural and New London is only a small city, so it’s hard to imagine how any increased service on the Shore Line East line will draw enough additional passengers to bring the subsidy below $100 per passenger. But election campaigns are for taking people for a ride, and the unhappy calculations behind it can wait until the election is safely past.

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