By Chris Powell
About 17% of state government employee positions have been left vacant, in part so Governor Lamont can improve state government’s financial position.
Prison employees are required to work abusive amounts of overtime even as they are at high risk of contracting COVID-19. The state police lately felt so short-staffed that they sank to giving administrative work to a trooper who was serving a criminal probation. Also short-staffed, the state Freedom of Information Commission is slower than ever in adjudicating complaints about denials of transparency in government, but then few in government outside the commission want transparency enforced.
So on the whole, despite its 17% vacancy rate, state government has muddled on. Indeed, in a campaign commercial the governor claims that “our state stayed strong and it’s getting stronger.”
With the state budget it just passed, the General Assembly has responded with more than its usual hypocrisy to the issue of unfilled jobs. According to the Connecticut Mirror’s Keith Phaneuf, the budget prohibits the governor from reducing any agency’s spending as long as the state budget as a whole isn’t running a deficit. But then the budget also instructs the administration to find $140 million in savings — savings the legislature itself declined to search for and identify.
This way of economizing lets legislators pose as the good guys and coddle the state employee unions while making the governor take all the risk of looking like the bad guy.
Maybe the governor isn’t complaining about this publicly because the legislature demanded far larger unspecified savings from his predecessor. Still, it would have been fair for the governor to have vetoed the budget and told the legislature to find the courage to do the economizing itself.
Nevertheless, extravagance and incompetence continue in state government, especially at the University of Connecticut.
Last week Tom Hopkins of Connecticut Inside Investigator, a journalism project of the Yankee Institute, detailed how UConn recently concluded that an arts professor repeatedly made sexual advances to students, touched many inappropriately, and purchased alcohol for an underage student.
But, Connecticut Inside Investigator found, the university took only the mildest action against the professor. First UConn put the professor on paid administrative leave and then restored him to the classroom for a year, as well as to research and administrative work, whereupon he retired without any firing or discipline on his record that would impede his finding work elsewhere in education.
Also last week Hartford Courant columnist Kevin Rennie reported that Rachel Rubin, UConn’s former presidential staff chief, who was paid $364,000 a year, recently retired with an annual pension of $144,000 and a payment of $82,000 for accrued benefits, only to be rehired soon afterward to assist UConn’s Board of Trustees with its search for a new president. In her temporary position in “retirement” Rubin may be paid as much as $200,000 a year.
Rennie notes that Rubin assisted the board in its hiring of Thomas Katsouleas as UConn president in 2019, which was a disaster, since he and the board quickly fell out and he resigned only two years later, golden-parachuting into a tenured professorship at UConn with a salary of $330,000 as guaranteed by his presidential contract.
Still, Connecticut has not reached the point where anyone in authority can criticize the university’s extravagance and incompetence. If the Republicans want a fat target in this year’s state election campaign, UConn is one.
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JOURNALISM PLAYS ALONG: As it becomes more politically correct and less critical, American journalism engages more in euphemism that takes political sides and sanitizes. There are no more illegal immigrants but only “undocumented” people. Supporters of abortion are “pro-choice.” Sex-change therapy for minors is disguised as “gender-affirming care” though it can have terrible adverse effects.
George Orwell saw this coming in “1984,” in which an apparatchik at the Ministry of Truth explains: “Don’t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thought crime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it.”
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Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years.
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Chris Powell column 