By Chris Powell
What does it mean that, as Dan Haar of Connecticut’s Hearst newspapers notes in a recent column, all of Connecticut’s 19 cities have white mayors though most of them have large populations of racial or ethnic minorities?
There has been no “voter suppression,” and many members of racial minorities hold other elected office in the cities. In recent years Hartford and New Haven each have had two Black mayors, and Hartford has had two Hispanic mayors as well.
Some say the lack of minority mayors diminishes trust in local government. Maybe, but that presumes some racism among members of minority groups themselves — a belief that only fellow members of minority groups can honestly care for them in high elected office.
For several years the Connecticut Conference of Municipalities and Yale University have been undertaking a program to encourage members of minority groups to get involved in politics and government in the state. Perhaps intimidated by history or tradition, minorities may need this special encouragement. But then politics and government need more attention from everyone — especially from those who don’t mean to draw their livelihoods from government.
After all, mayors from minority groups are not any more inherently virtuous than white mayors. A recent minority mayor of Hartford was convicted of corruption, while the most recent minority mayor in New Haven was not especially competent, raised city property taxes atrociously, and was soundly defeated for re-election by a white man.
Bad consequences can arise from minority mayors in big cities through no fault of their own. That’s because Connecticut treats its cities mainly as repositories of the poor and the government and welfare classes and could hardly care less about the results of its urban policies. The steady decline of living conditions in the cities has given the impression that the cities and their inhabitants are hopeless, when what [ITALICS] really [END ITALICS] is hopeless is [ITALICS] state policy [END ITALICS] toward the cities — a policy of throwing money at them only to placate their most vocal dependents.
While Hartford’s current mayor, Luke Bronin, a white man, is the city’s best mayor in many years, his relative successes — financial stability and some downtown development — are mainly functions of state government financing, as with the state’s extraordinary assumption of the city’s enormous bonded debt, a favor not granted to other cities, and state government’s financial underwriting of city projects. Without that heavy support from state government, Hartford almost surely would have continued sinking during Bronin’s administration too.
So without profound changes in state policy, what would more Black and Hispanic mayors do for Connecticut’s cities other than rearrange local patronage? The big challenge is not to change the race of the mayors but to change state policy toward the cities.
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MORE COMPETITION LOST: Just months after the controversial acquisition of People’s United Bank by M&T Bank, more competition in Connecticut’s banking industry is about to be lost. New York-based NBT Bancorp plans to acquire Salisbury Bancorp and its 14 offices in the northwestern part of the state, southwestern Massachusetts, and east-central New York.
NBT Bank already has more than 135 banking branches in Connecticut, New York, Pennsylvania, Vermont, Massachusetts, and New Hampshire.
When M&T, another New York bank, moved on People’s United, based in Bridgeport and having more than 400 branches in Connecticut and elsewhere in New England, the acquiring bank gave assurances that layoffs and branch closings would be minimized. Of course they weren’t. Elected officials harrumphed and pretended to get tough with the bank but they didn’t either.
People’s United was already a big, full-service bank and its acquisition by M&T brought no gains to the public, only gains to the bank’s owners from the reduction in competition.
Will the public gain anything from the loss of Salisbury Bank? Almost certainly not. But will Connecticut’s attorney general, William Tong, and the U.S. Justice Department bring antitrust law to bear against the continuing destruction of competition in banking in Connecticut? If they do, it will be a first.
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Chris Powell is a columnist for the Journal Inquirer in Manchester, Connecticut. (CPowell@JournalInquirer.com)
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Chris Powell column 