Basketball coach’s salary isn’t the one to question

By Chris Powell

Few people will complain about the new contract just awarded by the University of Connecticut to its men’s basketball coach, Dan Hurley, who is fresh off a national championship. With a six-year package worth $32.1 million in salary, or about $5.33 million a year, Hurley will become Connecticut’s highest-paid state government employee ever.

But Hurley’s new salary is in line with the salaries commanded by national champion coaches in college basketball and football. The revenue and prestige brought to colleges by successful football and basketball teams are immense. For many years UConn’s men’s and women’s basketball teams have brought the university and indeed the whole state to national attention. If a UConn football team could ever win a tournament, or even sustain a winning record for a few years, the state might be glad to pay its coach even more than Hurley.

It doesn’t matter that UConn, along with the rest of public higher education in the state, lately has been pleading poverty. Successful college football and basketball programs are exempt from financial restraint nearly everywhere.

What deserves sharp questioning is another salary just awarded at UConn. The university has hired a new police chief, Gene Labonte, lately police chief at Salem State University in Massachusetts and formerly a Connecticut state police commander. He is to be paid $235,000 annually.

Perhaps because of its extravagance, the new chief’s salary was not included in the university’s announcement of his hiring. Pressed about it, a university spokeswoman said the salary is what the departing chief would have been paid had he remained on the job.

This was an admission that unlike private enterprises and even a few government agencies, UConn did not use the personnel turnover as an opportunity to save some money, despite all the poverty pleading done lately by the university.

Far worse than this, the new police chief’s salary is grossly disproportionate to other police chief salaries in Connecticut.

The Hartford police department has about 380 officers and its chief is paid $159,000 a year. The Bridgeport police department has about 300 officers and its chief is paid about the same as Hartford’s.

UConn’s police department has about 86 officers. So UConn’s new chief will be paid $76,000 more than the Hartford and Bridgeport chiefs for supervising 294 fewer officers than Hartford has and 214 fewer officers than Bridgeport has.

In addition, of course, the volume and severity of police work in Hartford, Bridgeport, and Connecticut’s other cities and larger suburbs are far beyond what UConn’s police deal with. City police face frequent murders, shootings, robberies, assaults, rapes, and the endless dysfunction and misery of compacted poverty. City police officers are frequently attacked and sometimes even killed.

By comparison with police work in the cities, police work at UConn is a vacation.

So could UConn not have found a competent police chief for a salary closer to what is paid where the most difficult police work in the state is done? Will Connecticut have to wait for a losing basketball season before someone in authority at the state Capitol begins putting critical questions to the university?

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HYPOCRISY ABOUT MINORS: More incongruity in Connecticut law popped up the other day. The state began prohibiting marriage by minors — people under 18. Previously minors could marry in the state if they got a court’s approval.

The premise of the new law is correct — that minors are not fit to make big decisions because they lack judgment and are too easily influenced and exploited. On the same premise Connecticut forbids not just minors but everyone under 21 from purchasing alcoholic beverages and tobacco products. Tattooing minors without parental permission is also outlawed.

Meanwhile state law allows minors to get abortions without the permission or even knowledge of their parents. State law also allows schools to conceal the gender dysphoria of students from their parents.

It’s not that minors are competent on some days and incompetent on others. It’s that some things in Connecticut are politically correct and others aren’t, and pursuing political correctness is more important than protecting kids.

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

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