Bronin did well for Hartford but city’s big problems remain

By Chris Powell

By most accounts Hartford Mayor Luke Bronin, who is retiring at the end of the year, is leaving the city a better place after two four-year terms in office. Bronin has been competent and decent, has encouraged downtown housing development to try to draw the middle class back to the city, and has avoided demagoguery. 

So he will be missed, if maybe not for too long, since Connecticut’s majority party, the Democrats, could do worse than Bronin for a candidate for governor if Governor Lamont declines to seek a third term in 2026.

But despite Bronin’s work Hartford’s problems remain serious — more serious even than generally understood. 

While the city was on the verge of bankruptcy when Bronin took office — and indeed should have filed for bankruptcy, the better to shape up financially — bankruptcy was avoided not because of any reforms but because state government assumed $500 million of the city’s bonded debt. This was a bailout unprecedented for Connecticut, enacted by a dull-witted General Assembly that, despite the huge amount of money at stake, didn’t realize what it was doing.

Bronin claims credit for the bailout but it was mainly the doing of Gov. Dannel P. Malloy. Bronin’s contribution was his seeming likely to be more competent than his predecessors as mayor and thus not to cause more embarrassments.

While Lamont’s administration has made good progress reducing state government’s unfunded pension liabilities, it was facilitated largely by the billions of dollars in “emergency” aid bestowed on the state by the federal government. Meanwhile, as Connecticut’s Hearst newspapers noted the other day, Hartford city government’s unfunded pension liabilities have worsened dramatically. 

According to the Hearst report, in 2014 the city’s pension fund was 80% funded and had unfunded liabilities of about $252 million. But the most recent estimate is that the fund has only 67% of the assets it should have to be considered sound and its unfunded liabilities have more than doubled to nearly $600 million. On top of that, the performance of the city’s pension fund appears to be very poor.

Mayor Bronin told Hearst that the “fundamental” problem with the city’s finances is the same with all Connecticut’s cities — that “the local property tax is the only significant source of local revenue.” But that’s not really the big problem.

For Hartford’s property tax rate long has been high, as the tax rates of all Connecticut’s cities long have been — powerful disincentives to business, industry, and residents with any property wealth. The cities raise plenty of money from their high tax rates and still get about half their budgets reimbursed by state government in one way or another. So complaints about all the tax-exempt property concentrated in the cities are not persuasive. 

For decades city property taxes and city government spending have risen fairly steadily, not coincidentally along with the generous compensation of their unionized employees, even as city populations have grown more impoverished. Indeed, the longstanding disaster of Connecticut’s urban experience has caused and sustained suburban and rural opposition first to racial integration and now to construction of just about any housing that any normal person can afford.

Of course Connecticut’s urban problems arise as much from state government’s mistaken welfare, education, and government labor policies as from any malfeasance in the cities. The situation actually has been designed this way, the cities being operated as poverty and patronage factories for the state’s majority political party, with suburbs and rural towns not caring much as long as the poverty manufactured and expensively ministered to is mostly confined with its pathologies.

This is Connecticut’s social contract and it wouldn’t have endured so long if it wasn’t intended to do what it does. 

Will any mayor of a Connecticut city ever have the political courage to challenge the social contract and the mistaken policies that underwrite it? Or will there just be more ineffective social programs and bailouts? 

The lack of action on the insolvency of Hartford’s pension fund suggests confidence that another bailout will always be an option.

---

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

-END-