By CHRIS POWELL
Before complaining that state government doesn’t spend enough money on basics like medical care, education, transportation, environmental protection, and such, people should take note of recent reports from the Connecticut Mirror and the Yankee Institute’s Connecticut Inside Investigator.
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The reports found that state government is spending ever-increasing amounts of money on what is just political patronage — appropriations made not for any broad policy purposes but for helping the most influential state legislators of the majority party, the Democrats, to pose as heroes to constituents.
The Mirror report blames the trend on the federal government’s American Rescue Plan Act, which flooded states and municipalities with billions of dollars, nominally to offset the economic and tax revenue losses of the virus epidemic of 2020-23. But the act allowed states and municipalities great discretion in spending the money, and so the money did much more than offset specific losses. For the most part it became free money from Washington for whatever states and municipalities wanted to do with it.
Connecticut state legislators loved it, and the state budget they adopted in 2023 authorized the state Economic and Community Development Department to do something similar: to award almost $18 million in unspecified grants — still more seemingly free money. The most recent state budget appropriated raised the amount to almost $39 million.
Democratic legislators worked with the administration of Gov. Ned Lamont, also a Democrat, to assign the money to their pet causes, outside the normal appropriations process. Now suspicion surrounds the grossly disproportionate amounts that have been directed to nominally nonprofit enterprises controlled by a close friend of state Sen. Douglas McCrory, D-Bloomfield. A federal grand jury is investigating.
The Mirror reports that the economic and community development grants are now going to more than 120 organizations, none of which had to submit applications. “The only requirement,” the Mirror says, “is to know a lawmaker on good terms with the House and Senate Democratic leaders or their top aides.”
Meanwhile Connecticut Inside Investigator reports that the nominally nonprofit Hartford Economic Development Corp. has made millions of dollars in loans backed by state government to small businesses that have failed to repay, including second loans to businesses that were in default on their first. Some of the money ended up with enterprises operated by Senator McCrory’s friend.
Has any of this patronage money made a substantial difference in the health and prosperity of the communities where it was spent, or has it benefited mainly the people receiving the money and the legislators who arranged the grants and got political gratitude for them?
There is little if any auditing of what taxpayers get for these grants, and since no official applications have been required for many of them — since it has been enough that individual legislators advocate them — they can be assumed to be political payoffs if not corrupt.
Really, why should state government finance a legislator’s connection with influential constituents rather than provide adequate funding in basic policy — funding for, say, Medicaid insurance for the poor or “special education” for the many neglected and disadvantaged children of Hartford, New Haven, and Bridgeport who are failing in school?
Political liberals in Connecticut might ask questions like that if their liberalism isn’t just a pious pose.
NOT ENOUGH POLICING: Governor Lamont and other Connecticut Democrats are criticizing President Trump for wanting to send the National Guard to police Chicago and Baltimore as he now has guardsmen policing Washington. While Trump, as usual, is trying to stretch his authority and strike his own pose, Chicago and Baltimore indeed are the hell holes he calls them, overwhelmed by crime and depravity.
Last weekend there were dozens of shootings in Chicago, with eight people killed and 50 wounded.
Who will deny that with their own daily violence and depravity, Hartford, New Haven, and Bridgeport could benefit from a lot more policing? New Haven just had five murders in two weeks. Criticizing Trump’s overreach with crime doesn’t excuse Connecticut’s indifferent underreach.
Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years. (CPowell@cox.net)
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Chris Powell column 