By CHRIS POWELL
Despite some recent improvement, Connecticut’s state employee and teacher pension accounts are still underfunded by billions of dollars. Yet Governor Lamont wants to start using them as political slush funds.
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The governor’s idea is to have the pension funds buy a stake in the Mohegan tribe’s Connecticut Sun women’s basketball team in the Women’s National Basketball Association as a means of gaining leverage to keep the team in Connecticut, and then moving the team from the Mohegan reservation in Montville to Hartford. The tribe is deep in debt and wants to sell the team to an investor group that would move it to Boston, giving the tribe a capital gain of more than $300 million. But the league apparently disapproves and wants to move the team to Houston instead.
Thanks to decades of heroic work at the University of Connecticut, women’s basketball is extremely popular in Connecticut. The Sun has a strong fan base in the eastern part of the state but nothing like the UConn team’s fan base throughout the whole state. Putting the Sun in Hartford and having it play at the People’s Bank Arena — where the UConn women play more games than they play at Gampel Pavilion on campus, since the Hartford arena has 60% more seats — would pose financial risks to both teams, making them direct competitors.
The Sun’s value in a sale probably would diminish substantially if the team was headed for a small market like Hartford. Besides, the Mohegan tribe wouldn’t be offering the team for sale if its financial prospects would be greater in Hartford, since the tribe could afford to move the team to Hartford itself.
Investment involves risk, but the risk in state government’s investing in a WNBA team to facilitate its move to Hartford is far greater than the risk of many investments, and state government’s pension funds are in huge deficit relative to their obligations. Until the funds are in comfortable surplus, they should be investing only for investment profitability and security, not the politics of pleasing certain sports fans.
If it wants to buy a stake in the Sun, state government should do it with regular money, like the wonderful “budget surplus” state government pretends to have, though the surplus is really just money that has been produced only by the decades-long cheating on the pension funds.
If they decide to buy a stake in a basketball team when Connecticut already has two state-owned basketball teams with national standing, the governor and state legislators should take clear responsibility, explaining why the state needs part ownership of a third team more than it needs, for example, better medical care for the poor, adequate “special education” for troubled children, and more housing.
Whether they make it explicit or not, the governor and legislators will also be proclaiming a terrible precedent — that the pension funds are now political slush funds.
INSURRECTIONIST DEMOCRATS: The people who keep claiming that Connecticut is not a “sanctuary state” and is not obstructing enforcement of federal immigration law now want to block federal immigration agents from making arrests in state courthouses.
The request was directed last week to state Chief Justice Raheem Mullins by state Senate President Pro Tem Martin Looney, Senate Majority Leader Bob Duff, and 19 other Democratic senators.
How exactly would the chief justice block the federal agents? Would he instruct judicial marshals to tackle them at the metal detectors and shoot them if they get through? Would he try to get a federal court order to exclude the agents?
It’s not clear. The Democratic senators just want him to do something — something the senators themselves have failed to do: enact legislation barring federal agents from state courthouses.
Since federal law is superior to state law, a state law blocking federal agents from state courthouses would be brazenly unconstitutional nullification. Essentially the Democratic senators have told the chief justice: “Let’s you and them fight.” But at least the senators now have come into the open as insurrectionists.
Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years. (CPowell@cox.net)
Chris Powell column 