State government endures three more scandals in a week

By CHRIS POWELL

According to records obtained by the Connecticut Mirror and published last week, state government officials knew two years ago that state Sen. Doug McCrory, D-Hartford, was steering state anti-poverty and community development grants to his girlfriend. But those officials and their superiors apparently failed to recognize and act on the conflict of interest and corruption.

---

Can Democrats ever deliver ‘a city we can afford’?

Tantrum by Democrats isn’t worth hobbling government

‘Nip’ bottle fees don’t recover their cost in litter and drunken driving

---

Of course the officials, who worked for the state Department of Economic and Community Development, might have thought that, as McCrory himself has suggested, there is nothing illegal about state legislators steering state grants to people with whom they have intimate relationships. Government is a great repository of political patronage where connections often trump merit — especially in regard to programs in the name of economic development and alleviating poverty, since results there are seldom audited.

Even so, disclosure that state officials didn’t stop a Democratic senator’s exploitation of his office and state funds is another blow to the integrity of Governor Lamont’s administration, especially since it comes just days after the federal bribery and extortion convictions of the governor’s former deputy budget director, Konstantinos Diamantis, who awaits another trial on additional corruption charges.

The grant-steering scandal continues to be investigated by a federal grand jury, since state prosecutors have little interest in pursuing corruption and state Attorney General William Tong is too busy obstructing enforcement of federal immigration law.

While the Mirror was publicizing the McCrory documents, the Yankee Institute’s Meghan Portfolio was disclosing that a state police lieutenant, Robert Hazen, was paid last year almost as much in overtime — $122,000 — as his regular salary, $137,000, and lately has been allowed to authorize much of his own overtime, apparently because he has become chief of staff to a lieutenant colonel.

So far this year Hazen already has received another $32,000 in overtime.

Apparently no one in the state police has been watching Hazen’s overtime any more than anyone in the state budget office was watching Diamantis’ extortion and no one in the General Assembly was blowing the whistle on the grant steering done by McCrory and other legislators, though there is no evidence that the grant steering done by other legislators has involved favors to romantic partners or relatives, just political supporters.

A spokesman for the state police says they are striving to reduce overtime and already achieving some success — a reduction of 8% in the last fiscal year. Part of the overtime problem is a shortage of state troopers, a problem also being worked on. But if Hazen has been authorizing his own overtime, much correction remains to be done.

Elected officials often prattle about the poor. They don’t seem to understand that the best service to the poor is to reduce excess, corruption, and political patronage in government so that more resources can be made available to the poor. Not everyone who advocates efficiency in government is hateful, even if anyone pursuing efficiency risks such accusations from the prattlers, who have not yet noticed that poverty is worsening despite the increased appropriations in the name of reducing it.

Still another scandal was reported last week. The state Education Department announced that most students in Connecticut failed the state’s physical fitness test in the 2024-25 school year. The test is given in fourth, sixth, and eighth grades, and once to students during their high school years.

Various factors are blamed for the poor results, including the recent virus epidemic, the obsession young people have with social media, and reductions in school athletic and extracurricular programs.

The results of the physical fitness tests seem to correlate to some extent with community demographics, as poverty weighs on physical fitness as it does on academic performance.

Little can be done about it short of requiring parents to start paying more attention to their children’s physical fitness. But with chronic absenteeism of Connecticut’s students standing at 17%, and at 25% or more in the  cities, parental responsibility isn’t being pressed as it should be. State government doesn’t yet dare get that politically incorrect — and relevant.

——

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

-END-