By CHRIS POWELL
Connecticut is nearly the highest-taxed and most expensive state in the country, and though state legislators are prattling about making the state more “affordable,” most of this year’s session of the General Assembly has been a scramble to spend more money. Indeed, the legislature long has been most remarkable for its inability to audit government for actual results and to discover any substantial spending that can be reduced.
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But not anymore. Last week the state House of Representatives overwhelmingly approved a bill that would repeal the old state law requiring municipal governments to give formal notice of their plans and actions by purchasing legal notices in newspapers.
The legislation’s rationale is that posting the notices on municipal internet sites will alert the public sufficiently to what local government is doing and that it will be free, saving municipal governments altogether maybe two or three million dollars every year.
The money is real but the claim that sufficient notice can be achieved by municipal government internet sites is laughable. For the audience of municipal government internet sites is tiny. By contrast, even as newspaper readership declines, newspapers still have a substantial audience. More important, legal notices alert news organizations to what government is doing, and in turn news organizations alert the public both in print and on their internet sites.
Since newspapers charge for legal notice advertising, the notice requirement can be viewed as a subsidy to newspapers. But that is not how the advertising requirement originated. The requirement buys a service of value — and not just notice to the public about the particular item being advertised but also local news reporting generally, which is in serious decline because the internet and social media are drawing the audience away from local news and because civic engagement is declining along with literacy generally.
If the advertising requirement is repealed, then for everyone who reads legal notices on his municipality’s internet site there may be hundreds or even thousands of people who lose access to local news as newspapers adjust to their loss of income by reducing their news coverage and frequency of publication.
Municipal officials have been advocating repeal of the legal notice advertising requirement for many years, and saving money is not the only reason for their enthusiasm.
The advertising requirement is a relic of the era of limited government, which is long gone. The current era is one of virtually unlimited government with many more people drawing their livelihood from government.
As the primary mechanisms of accountability to the public, news organizations annoy government officials. Government is so much easier without journalism — which is not to say that government without journalism would be more efficient but rather that government’s inefficiencies, mistakes, and crimes would be disclosed less often.
That’s why while the legislature finds it almost impossible to reduce or eliminate government spending anywhere else, it seems about to proclaim that journalism about government is readily expendable.
The state Senate’s approval of the House-passed legislation and Governor Lamont’s signature on it may inaugurate a golden age of unaccountability in government in Connecticut, a more expensive and mysterious age.
GAMBLING’S DAMAGE: According to a report last week in Connecticut’s Hearst newspapers, some state legislators are having doubts about state government’s expansion of legal gambling in recent years, particularly about sports betting, which has compounded with gambling casinos, internet casino gambling, and what now may seem like the deadly first step back in 1972, the state lottery.
Gambling addiction has exploded in the state, damaging thousands of lives, ruining families, helping to corrupt national sports, and recently snaring even New Haven’s police chief, all while making a very few people rich in the guise of reparations for ancient wrongs no one alive today suffered from. Gullible Connecticut is supposed to believe that casino gambling is social justice.
Legislators and governors have thought that getting money through gambling — indirect rather than direct taxation — is worth the awful consequences to society. It isn’t and remains a matter of political cowardice.
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Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years. (CPowell@cox.net)
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Chris Powell column 