By CHRIS POWELL
No one in journalism in Connecticut seems to have noted it except for Hartford Business Journal Editor Greg Bordonaro, but Governor Lamont defaulted this year on an issue he repeatedly said he wanted to address: the need to get state government employees back to work in their offices and reduce the time they spend claiming to work from home.
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Somehow working from home has secured a place in the long list of state employee rights and can’t be changed by ordinary public administration, only through arbitration or a new master state employee union contract. The governor negotiated another contract this year, with generous raises for a workforce that was already extremely well paid, but it changed nothing about the right of state employees to work from home via the internet, e-mail, and telephone.
That they might do better work in the company of their colleagues and in sight of their supervisors is not yet of much official concern.
Instead the governor and the state employee union coalition agreed to create a committee to study the issue and make recommendations early next year — that is, safely after the state election in November, when the governor, a Democrat, and the big Democratic majority in the General Assembly will be relying on state employee union members for their usual pluralities.
Voters surely will forget about the “telework” issue during the campaign ahead unless some candidates or other news organizations remind them.
Will the Republican nominee for governor, Greenwich state Sen. Ryan Fazio, find the courage to do that?
The other day Fazio mocked the governor’s proposals for legislation that might help bring electricity prices down. The proposals deserved a little mockery, since they are in large part philosophical stuff for which the state Public Utilities Regulatory Authority would need to develop specifics. Maybe that will work out, especially since the governor recently reconstituted the authority, his previous appointees having been rather ineffectual and, in the case of the chairwoman, so dishonest and corrupt that the state’s largest electric utility, Eversource, defeated the agency in important litigation this year.
But candid discussion of electric utility issues is probably impossible anyway, most people being furious about electricity prices, and about prices generally, and being so susceptible to demagoguery by politicians against large corporations. Few people notice that government itself is far worse about controlling its costs than utilities are, and few politicians remind them about that either.
A spokesman for the governor’s re-election campaign shot back, somewhat fairly, at Fazio’s criticism of the governor’s electricity proposals.
The spokesman said Fazio and other Republican senators have only one idea about electricity — eliminate the public benefits charge on electricity bills — “and it doesn’t even work. It moves costs from your electric bill to your tax bill. That’s it.”
Almost but not quite. For moving the public benefits charge and its constituent parts from the obscurity of electricity bills to the relative sunlight of the state budget would force the governor and state legislators to appropriate and tax plainly for them. It would force everything financed by the public benefits charge to compete for appropriations against everything else in the state budget. That might spark a debate about, for example, just how much electricity should continue to be a component of welfare benefits and whether various environmental programs are worthwhile.
Of course Republican legislators might not want to face such questions any more than Democratic legislators and the governor do. When it comes to supervising state government spending, most Republican legislators are less like junkyard dogs than cuddly bunnies. And why bother being more conscientious? Taxpayers pay less attention to government than its employees and special interests do, and they don’t get as angry when crossed.
But ending the taxation of electricity, a necessity of life, would be progress, and even liberal Democrats might realize this if they didn’t prefer raising money for government by any means, so spending can be increased, to the more progressive taxation they purport to favor.
Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years. (CPowell@cox.net)
Chris Powell column 