By CHRIS POWELL
Maybe Hamden state Rep. Josh Elliott, challenging Governor Lamont’s renomination in the Democratic primary August 11, has their party perfectly figured out. Elliott speaks almost entirely of enlarging government, increasing its dependents, taxing and spending more, and giving government more power over the economy and society generally.
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Elliott seems to presume that most Democrats who will vote in the primary are members of the government class or aspire to become members and that they can be convinced that he really will do more for them than Lamont has done, even as the governor often announces new subsidies for one group or another, also seeming to presume that the primary will be decided by the government class and its aspirants.
So is there any other constituency in the Democratic Party these days — like a constituency for plain old honest, efficient, transparent, and effective government, government that actually accomplishes what it purports to do?
This month an anti-poverty nonprofit organization in Waterbury, New Opportunities Inc., was found for the second time to have misused state money, this time nearly $3 million, to conceal various financial losses. The misconduct was discovered not by government auditors but only because last December electric utility Eversource reported that a check from the organization for $1.5 million, money for home heating assistance, had bounced.
Is this the only recent misuse of state money awarded in the name of alleviating poverty? The recent scandal of state grants arranged by state legislators as political patronage for nonprofit groups suggests that more auditing of state-financed nonprofits is in order.
A few days ago the state Medical Examining Board recommended canceling the $71,000-a-year disability pension of a Republican state senator, Paul Cicarella of North Haven, because he is not really disabled after all and for years has been earning good incomes in other jobs, including his legislative job, despite the supposedly disabling fall he suffered as a prison guard.
State Comptroller Sean Scanlon is trying to clean up the disability pension mess and it is said that Cicarella broke no law. But is it likely that he is the only former state employee to have exploited the laxity of the system? What would an in-person examination of all disability pensions find? No one seems to be calling for one.
There have been many scandals of mismanagement during Governor Lamont’s 7½ years in office — not necessarily more than in previous administrations but enough to constitute valid issues in the campaign for governor. Maybe Republicans will raise some eventually, but if Elliott doesn’t raise some in the Democratic primary — and he hasn’t done so yet, though the offender in the recent pension case is a Republican politician — the indifference may be taken as confirmation that no Democrat running for governor sees anything to be gained by making state government more honest and efficient.
At least the Yankee Institute has been noticing many financial management lapses in state and municipal government.
Yankee’s Meghan Portfolio has even proposed that the General Assembly and governor should address these lapses with new legislation that she deliciously would name after former New Britain Mayor Erin Stewart, whose grifting with her city credit card was exposed just in time to prevent her from getting the Republican nomination for governor.
Portfolio would call it “ERIN’s Act” — the Expenditure Records and Information Notification Act. It would require executive branch agencies to post on the internet the purchases government officials make with government credit cards.
Portfolio notes that many recent reports by the state auditors have found misuse of such credit cards, sometimes even after misuse had been identified in previous audits, failures including “missing receipts, inadequate supporting documentation, unauthorized card users, untimely reconciliations, purchases lacking proper approval, split transactions, and failures to comply with established policies.”
Of course nothing can force government administrators to look at the credit card records they have been ignoring. But posting them on the internet at least would make what’s left of investigative reporting easier.
Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years. (CPowell@cox.net)
Chris Powell column 