Yale has become too big for its property tax break

By CHRIS POWELL

If any news report in Connecticut this year should prompt an urgent response from state government, it’s the one published last week by the Hearst Connecticut newspapers about the burden of Yale University’s property tax exemption in New Haven.

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Democrats keep pretending they aren’t obstructing ICE

It’s actually an old story but one that has never gotten proper attention from Connecticut governors and state legislators.

The essence of it is that most real estate in New Haven, being owned by nominally nonprofit entities, is exempt from municipal property taxes; that most of this exempt property is owned by Yale; and that the university, while being New Haven’s largest employer and the city’s main reason for being, is less of a boon than generally thought.

According to the Hearst report, the university’s taxable property in New Haven, property used mainly for commercial purposes, has total value of $173 million while its tax-exempt property, used mainly for educational purposes, is valued at around $4.4 billion.

Yale pays the city $5 million annually in taxes on its taxable properties and another $22 million or so in voluntary payments for its exempt properties, or about $27 million. But without its property tax exemption Yale would owe New Haven as much as $146 million more than the university pays now.

Of course there’s no denying Yale’s enormous economic contribution to New Haven and its suburbs. Without Yale, New Haven would be Bridgeport, whose reason for being, as long assumed by state government, is mainly to confine Fairfield County’s poverty. 

But Yale’s relationship with New Haven has gotten far beyond disproportionate. As a political force the university is bigger than the city and, it seems, since state government has not acted against that disproportion, bigger than the whole state.

It’s not that Yale can’t afford to pay more; it has an endowment of around $40 billion that even President Trump and the Republican majority in Congress have found the courage to begin taxing. 

Nine years ago the General Assembly considered legislation to limit the university’s tax exemption but did not act.

Yale has claimed that the charter it received from Connecticut’s colonial legislature in the 1700s gives the university permanent exemption from property taxes. But the charter and its revisions under state law during the next two centuries put limits on Yale’s tax exemption, the first limit being a mere 500 pounds sterling. The tax exemption was thought justified in large part because, in its early years, Yale was heavily subsidized by cash from state government and was a de-facto government institution. A remnant of this connection to state government is the continuing “ex-officio” membership of Connecticut’s governor and lieutenant governor on the university’s Board of Trustees.

Yale no longer gets a direct annual cash stipend from state government but its $146 million tax break is worth a lot more. That money is paid not just by New Haven’s residents through their property taxes and rents but by all state taxpayers as well, since New Haven city government is so heavily subsidized by state government. 

Even if the courts concluded that the university’s charter, as amended over the years, puts it beyond all property taxes on educational buildings, state government could coerce Yale by restricting the acreage it owns in the city, thereby forcing it to sell property and rent it back.

Would Yale leave Connecticut if, as was proposed nine years ago, state law limited university property tax exemptions to $2 billion per year, thereby raising Yale’s annual tax bill by $70 million or so? Yale’s huge endowment implies otherwise.

At least the new federal tax on large university endowments has not prompted the richest schools to start planning to leave the country. 

The additional property tax revenue paid by Yale could be divided equally between New Haven and state government, state government recovering its share by reducing its financial aid to the city. 

Of course those governments probably wouldn’t spend the windfall very well, but it’s the principle of the thing.      

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

Awful Trump is right on crime but Connecticut is indifferent

By CHRIS POWELL

For the sake of argument, stipulate that President Trump, a Republican, never has good intentions, only demagogic ones, and has a political interest in exaggerating the problem of crime in the cities, most of which long have been mismanaged by Democrats.

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But that political interest is no stronger than that of the Democrats in falsely minimizing urban crime. Indeed, crime data is almost as manipulated as economic data is by whoever is in power. The question now is whether the urban crime problem is bad enough to deserve the attention Trump has called to it by taking control of the District of Columbia police and deploying the National Guard to patrol the district.

In any case, crime in D.C. seems to be down sharply now that there are soldiers all over the place. Though the president may not have authority to put soldiers in other cities, many of them, like Chicago and Baltimore, could use similar treatment or else thousands more police officers on their streets and aggressive prosecution of the lesser crimes like shoplifting that are now condoned.

State government in Connecticut could hardly care less about crime. As long as the worst of it — the shootings, stabbings, and murders — is confined to the state’s cities, particularly Hartford, New Haven, and Bridgeport, the poverty factories — it’s all considered normal and largely avoidable by the middle and upper classes, who can stick to the suburbs.

Presiding over a poverty factory, New Haven Mayor Justin Elicker has an especially difficult job, since he feels obliged to express sympathy for victims and perpetrators alike while trying to persuade suburbanites that his city is still safe for them despite incidents like the two fatal shootings that occurred Aug. 25 next to the Yale University campus. Those murders unnerved students as the new college year began, reminding them that New Haven consists of two parallel and very different universes.

Responding to the murders, Mayor Elicker noted again that most criminal violence in New Haven involves people who know each other. That is, you’re perfectly safe in New Haven as long as you don’t know anyone there, or at least no one outside the Yale cocoon.

If you’re born into the underclass, born into a fatherless household, as so many children in the poverty factories are, state government would have you put your faith in ever more anti-poverty programs — free or heavily subsidized stuff, and in social promotion in school, during which you may feel better about yourself until you graduate from high school and find yourself qualified only for menial work or the dangerous trade in illegal drugs. (Connecticut’s purported legalization of marijuana has not eliminated that trade as was hoped.)

Of course that’s if you ever get to school and graduate in the first place. Chronic absenteeism is high in the poverty factories and was probably about to get higher in Bridgeport when the school board decided in April to save $4.6 million by eliminating bus service for 2,400 students, increasing by a half mile the distance students are obliged to walk to school.

The state Education Department, which has put Bridgeport schools under extra scrutiny because of their grotesque failure, intervened, locating extra money and apparently negotiating a better deal with the bus contractor than the school board made, allowing bus service to remain as it had been. But that won’t diminish chronic absenteeism. 

That problem, like most of the problems of the underclass in Connecticut, is mainly a matter of child neglect, a lack of parenting in households that can’t afford to take good care of their children or don’t try to. The less parenting, education, and job skills in society, the more policing will be needed. 

So awful as Trump may be, he is emphatically right about the cities, even if he doesn’t fully understand or care about why they got so bad, and his Democratic adversaries are not only wrong about the cities but the main perpetrators of their frightening decline.

——

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

-END-

Newington raid shows Democrats want no immigration enforcement

By CHRIS POWELL

Nothing seems to upset Democrats in Connecticut more than arrests for illegal immigration. 

For years the Democrats were indifferent to millions of illegal entries into the country, figuring that while illegal immigrants might drive down wages for the less skilled and drive up the costs of housing, social services, and schools, at least illegal immigrants would concentrate in Democratic-leaning congressional districts, cause creation of more Democratic districts, and make the U.S. House of Representatives politically uncompetitive forever without the need for gerrymandering. 

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Immigration law enforcement policy under the last Democratic national administration was to overlook the gate crashers and merely to issue immigration court summonses to those caught entering the country illegally or claiming asylum, and then chuckle when the illegal entrants and asylum claimants just disappeared into the country and never showed up for their hearings.

The people whose party broke the immigration system now complain that it’s broken and that the exquisite due process of law they’d like to see with enforcement, full of distractions and appeals, is impossible if enforcement is to be even partially effective with 14 million people illegally residing in the country.

There are valid concerns about due process in many deportations. But Democrats in Connecticut aren’t really worried about due process. They would be opposed to deportations even with exquisite due process.

They made this plain with their screeching last weekend about the arrests by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents of seven employees at a car wash in Newington. 

A statement issued by Newington Mayor Jon Trister, state Sen. Matthew Lesser, state Rep. Gary Turco, and other Democratic officials said: “The recent actions of ICE are designed to intimidate and terrorize immigrants and their families, and we will not stand idly by. As community leaders, we stand united with Newington’s immigrant communities. Our town has been and will remain a place where families are welcome and where neighbors look out for one another.”

The mayor and others complained that ICE did not notify the town’s police department in advance of the raid at the car wash.

But if the arrests in Newington were “designed to intimidate and terrorize immigrants,” exactly how were they any different from most other immigration arrests and from many ordinary arrests by police in Connecticut and elsewhere — and how could they have been any different?

To avoid scaring illegal immigrants, should ICE have telephoned or mailed summonses to the car wash to direct the employees in question to visit an ICE office for a hearing to adjudicate their status? Of course those of the car wash employees whose presence in the country is illegal would have scattered immediately. 

That would have been more Democratic pretense of enforcement policy.

ICE probably knows better than to give notice of its raids to police departments in a “sanctuary state” like Connecticut, which gives special driver’s licenses to illegal immigrants and whose “Trust Act” forbids police from cooperating with immigration authorities in most instances. Indeed, ICE fairly could have presumed that Newington’s police chief would alert Mayor Trister and the mayor would tip off the car wash to thwart the raid, just as state Rep. Corey Paris, D-Stamford, tried to thwart immigration enforcement in his district a few days earlier. 

After all, the statement Mayor Trister issued with the other local Democrats refused to make any distinction between legal and illegal immigrants. The statement indicated that all immigrants are welcome in Newington, legal and illegal alike — no distinctions.

That is, the Democratic position is that there should be no immigration law enforcement in Connecticut — that anyone who enters the country illegally and makes his way to Connecticut generally and Newington particularly should be exempt from immigration law enforcement until he’s caught committing a serious crime. Driver’s licenses, New Haven resident identification cards, welfare and other social services, and pious protection against immigration law enforcement await anyone who breaks in. 

Connecticut seems unable to bolster its population by increasing the state’s prosperity but illegal immigration could do it. 

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

-END-

Democrats keep pretending that they aren’t obstructing ICE

By CHRIS POWELL

Connecticut Democrats keep doubling down in support of illegal immigration and obstruction of immigration law enforcement even as they keep pretending they’re not doing so.

Last week at the Legislative Office Building about 25 Democratic elected officials held a news conference that made a spectacle of their contradictions.

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A week earlier state Rep. Corey Paris, D-Stamford, had issued a warning on social media that federal immigration agents were active in his district. He urged people to “remain vigilant, stay aware of our surroundings, and, above all, prioritize your safety,” as well as to bring immigration enforcement actions to the attention of groups that assist illegal immigrants.

Responding on social media, a conservative organization accused Paris of publicizing the “live location” of immigration agents and urged the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency to “charge him.” 

ICE reposted the accusation, prompting, according to Paris, lots of anonymous threats against him. He denied disclosing the “live location” of immigration agents and putting any agents at risk.

Indeed, Paris had not posted that agents were, for example, working around the Stamford train station or a particular supermarket. But his district is a small place with defined borders, and citing it conveyed information useful to people seeking to remain in the country illegally, so Paris’ intention was clear: to obstruct enforcement of immigration law.

At their news conference, Democratic elected officials, including Lt. Gov. Susan Bysiewicz and U.S. Sen. Richard Blumenthal, minimized that aspect of the controversy. They concentrated on the threats Paris received, as if there is substantial political disagreement in Connecticut about the impropriety of such threats. (Even Republican state legislators felt obliged to deplore the threats against Paris while failing to deplore what he did.) 

No, the substantial political disagreement is about illegal immigration.

“Corey did nothing wrong,” Blumenthal insisted, and his colleagues at the news conference repeated this assertion. 

All this came just days after Governor Lamont and state Attorney General William Tong had proclaimed again that Connecticut is not a “sanctuary state” and does not interfere with immigration law enforcement.

No one in journalism called the governor and the attorney general to ask why, if Connecticut is not a “sanctuary state,” a state legislator had just acted as if it is one and if they approved of what he did. 

Indeed, in calling their news conference the Democratic elected officials must have been confident that no one in the Capitol press corps would ever question them critically about illegal immigration.

No one asked the Democrats if, by saying Paris did “nothing wrong,” they meant that trying to sabotage immigration law enforcement is OK.  

No one asked if they would feel justified in doing what Paris did if they knew that immigration agents were working in a particular area. 

No one asked how the explosion in the country’s illegal immigrant population in recent years is likely to effect congressional redistricting and which political party will benefit most from it.

No one asked if immigration law violators who have not been accused or convicted of other offenses should be exempt from enforcement — that is, if there should be another immigration amnesty.

No one asked if, for the country’s protection, every foreigner should get ordinary vetting before being admitted.

And no one asked if, before publicizing immigration enforcement in his district, Paris should have determined whether the agents were going after criminals or just ordinary immigration law violators.

But almost simultaneously with the Democratic news conference ICE announced that in a recent four-day operation in Connecticut it had arrested 65 people, 29 of whom “had been convicted or charged in the United States with serious crimes, including kidnapping, assault, drug offenses, weapons violations, and sex crimes.” Others, ICE said, had criminal records in their native countries.

“Connecticut is a sanctuary no more,” ICE said, implying that there would be more enforcement in the state. 

How much more enforcement will be required in Connecticut before critical questions are put to public officials who deplore it?

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

Governor should make prisons account for deaths of inmates

By CHRIS POWELL

Criminally convicted people are generally not very healthy. Many have smoked, abused drugs and alcohol, and become mentally ill or close to it. So it’s to be expected that some will die in prison. But since prisons are government institutions largely concealed from the public, government should account fully for every death in prison.

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Connecticut is doing miserably in this regard. 

Katherine Revello of Connecticut Inside Investigator, an undertaking of the Yankee Institute, last week recounted her great difficulty extracting information from the Correction Department and state police about the deaths of three inmates at the prison in Newtown in July last year.

One inmate hanged himself. It took the department three months to answer Revello about the cause of the other two deaths: drug overdoses. Only this month did the state police provide documents Revello sought about the investigation of those deaths, and most pages of the reports were entirely redacted.

Revello writes that the state police attributed their redactions to four exemptions in the state’s freedom-of-information law: “investigatory techniques not known to the public, personnel or medical files that would invade personal privacy if released, logs that contain information on the movement of inmates and staff in prisons, and an exemption that prevents the disclosure of images of deceased victims.”

This is ridiculous. What techniques of investigating deaths in prison are so sensitive that the public must be kept ignorant of them? 

As for invasion of privacy, people in prison have little privacy and the dead have none at all. 

What is so sensitive about the movement of prison employees and prisoners? Of course they don’t stand still. 

As for images of the deceased, there may not always be a need for their release but there sure would be public interest in releasing them if death was attributed to a drug overdose when photos of the victim show a knife in his back.

And where did the drugs found in the bodies of the two overdose victims come from? The drugs seem to have been pharmacological drugs that are prescribed, not cocaine or heroin. So did the inmates get them properly from prison medical staff, or improperly from prison staff, other prisoners, or visitors?

These are fair questions about prison management, and if investigation can’t find answers, someone in authority should have said so by now.

Meanwhile Connecticut’s new prison ombudsman, an advocate for prisoners, DeVaughn Ward, has been trying to gain the release of Correction Department video showing the fatal subduing of a mentally ill prisoner by prison staff seven years ago — also at the prison in Newtown.

In a recent newspaper essay, Ward wrote of the prisoner: 

“As he awaited placement in round-the-clock observation, officers escorted him for a strip search, forcing him to bend over while naked on a cell bed, per Correction Department policy. Almost immediately a struggle erupted. 

“Officers pulled a spit mask over his face, struck him repeatedly, and sprayed him with chemical agents while the mask remained on. Pinned, he was injected with a combination of medications. When officers later tried to move him, he couldn’t walk. He was wheeled to another cell. By the time medical staff checked him, he was unresponsive.  

“Connecticut’s chief medical examiner ruled Jones’ death a homicide: ‘sudden death during struggle and restraint with chest compression.’ The autopsy documented a liver contusion; contusions and abrasions to the head, torso, and extremities; and internal bleeding along the back, sides, and shoulders caused by chest compression. Yet no one was charged with a crime, and some of the officers remain on the state’s payroll.”

The ombudsman blames state Attorney General William Tong for the withholding of the video. But Tong is just representing his client, the Correction Department, which doesn’t want the public to see what’s going on.

The ombudsman’s complaint should be directed to Governor Lamont, who appoints the correction and state police commissioners. The governor needs to understand that there is a chronic problem here and that he should do something about it. 

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

Medicaid fraud, cuffed kids, and arrests in courthouses

By CHRIS POWELL

When the Republican national budget and tax legislation was enacted in July, Democratic officials in Connecticut screamed that it would destroy Medicare and Medicaid, that Republican claims of waste and fraud in those programs were exaggerated, and that there is too little waste and fraud in those programs to worry about.

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But a few months earlier Governor Lamont’s public health and social services commissioner retired after it was disclosed that she had countenanced the termination of an audit of Medicaid fraud in a case in which the governor’s former deputy budget director and a former Democratic state representative have been indicted and a Bristol doctor has pleaded guilty.

Just hours before the budget and tax legislation was enacted, state prosecutors charged an acupuncturist from Milford with defrauding Medicaid of $123,000.

And a few days ago the owners of a medical laboratory in Branford who were being federally prosecuted agreed to pay $1.2 million to settle Medicaid and Medicare fraud charges.

Necessary as Medicare and Medicaid are, as third-party payment systems they are structured to relieve beneficiaries of any incentive to check the charges incurred on their behalf. Such systems invite fraud and always can use more auditing, especially since the federal government’s deficit is out of control and is severely eroding the value of the dollar and thereby reducing the country’s living standards.

Elected officials who care about people who need government’s help should be clamoring for more serious auditing of all expensive government programs to ensure that the money is well spent. The Democrats’ reflexive defense of the status quo of spending actually hurts the poor.

HANDCUFFS AREN’T THE PROBLEM: Last month elected officials and representatives of the social-services industry joined Governor Lamont at the headquarters of a youth services organization in Norwalk to celebrate his signing of a law restricting the use of handcuffs by police on children under 14.

The law doesn’t entirely forbid handcuffing children; they can still be handcuffed if they are violent or threatening violence or being conveyed to or from confinement. 

Just how violent or disorderly do children have to be before police can properly handcuff them? Good luck to police officers in making this judgment and avoiding lawsuits.

Of course police officers are sometimes overbearing even as they are far more sinned against than sinning. The body cameras they increasingly wear and the dashboard cameras that are increasingly placed in their cruisers will help restrain them.

But the problem signified by the new law is not a problem of police misconduct, and the new law against handcuffing children is nothing to celebrate.

The problem is the worsening of juvenile misconduct and the growing number of children who don’t know how to behave, one of the many problems that correlate with inadequate parenting. With the handcuffing law state government has decided, in essential Connecticut style, to try to address the symptom of a problem in the hope that no one will note that state government doesn’t dare to investigate the problem’s causes.

LAW APPLIES IN COURTHOUSES TOO: Federal immigration agents caused a shocking scene the other day as they raided the state courthouse in Stamford and arrested two men who briefly barricaded themselves in a bathroom. The arrests appalled people who don’t believe that immigration law should be enforced, especially not in a courthouse, though people are routinely detained in courthouses on other charges.

The incident was also shocking to some because federal policy used to avoid arrests in courthouses, but the Trump administration has changed it, realizing that the law applies in courthouses too and that courthouses are good places for apprehending immigration law violators. 

Former state Rep. David Michel, D-Stamford, who documents immigration arrests, lamented, “It feels like we’re in a state of lawlessness. When I document this, I feel like I’m in another country.”

But the lawlessness is the illegal immigration, not arrests for it, and if immigration law is not enforced and all immigrants are not vetted normally, the United States soon may become another country. 

——

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

New Haven understands ‘sanctuary’ while Tong and Lamont pretend not to

By CHRIS POWELL

What are “sanctuary states” and “sanctuary cities”? 

Connecticut Attorney General William Tong and Governor Lamont last week claimed not to know and to have no idea why the Trump administration has labeled Connecticut a “sanctuary state.”

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“There is nothing in our laws or statutes that says Connecticut is a ‘sanctuary’ state,” Tong says. “We are not.”

The governor says: “I am focused on making sure people feel safe in our schools, churches, and elsewhere. Nothing about this makes Connecticut a ‘sanctuary’ in any legal or practical sense.”

But the U.S. Homeland Security Department provides a clear definition: “Sanctuary” jurisdictions have “policies, laws, or regulations that impede enforcement of federal immigration laws.” 

That’s Connecticut. 

The state’s “Trust Act” explicitly forbids police agencies from cooperating with federal immigration authorities in most circumstances. It doesn’t matter that the “Trust Act” doesn’t use the term “sanctuary.” “Sanctuary” means “a place of refuge or protection,” which is what the “Trust Act” makes Connecticut for illegal immigrants.

The attorney general and the governor play their word game in the hope of not provoking the Trump administration, which, unlike its predecessor, is enforcing immigration law. But the game not only fails to avoid provocation; it also falsely suggests that the attorney general and the governor don’t know they are attempting nullification of federal law just as the segregationist states of the last century tried to do.

New Haven city government is just as nullificationist but it wasn’t playing the word game last week. An announcement from Mayor Justin Elicker was headlined: “Mayor Elicker applauds growing nationwide coalition of local governments challenging the Trump administration’s attempt to defund welcoming and sanctuary jurisdictions. …”

The announcement added: “Sanctuary policies make us all safer and ensure communities are welcoming places for everyone.” That is, “welcoming” even for people in the country illegally and even for people of bad intent. 

The attorney general and the governor note that no federal law requires police in Connecticut to cooperate with federal immigration authorities. But this refusal to cooperate very much impedes immigration law enforcement — the point of the “Trust Act.” 

State government and New Haven city government impede immigration law enforcement far more directly by issuing identification documents to illegal immigrants precisely to facilitate their violation of immigration law — state government by issuing special driver’s licenses to them, New Haven by giving them city identification cards. These identification documents make the state and the city direct and knowing accomplices in illegal immigration.

Pretending that the state is not providing “sanctuary” when it obviously is doing just that, the governor and attorney general take their constituents for fools. New Haven’s policy is the same and just as bad as the state’s but, unlike the attorney general and the governor, at least Mayor Elicker is honest about it.

FORBID ANONYMOUS LAWSUITS: In recent years Connecticut’s Judicial Department has transformed from the least transparent to the most transparent of the state’s three branches of government. But a civil lawsuit from Kent could push the department back to the old ways.

Former students and employees of the Kent School are suing the school in Superior Court for damages arising from what is said to have been a former school employee’s copying intimate photographs and other information about them from the school’s computer system. Three plaintiffs have asked the court to let them sue anonymously, using pseudonyms, to avoid embarrassment.

Judge Daniel Klau has denied the request, holding that the public interest in open courts outweighs the privacy interests of the plaintiffs, but the pseudonym issue has been taken to the Appellate Court.

Merely identifying the plaintiffs as is ordinarily done in lawsuits won’t make any intimate photos public, but concealing their identities will set an awful precedent. After all, many plaintiffs might prefer to sue anonymously. In effect that would close the courts to the public, since anonymity precludes accountability. 

Connecticut’s Constitution commands, “All courts shall be open.” If it has forgotten, the Appellate Court should look it up.

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

Will Gov. Lamont allow escape from unpublic education?

By CHRIS POWELL

How much more of a servant of the government employee unions does Governor Lamont want to be?

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Connecticut will find out when the governor decides what to do about the new federal legislation that offers people a dollar-for-dollar tax credit of as much as $1,700 for making contributions to organizations that provide scholarships at private elementary, middle, and high schools.

It’s very clever school-choice legislation. It doesn’t cost state or municipal government any money. It doesn’t take any money from what style themselves public schools. To the contrary, it could save public schools money by removing some of their students.

Of course it’s more federal deficit spending, but nobody associated with public education has ever cared about federal budget deficits or the terrible inflation they have caused. When it receives the money, the public education colossus loves federal deficit spending.  

The only undeniable objection to the law is that it would engender more competition, especially for Connecticut’s many failing city public schools, and pressure state government to do something about them besides throw money at them without result.

Of course in the long run choice and competition in lower education would diminish enrollment, public support, and funding for government schools. But why shouldn’t those schools and the parents of their students start to be judged by educational results and face some accountability?

The big problem with public education in Connecticut is that it’s no longer public at all.

Wages and working conditions for school employees aren’t controlled by ordinary democracy — the election of school board members — but by binding arbitration of union contracts, under which unions have more authority than school boards do. Except for superintendents, nearly all school employees — even school principals — are unionized, so a school system has no actual management.

Connecticut’s minimum budget requirement law makes it nearly impossible for school boards to reduce spending even if enrollment declines.

Connecticut’s teacher tenure law makes it nearly impossible to dismiss poor teachers without prohibitive expense.

Connecticut freedom-of-information law exempts teacher evaluations from disclosure, alone among all government employee evaluations. People in Connecticut can see the evaluations of their trash collectors but not those of the teachers of their own children.

And now, as the Yankee Institute’s Meghan Portfolio disclosed the other day, a new state law requires municipal governments to report any year-end cash surpluses directly to their teacher unions but not to their own residents. The law’s objective is to ensure that the teacher unions get first grab at any extra money that might be lying around. 

This isn’t public education. It’s special-interest education.

A system of private education drawing its revenue from federal tax credits would be more accountable simply by providing an alternative to the system operated by and for the benefit of the teacher unions.

But under the new federal law, the scholarship contributions on which such a system would be based can’t qualify for federal tax credits unless a state’s governor approves the system or it is approved by some other state agency with authority over tax breaks. 

It’s not clear what such other state agency that would be in Connecticut, but whatever it was, it still would be controlled by the governor, a Democrat, or by the General Assembly, which has a big Democratic majority. Of course the government employee unions, especially the teacher unions, are the biggest components of the Democratic Party, and most of state government is a big kickback to the unions for their support of the Democrats at election time.

Government employee union support for the Democratic regime erases all concern for results in “public” education in the state. As a result most high school graduates never master high school math and English, the state’s schools have horrible racial performance gaps, and social promotion assures the graduation of illiterates, and school spending increases even as student performance and enrollment decline. 

For student performance doesn’t count politically. The only thing that counts politically is the satisfaction of the teacher unions and their control of the majority party.

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

Poverty racket and kickbacks disgrace state government

By CHRIS POWELL

Under investigation by a federal grand jury for having steered millions of dollars of state government anti-poverty grants to enterprises controlled by a friend, state Sen. Douglas McCrory, D-Bloomfield, insists, “I did nothing illegal.”

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Most people may not believe him, but McCrory is probably telling the truth. For steering money and other goodies to its favorites — patronage — is what state government does ordinarily. Sometimes those who steer the money and goodies get kickbacks, and if those kickbacks are paid in cash or negotiable instruments, they may constitute bribery. But if the kickbacks take the form of political support, campaign contributions, or personal favors, or if they can’t be tracked clearly to the recipients of the patronage, they are routine.

Don’t like it? Well, McCrory did not say he had done nothing wrong. He said he had done nothing illegal.  

Since, in an interview with Connecticut’s Hearst newspapers, McCrory acknowledged widespread suspicion that he has been romantically involved with the woman to whom he steered those state grants and then said he would not discuss his personal life, his friend may make a career from poverty. Poverty is big business. 

Connecticut’s Social Equity Council, which distributes state marijuana tax revenue as patronage grants in communities where drugs were a big problem, is the embodiment of the poverty business, formalized by government and prettily disguised by its name.

The late editor of The Washington Monthly, Charles Peters — a liberal back when liberalism was idealistic and unselfish, before it was a business — saw enough of this stuff to draw a maxim from it. The big scandal, Peters discerned, is never what is illegal but what is perfectly legal.     

McCrory should be too smart to have ever taken cash for exploiting his office. But he may need luck if he doesn’t plead the Fifth Amendment and instead tries telling the grand jury what he told the Hearst papers: that he won’t discuss his personal life and his connection to the woman to whom he steered the grants.

Thanks to the work of the Yankee Institute’s Meghan Portfolio, it seems that the corruption of state government goes far beyond the poverty racket.

Two weeks ago Portfolio exposed the fraud of state government’s “Passport to Parks” program, in which, starting in 2018, a $24 surcharge was imposed on every three-year motor vehicle registration. The fee was pledged to finance improvements at state parks and to convey free parking there for Connecticut vehicles.

But now, Portfolio writes, most of the $27 million a year produced by the fee isn’t used for the parks. Instead nearly 60% is spent on state employee pensions and benefits. 

Of course most people don’t use the state parks much and would have preferred to pay for admission and parking at the point of use rather than to have to pay so much when registering their cars. The program was actually a racket to begin with, also prettily dressed up.

Last week Portfolio disclosed that the new state law establishing a trust fund for “early childhood education” has an obscure provision to help teacher unions get more municipal money. 

The provision requires school boards to produce an annual report on any money left over from previous budgets. But the objective is not transparency. 

Portfolio writes: “The law doesn’t direct these reports to parents, taxpayers, or even locally elected finance boards. Instead the reports must go directly to the state Department of Education — and to the unions. That means union negotiators and state officials get advance access to a district’s financial reserves — a significant advantage when labor contracts come up for negotiation. Local voters, by contrast, get no such direct insight unless they file freedom-of-information requests or search through meeting minutes.”

As always the teacher unions come first, taxpayers last.

The obscure provision was the product of the General Assembly’s Democratic majority, the longstanding tool of the unions, and the usual kickback will be union support for the Democrats in the next legislative election.

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

Why can’t journalism pose key immigration questions?

Connecticut’s television stations seem to prohibit their reporters from asking critical questions even amid brazen provocations.

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Nothing else well explains how a TV news reporter covered another protest against immigration law enforcement last week, this one at City Hall in New Britain. 

No protesters denied that most of the people recently apprehended and detained by federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents in Connecticut were in the country illegally. Instead all the talk at the protest was about how unfair it is for illegal immigrants to have to obey the law. 

So should there be no immigration law?

No one quoted by the TV reporter was asked — and yet for viewers watching closely, video showed the story the reporter was failing to pursue.

Signs and banners carried by the protesters read “No borders, no cages, no ICE, no more deportation” and “Abolish ICE, no detention, no deportation.”

Protesters carried a Palestine flag and chanted “free, free Palestine.” What exactly did Palestine have to do with immigration law enforcement? Did the protesters want the people who are trying to annihilate Israel to be freely admitted to the United States so they can bring their theocratic fascism to bear against Jews and infidels here? Are all today’s protesters in the United States part of a cult aiming to bring the country down? For to open the borders and have no immigration law enforcement again, as under the previous national administration, would be to erase the country.

The TV reporter didn’t ask the protesters. She just gave them a lot of free airtime to propagandize about their idea of justice without having to defend it.

Not that print journalism does much better. Connecticut’s original “sanctuary city,” New Haven, keeps getting away with anything that supports illegal immigration. 

Last week the Connecticut Public news organization celebrated the Elm City Resident Card, issued by city government, as “a symbol of inclusion” even though it was created in 2007 precisely to hinder immigration law enforcement — to provide illegal immigrants with a document implying legality and helping them get housing and bank accounts.

New Haven city government and especially its school system are under great financial strain because of the hundreds and perhaps thousands of illegal immigrant children attending city schools and needing extra services, like tutoring in English and remedial education generally. Being short of money, the city just closed a school and eliminated staff positions.

But the financial consequences of illegal immigration to New Haven city government and state government have yet to be investigated journalistically, though state financial aid to New Haven is, like state Medicaid benefits, part of state government’s blank check for illegal immigration. New Haven could save millions of dollars by not being a “sanctuary city” just as state government could save tens of millions by not being a “sanctuary state.”

New Haven Mayor Justin Elicker boasts about the housing construction his administration has been facilitating. He wants the city to gain 10,000 more housing units over the next 10 years and to increase its population by 14,000 to exceed 150,000 and thus become the state’s largest city.

Of course Connecticut badly needs more housing. But for whom is New Haven building housing — for legal residents or more illegal immigrants? Mayor Elicker has not been asked journalistically.

Housing construction in New Haven would do little to relieve the state’s shortage if it was filled by more people needing Elm City Resident Cards. Indeed, Connecticut’s housing shortage and the state’s high housing prices result in part from illegal immigration, for which state and municipal government have made no provision.

The problem here isn’t that all immigrants are bad or even that all illegal immigrants are bad. The problem here is that there are serious costs to subverting immigration law as Connecticut and New Haven do, that the sanctimony that excuses illegal immigration doesn’t address those costs, and that they won’t be addressed as long as journalism keeps failing to pose critical questions.

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