Utility regulator, caught lying, blames her adversaries

By CHRIS POWELL

Just hours after she was caught lying to state legislators, the chairwoman of Connecticut’s Public Utilities Regulatory Authority, Marissa P. Gillett, resigned last week, blaming her vindicated critics for making her life harder than she could bear.

Overimpressed by college, Democrats get arrogant

Senator Winfield and other Democrats want open borders again

Charlie Kirk’s murder shows where cancel culture leads

For weeks Gillett and her office had been denying that other members of the authority had been instructed by e-mail to avoid contacting authority staff directly to get information about the authority’s work. Gillett and her office insisted that extensive searches had found no evidence of the e-mail, though witnesses insisted such e-mail had been sent. 

The underlying suspicion was that the chairwoman had commandeered the authority and was trying to freeze out its other members. 

With questions and doubts intensifying, especially among members of the Republican minority in the General Assembly, and with lawsuits by the utility companies progressing, increasing the chance that any concealment would be undone, last Wednesday the authority announced that it had found the disputed e-mail after all and it indeed had come from Gillett’s chief of staff. 

So on Friday Gillett resigned, presumably hoping to foreclose the investigation of her lying that the legislature might have been obliged to undertake if it had any self-respect.

Gillett and the authority long have been feuding with Connecticut’s two major electric utilities, Eversource and United Illuminating, over their rates and performance. The companies didn’t like the greater scrutiny they were getting under Gillett’s regime. 

But then the companies long have been scapegoated for state government’s own deceitful inflation of Connecticut’s electricity prices, which are nearly the highest in the country in part because state government, through the regulatory authority, was stuffing electric bills with hidden taxes, now infamous as “public benefits charges.”

The deceitfulness of the “public benefits charges” has always impugned utility regulation, especially since regulation’s pose of seeking efficiency from the electric companies contrasts so laughably with state government’s extravagance, negligence, and indifference with its own operations.

Who has been more justified in the feud between the regulatory agency and the companies? Maybe a more honest and collegial agency under a new leader can regain credibility and find out.

In her letter of resignation to Governor Lamont, Gillett wrote that her conflict with the electric companies was distracting from the regulatory authority’s work “and has exacted a real emotional toll both for me personally, as well as my family, and for my team. … There is only so much that one individual can reasonably endure, or ask of their family, while doing their best to serve our state.”

But the electric companies didn’t make Gillett lie, and if she hadn’t been caught lying, she would have continued to build her empire and wouldn’t have resigned so fast.

MAYORS CAN’T STOP CRIME: Having become a one-party city — Democratic, of course — New Haven is fortunate to have a vigorous Republican challenger to Mayor Justin Elicker in this year’s election: Steve Orosco. 

It’s Orosco’s job to find fault with Elicker’s administration, and the other day he did so by raising the issue of crime in the city. “Pain and fear remain on every block,” Orosco said.

But violent crime in New Haven, as in Connecticut’s other impoverished cities, goes up and down, sometimes with the weather, and its level in New Haven this year isn’t so different from the average. Further, no mayor of New Haven or other impoverished city in the state could affect crime very much without something like President Trump’s placing an armed National Guard soldier on every corner, as he did in Washington, D.C. Connecticut’s policy isn’t to reduce crime as much as to confine it to the cities.

Urban crime is a matter of demographics created by long-failing state and national policies that have turned cities into poverty factories. No city mayor can bring the fathers home to help raise the children they abandoned. The most a mayor can do is try to restrain the looting done by the government employee unions, and politically the unions are more fearsome than the criminals.

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

Overimpressed by college, Democrats get arrogant

By CHRIS POWELL

Surely state Rep. Eleni Kavros DeGraw, D-Avon, doesn’t represent the entirety of Connecticut’s Democratic Party. But she is evidence of the party’s transition from the party of the working class to the party of the arrogant elites.

Senator Winfield and other Democrats want open borders again

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Remote work in state government isn’t best for the public

Kavros DeGraw revealed herself last month with comments at a meeting of a General Assembly committee studying relief for college student debt. The Yankee Institute’s Meghan Portfolio reports that Kavros DeGraw said “the most important thing is to go to college … to have long-term earning power and to be able to start building generational wealth and to succeed.”

Kavros DeGraw added: “If folks aren’t going to college and getting the jobs that college educations fill, what jobs are they ending up in? They’re ending up in jobs that do not pay them enough. And then they do become, quote, unquote, a burden on everyone else because of the services they might need.”

That’s not only a mistaken view of the lives of people without college degrees, many of whom make good livings and do jobs vital to society, but also a mistaken view of the lives of people with college degrees, many of whom are in debt and stuck in dead-end jobs after earning degrees of little financial value while many others make great incomes doing little good for society.

The higher education that so impresses Kavros DeGraw is full of such ironies. 

The new president of the community colleges in Manchester, Enfield, and Middletown touts his degree in “LGBT studies,” which may get his political correctness ticket punched but won’t help him convey much useful learning to students.

Meanwhile the former chancellor of the Connecticut Colleges and Universities System, Terrence Cheng, now a “strategic adviser” to the system’s Board of Regents, which pushed him out of the chancellorship because of an expense account scandal, is even more of a “burden on everyone else,” since he is being paid just as much for doing nothing much. Cheng has degrees in English and, not so ironically, fiction. 

The Cheng scandal has been continuing for more than a year but Kavros DeGraw seems to have said nothing about that burden on society.

Indeed, many pompous higher-ed types strut around calling each other “Doctor” but to replace a lightbulb they have to call someone who knows how to use a ladder.

The problem with college student debt, as state Rep. Tammy Nuccio, R-Tolland, explained to the study committee, is simply that college is overpriced. It costs more than it’s worth. 

This doesn’t mean that college degrees are worthless, nor that all college courses should facilitate entry to lucrative careers. College should not only teach work skills but also broaden appreciation of life in all respects. 

But the bigger education problem in Connecticut and throughout the country is lower education. Standards in lower education have been eliminated. Half of high school graduates never master what used to be considered high school work, and they enter adulthood qualified only for menial jobs. The drag on society is not the lack of college education but the lack of primary education, and unfortunately it’s too terrifying for elected officials like Kavros DeGraw to acknowledge, so it will get worse.

WAR, NOT DEFENSE: President Trump, who claimed a dubious medical exemption — bone spurs — to escape the military draft during the Vietnam War, wants to look tough and to make the country look tougher. Hence his plan to return the Defense Department to its original name, the War Department. Again he is right for the wrong reasons.

The country doesn’t need more military toughness as much as it needs more military smarts. Its most recent wars — Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan — weren’t defense. They were stupid imperial adventures. The country would have been far better off without them.  

The same goes for “defense” contractors. They’re really military contractors, including Connecticut’s home team — Pratt & Whitney, Electric Boat, and Sikorsky Aircraft. Journalism should stop playing along with the charade.

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

Senator Winfield and other Democrats want open borders again

By CHRIS POWELL

In a recent newspaper essay, state Sen. Gary Winfield, D-New Haven, laid out clearly the position of most Democratic officials in Connecticut on illegal immigration.

Charlie Kirk’s murder shows where cancel culture leads

Remote work in state government isn’t best for the public

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It’s that while illegal immigrants who are caught committing serious crimes should be deported, all illegal immigrants who have not been caught committing serious crimes should be exempt from immigration law. Simple violation of immigration law should be ignored, Winfield wrote, because for every illegal immigrant being caught, detained, and deported for serious crimes under the Trump administration, “there are 15 car wash employees, landscapers, dishwashers, construction workers, and high school students” also being caught, detained, and deported.

It must be hoped that Winfield and the Democrats haven’t thought this through. It would be scary if they have thought it through.

For the policy advocated by Winfield and the Democrats would reopen the invitation given to the world by the Biden administration’s open-borders policy. 

The Winfield policy would be a proclamation that anyone can enter the United States at any time and come to Connecticut and stay until he is caught committing a serious crime — that there is no need to examine anyone entering the country illegally, no need to review any entrant’s character, intentions, and risk of becoming a public charge.

This policy also would be a proclamation that Connecticut thinks it can afford an unlimited number of illegal and unvetted immigrants, even though many illegal immigrants have become public charges in one way or another, especially in regard to children who don’t speak English and need extensive remedial education, and even though the state has a desperate shortage of housing for its legal residents and isn’t hurrying to build much more.

President Trump has said reckless, stupid, and hateful things regarding the immigration problem. But that’s no excuse for someone else’s bad policy.

Everyone who enters the United States illegally and is allowed to stay as if the law doesn’t apply to him is an incentive for others to enter illegally, and while most illegal immigrants may have good intentions and behave well, many do not, including many who have come to Connecticut. Just last week a man charged with the sexual assault of a jogger in New Haven was identified as an illegal immigrant from Guatemala who already had been deported twice. He is three times an illegal immigrant.

Millions of inoffensive illegal immigrants don’t justify even one criminal illegal immigrant, and there are thousands of them.

Winfield wrote that he favors a “path to citizenship” for illegal immigrants. But the United States has nearly the most liberal immigration policy in the world and already offers such a path. It begins with legal and properly vetted entry to the country.

Of course none of this matters if Winfield and the Democrats make excuses for open borders because most illegal immigrants concentrate in Democratic urban areas and lead to the creation of more safely Democratic congressional districts at the expense of politically competitive and Republican districts. 

In that case Winfield and the Democrats have thought their policy through and it’s not really humane at all. It’s a political racket.

NOT A NATIONAL HERO: Charlie Kirk was a brave advocate of free speech and conservative policies who sought to engage honestly with his adversaries, many of whom are disgraceful perpetrators of cancel culture.

But Kirk, founder of Turning Point USA, never held public office and, being a political partisan, was not a national hero at the time of his murder. President Trump’s ordering the national flag to be flown at half staff to honor Kirk was a partisan gesture, accompanied by the president’s denunciation of his adversaries on the political left.

Brave as Kirk was, millions did not think well of him. Indeed, many people are even celebrating Kirk’s murder.

This political division is why the flag should not have been lowered for Kirk — and now this lowering may be taken as precedent by a future administration for bestowing honors on some mere partisan on the political left.      

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

Charlie Kirk’s murder shows where cancel culture leads

By CHRIS POWELL

Over the last century in the United States what has become known as cancel culture has moved from the political right to the political left.

The Red scares of the 1920s and 1950s were a conservative phenomenon that blacklisted, deported, and even imprisoned people for real or suspected leftist political views that were equated, often wrongly, with treason and disloyalty.

Remote work in state government isn’t best for the public

Don’t turn state pension money into a political slush fund

Connecticut Democrats divert more public money to patronage

Today cancel culture is a leftist phenomenon that contrives no pretense about treason and disloyalty. It seeks to silence conservatives simply because they are politically objectionable. Whoever last week assassinated Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk, the conservative advocate of free speech and sincere dialogue with the other side, was the exemplar of cancel culture, illuminating where it will take the country.

Being allied with cancel culture, most Democratic officials don’t want to examine the Kirk assassination too closely. Democrats, including Connecticut’s U.S. Sen. Chris Murphy and U.S. Reps. John B. Larson and Jahana Hayes, seem to prefer to attribute the assassination to the country’s gun problem, so as to put Republicans, defenders of Second Amendment rights, on the defensive. During an angry confrontation on the floor of the House of Representatives last week, Hayes objected to a call for prayers for Kirk and his family, shrieking, “Pass some gun laws!”

There may be room for more gun laws on the federal level, but the assassination of Kirk is not an argument for them. Kirk appears to have been killed by an ordinary bolt-action hunting rifle, not the sort of semi-automatic rifles Democrats delight in mislabeling as “assault weapons” as they seek to outlaw them. Is the country now to outlaw even rudimentary rifles while nearly all gun crime is committed with handguns?

Connecticut’s gun laws already are nearly the most restrictive in the country and the state’s problem is not that it lacks laws but enforcement. Two years ago the state Office of Legislative Research reported that nearly two-thirds of criminal charges involving guns in Connecticut were routinely dropped in plea bargaining to get convictions on related charges considered more serious, like robbery.

If Connecticut ever took gun crime seriously it would make the gun charges the most serious and upon conviction impose mandatory sentences of life without parole. But then most new imprisonments would involve impoverished members of racial minorities, and legislators might be asked where all the poverty keeps coming from despite all the money they spend in the name of reducing it.

While from the beginning American political rhetoric often has been venomous, it never has been as venomous as it is today.

President Trump is a major perpetrator of it but he is far outnumbered by its perpetrators among the Democratic Party’s looney left in government and academia, and at least Trump hasn’t turned his office into an agency of cancel culture. His many firings of executive branch Democrats are matters of political patronage, explained by the great insight of Kentucky Sen. Alben Barkley, a Democrat, during the 1948 presidential campaign: “What is a ‘bureaucrat’? A ‘bureaucrat’ is a Democrat who holds an office some Republican wants.”

What can stop cancel culture from getting even more murderous and totalitarian? Only a return to what Judge Learned Hand called the spirit of liberty:

“The spirit of liberty is the spirit which is not too sure it is right. The spirit of liberty is the spirit which seeks to understand the minds of other men and women. The spirit of liberty is the spirit which weighs their interests alongside its own without bias. The spirit of liberty remembers that not even a sparrow falls to earth unheeded. The spirit of liberty is the spirit of Him who, near 2,000 years ago, taught mankind the lesson it has never learned but never quite forgotten: that there may be a kingdom where the least shall be heard and considered side by side with the greatest.”

Charlie Kirk pursued the spirit of liberty. May others still dare to follow him.

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

Remote work in state government isn’t best for the public

By CHRIS POWELL

Working remotely by computer, internet, and telephone can make people more productive, sparing them the burden of commuting and the social distractions of the office.

But working remotely can reduce productivity as well. It exposes workers to the distractions of home life, encourages them to slack off, since no supervisors or colleagues are watching them, and forecloses insights gained when work is done collegially.

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Connecticut Democrats divert more public money to patronage

Yale has become too big for its property tax break

Striking the right balance between in-person and remote work is a matter of management, which is why remote work is almost certainly a disadvantage in Connecticut state government, state government having precious little management, with nearly all its nominal managers being unionized and with their union contracts and the state Board of Mediation and Arbitration making dismissals virtually impossible.

A recent report from Connecticut’s Hearst newspapers examined remote work in state government, and some of its findings were disturbing. 

At least 248 state employees are allowed to work full-time from out of state, which indicates that their basic loyalty is not to Connecticut, their employer. Are all these out-of-state employees really so uniquely skilled that their work couldn’t be done well by someone living among the people he is supposed to be serving and his colleagues in his agency? 

Another 11,500 state employees are allowed to work in large part from home. Even if they seem productive to their supervisors, their supervisors may not have much idea of whether they could be more productive, because the supervisors cannot always see how long the work actually takes.

A spokesman for Governor Lamont explains: “Ultimately managers are given discretion to allow employees to telework at a level that makes business sense for their agency, and, above all else, they ensure work is thorough and completed.” 

At least that’s what managers are supposed to do. Do they really do it? A commissioner can hardly check on how well his manager is supervising an employee when neither the commissioner nor the manager can see the employee on the job.

Of course state employees love working remotely. When legislation to reduce telework was proposed in the General Assembly this year, 500 state employees opposed it. Did they oppose it more because they think telework is in state government’s interest or more because they think it’s in their own interest? Do all state government employees place their employer’s interest above their own?

A few days after the Hearst Connecticut report was published, WFSB-TV3 in Hartford called attention to what may be the state government’s most interesting example of remote work. The station reported that Terrence Cheng, the disgraced former chancellor of the Connecticut State Colleges and Universities System, having been removed from that job by the Board of Regents and appointed “strategic adviser” to the board at the same salary and benefits, nearly $500,000, for the year remaining on his contract, seems not to have attended any board meetings since becoming its “strategic adviser.”

Even when Cheng was chancellor the board allowed him to live in New York. He still does.

What exactly is Cheng doing? A spokesman for the board said it’s research.

Of course the regents aren’t supervising Cheng now any more than they did when he was abusing his expense account and giving big raises to crony administrators. His new job is really just cover for fat severance pay, the regents having lacked the courage to fire him outright. But this is still an example of how state government management isn’t conscientious. 

So it’s a good bet that state government should be a lot more selective with remote work. But it’s unlikely to do so while the majority political party is controlled by the government employee unions.

It’s also a good bet that the employees of state government’s hospital for the criminally insane, Whiting Forensic, and employees of the state prisons wish they could work remotely. Many have been injured on the job lately for lack of adequate muscle in the wards and cellblocks, another problem the governor and legislators ignore.

——

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

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Don’t turn state pension money into a political slush fund

By CHRIS POWELL

Despite some recent improvement, Connecticut’s state employee and teacher pension accounts are still underfunded by billions of dollars. Yet Governor Lamont wants to start using them as political slush funds.

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The governor’s idea is to have the pension funds buy a stake in the Mohegan tribe’s Connecticut Sun women’s basketball team in the Women’s National Basketball Association as a means of gaining leverage to keep the team in Connecticut, and then moving the team from the Mohegan reservation in Montville to Hartford. The tribe is deep in debt and wants to sell the team to an investor group that would move it to Boston, giving the tribe a capital gain of more than $300 million. But the league apparently disapproves and wants to move the team to Houston instead.

Thanks to decades of heroic work at the University of Connecticut, women’s basketball is extremely popular in Connecticut. The Sun has a strong fan base in the eastern part of the state but nothing like the UConn team’s fan base throughout the whole state. Putting the Sun in Hartford and having it play at the People’s Bank Arena — where the UConn women play more games than they play at Gampel Pavilion on campus, since the Hartford arena has 60% more seats — would pose financial risks to both teams, making them direct competitors. 

The Sun’s value in a sale probably would diminish substantially if the team was headed for a small market like Hartford. Besides, the Mohegan tribe wouldn’t be offering the team for sale if its financial prospects would be greater in Hartford, since the tribe could afford to move the team to Hartford itself.

Investment involves risk, but the risk in state government’s investing in a WNBA team to facilitate its move to Hartford is far greater than the risk of many investments, and state government’s pension funds are in huge deficit relative to their obligations. Until the funds are in comfortable surplus, they should be investing only for investment profitability and security, not the politics of pleasing certain sports fans.

If it wants to buy a stake in the Sun, state government should do it with regular money, like the wonderful “budget surplus” state government pretends to have, though the surplus is really just money that has been produced only by the decades-long cheating on the pension funds. 

If they decide to buy a stake in a basketball team when Connecticut already has two state-owned basketball teams with national standing, the governor and state legislators should take clear responsibility, explaining why the state needs part ownership of a third team more than it needs, for example, better medical care for the poor, adequate “special education” for troubled children, and more housing.

Whether they make it explicit or not, the governor and legislators will also be proclaiming a terrible precedent — that the pension funds are now political slush funds.

INSURRECTIONIST DEMOCRATS: The people who keep claiming that Connecticut is not a “sanctuary state” and is not obstructing enforcement of federal immigration law now want to block federal immigration agents from making arrests in state courthouses.

The request was directed last week to state Chief Justice Raheem Mullins by state Senate President Pro Tem Martin Looney, Senate Majority Leader Bob Duff, and 19 other Democratic senators.

How exactly would the chief justice block the federal agents? Would he instruct judicial marshals to tackle them at the metal detectors and shoot them if they get through? Would he try to get a federal court order to exclude the agents? 

It’s not clear. The Democratic senators just want him to do something — something the senators themselves have failed to do: enact legislation barring federal agents from state courthouses.

Since federal law is superior to state law, a state law blocking federal agents from state courthouses would be brazenly unconstitutional nullification. Essentially the Democratic senators have told the chief justice: “Let’s you and them fight.” But at least the senators now have come into the open as insurrectionists.

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

By raising minimum wage, Connecticut admits failure

By CHRIS POWELL

Governor Lamont, Lt. Gov. Susan Bysiewicz, and state Labor Commissioner Dante Bartolomeo last week announced gleefully that Connecticut’s minimum wage will increase on Jan. 1 by 3.6%, from $16.35 to $16.94 per hour, being tied by state law to the federal employment cost index. The justifications they offered were not persuasive. Indeed, they were based on false premises.

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“Nobody who works full-time should have to live in poverty,” the governor said, as if working full-time necessarily has some connection to the monetary value of the work. All honest work may be honorable, but menial work — work that can be done by anyone — is not worth $16.94 per hour if someone can be found to do it for less. The minimum wage is government’s idea of what menial work should be worth in an ideal world, an aspiration — well-meaning in some cases, perhaps, but mostly just government’s striking a pose about its own goodness.

The governor’s statement about not living in poverty is just liberal blather, especially in Connecticut, as the governor should know well. That $16.94 per hour is $654 per week, even as social-work and economic research groups long have calculated that to live decently in Connecticut a single person needs an income of at least three times as much. 

The governor’s economic principle about the minimum wage is no more meaningful than everyone else’s principle that it shouldn’t rain on weekends.

Despite the minimum wage increase, tens of thousands of people in Connecticut will keep working for pay well above minimum wage while still living in or on the edge of poverty. Part of it will be their own fault, their living beyond their means, and part of it the government’s. 

Lt. Gov. Bysiewicz did no better. “The minimum wage,” she said, “was established to provide a fair, livable baseline of income for those who work.” The lieutenant governor’s pay, about $190,000 a year, is 5½ times more than Connecticut’s new full-time minimum wage salary, $34,000. If she ever did the numbers seriously, how fair and livable would minimum wage sound to her?

Bysiewicz added, “This is a fair, gradual increase for workers that ensures that as the economy grows, our minimum wage grows with it — and that’s good for everyone.”

Except that the economy really isn’t growing much at all. What’s growing is mainly inflation, the devaluation of the money workers earn.

At least Commissioner Bartolomeo approached this point. Raising the minimum wage, she said, “helps protect the most vulnerable earners from inflation and cost increases, and helps keep wage gaps from widening.”

Hardly. Inflation long has been underreported by the federal government, with price criteria frequently revised in the hope that people wouldn’t believe the evidence of their own lives, the decline in their standard of living. Most of those voting in the last election seem to have stopped believing official inflation data. And even liberals in Connecticut acknowledge that the wage gap keeps widening.

The minimum wage was never meant to be fully supportive for a single person. It functioned as a standard of entry-level pay for the unskilled, especially teenagers, so people wouldn’t be too demoralized by their first jobs and would strive to gain skills and advance. 

Today in Connecticut the need for a minimum wage increase is mainly political — to camouflage the declining skill level of much of the workforce, the fatherless urban underclass — the increasing numbers of young people who attend schools without standards and graduate uneducated but who, it is hoped, remain full of self-esteem.

Connecticut has tens of thousands of job openings — for skilled workers — in manufacturing, nursing, teaching, and other fields, jobs that pay far above minimum wage, for which enough qualified applicants can’t be found.

Raising the minimum wage is actually a proclamation that Connecticut has given up on a skilled workforce, a proclamation that the jobs of the state’s future will be at the fast-food window — until the robots take over.

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

Connecticut Democrats divert more public money to patronage

By CHRIS POWELL

Before complaining that state government doesn’t spend enough money on basics like medical care, education, transportation, environmental protection, and such, people should take note of recent reports from the Connecticut Mirror and the Yankee Institute’s Connecticut Inside Investigator. 

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Awful Trump is right on crime but Connecticut is indifferent

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The reports found that state government is spending ever-increasing amounts of money on what is just political patronage — appropriations made not for any broad policy purposes but for helping the most influential state legislators of the majority party, the Democrats, to pose as heroes to constituents.

The Mirror report blames the trend on the federal government’s American Rescue Plan Act, which flooded states and municipalities with billions of dollars, nominally to offset the economic and tax revenue losses of the virus epidemic of 2020-23. But the act allowed states and municipalities great discretion in spending the money, and so the money did much more than offset specific losses. For the most part it became free money from Washington for whatever states and municipalities wanted to do with it.

Connecticut state legislators loved it, and the state budget they adopted in 2023 authorized the state Economic and Community Development Department to do something similar: to award almost $18 million in unspecified grants — still more seemingly free money. The most recent state budget appropriated raised the amount to almost $39 million.

Democratic legislators worked with the administration of Gov. Ned Lamont, also a Democrat, to assign the money to their pet causes, outside the normal appropriations process. Now suspicion surrounds the grossly disproportionate amounts that have been directed to nominally nonprofit enterprises controlled by a close friend of state Sen. Douglas McCrory, D-Bloomfield. A federal grand jury is investigating.    

The Mirror reports that the economic and community development grants are now going to more than 120 organizations, none of which had to submit applications. “The only requirement,” the Mirror says, “is to know a lawmaker on good terms with the House and Senate Democratic leaders or their top aides.”

Meanwhile Connecticut Inside Investigator reports that the nominally nonprofit Hartford Economic Development Corp. has made millions of dollars in loans backed by state government to small businesses that have failed to repay, including second loans to businesses that were in default on their first. Some of the money ended up with enterprises operated by Senator McCrory’s friend.

Has any of this patronage money made a substantial difference in the health and prosperity of the communities where it was spent, or has it benefited mainly the people receiving the money and the legislators who arranged the grants and got political gratitude for them?

There is little if any auditing of what taxpayers get for these grants, and since no official applications have been required for many of them — since it has been enough that individual legislators advocate them — they can be assumed to be political payoffs if not corrupt. 

Really, why should state government finance a legislator’s connection with influential constituents rather than provide adequate funding in basic policy — funding for, say, Medicaid insurance for the poor or “special education” for the many neglected and disadvantaged children of Hartford, New Haven, and Bridgeport who are failing in school?

Political liberals in Connecticut might ask questions like that if their liberalism isn’t just a pious pose. 

NOT ENOUGH POLICING: Governor Lamont and other Connecticut Democrats are criticizing President Trump for wanting to send the National Guard to police Chicago and Baltimore as he now has guardsmen policing Washington. While Trump, as usual, is trying to stretch his authority and strike his own pose, Chicago and Baltimore indeed are the hell holes he calls them, overwhelmed by crime and depravity.

Last weekend there were dozens of shootings in Chicago, with eight people killed and 50 wounded. 

Who will deny that with their own daily violence and depravity, Hartford, New Haven, and Bridgeport could benefit from a lot more policing? New Haven just had five murders in two weeks. Criticizing Trump’s overreach with crime doesn’t excuse Connecticut’s indifferent underreach. 

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

-END-

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.

Awful Trump is right on crime but Connecticut is indifferent

Newington raid shows Democrats want no immigration enforcement

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.

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

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