‘Mean’ is not an argument in transgender controversy

By CHRIS POWELL

According to the leader of the Democratic majority in the state Senate, Norwalk’s Bob Duff, Republican legislators are “mean” for proposing legislation to prevent boys from participating in girls’ sports when the boys think of themselves as girls.

Rent control won’t build the housing Connecticut needs

Homelessness, mental illness invite a ‘town farm’ approach

Must nearly all Connecticut be on government’s payroll?

“Mean” is pretty tame as Democratic criticism of Republicans goes these days. At least Duff didn’t call the Republicans racist, misogynist, or right-wing extremists, as is commonly done by many Democrats without prompting other Democrats to call them “mean.” These days anyone who suggests, for example, that state government shouldn’t be controlled by the government employee unions anymore is bound to be called one of those things, maybe all three. For as Lenin or some other totalitarian is supposed to have observed: If you label something well enough, you don’t have to argue with it.

Calling Republicans “mean” for wanting to keep males out of female sports is not an argument. It is a distraction, because there is no argument against keeping males out of female sports, except that doing so may hurt the feelings of the males who think of themselves as female.

But keeping those males out of female sports doesn’t deny them the ability to participate in sports, as is sometimes alleged, since they remain free to participate in male sports. 

If anyone really needs reminding, the premise of segregating the genders in sports is that on average males are larger, stronger, and faster than females, and that only such segregation can assure equal opportunity for females, which the 1972 amendments to Title IX of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 were meant to achieve.

But now that the transgenderism cult has taken over the Democratic Party, the party maintains that physical differences between the sexes have disappeared and there is no unfairness in requiring females to compete against males, even as males competing as females have famously robbed the latter of deserved victories in Connecticut and throughout the world, sometimes inflicting physical injuries on the females.

That unfairness is what is “mean,” though Duff affects not to see it.

If a male can deny biology and merely think himself female and induce government to compel everyone to pretend along with him, what becomes of reality? After all, if the adage is true — that you’re only as old as you feel — how can adults be prevented from playing in Little League and lording it over the kids there?     

Most people know that the transgenderism cult in sports is nonsense but are reluctant to say so lest they risk having the cult’s many demagogues call them “mean” or something worse. After all, they may figure that there is only a little injustice here — to the few females who lose to the males who purport to have transcended their gender and its physical advantages. 

Even so, it’s injustice all the same, and resolving the issue in favor of justice might be easy in Connecticut if a team competing against the University of Connecticut’s beloved women’s basketball team recruited a transgender player or two who proceeded to knock the UConn women around in a blowout on television.

The resulting popular indignation might give Connecticut Democrats some political courage.

The Biden administration turned Title IX on its head, the Trump administration is striving to put it back upright, and a few Democrats may be realizing that the country is not inclined to keep pretending along with them that males belong in female sports, bathrooms, and prisons, nor to pretend that immigration law enforcement should stop. Indeed, only such Democratic nuttiness could have brought Donald Trump back to the presidency.     

California’s Democratic governor, Gavin Newsom, who aspires to his party’s next presidential nomination, appeared to have deduced this the other day when he told an interviewer that male participation in female sports is unfair. This was amazing, since California is where most nuttiness originates.

If Newsom can repudiate the nuttiness, could Senator Duff and other Democrats in Connecticut repudiate it someday as well? Or would that be too “mean”?    

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

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Rent control won’t build the housing Connecticut needs

By Chris Powell

Connecticut’s cost of living is high, in large part because of housing prices, and nearly everyone says the state needs much more housing, especially “affordable” housing — most of which is rental housing. But whether everyone who says the state needs more housing really believes it is a fair question.

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That’s because most of the housing legislation proposed in the General Assembly wouldn’t increase the supply of housing at all. Most proposals would just scapegoat landlords, though more rental housing requires more landlords. Other proposals would just increase the dependence of renters on government. 

State government action that might actually get any “affordable” housing built remains too controversial, even for many Democratic legislators who ordinarily prattle about helping the poor even as Democratic administrations lately have been grinding the poor down with inflation, high electricity prices, and ineffectual schools.

For example, Democratic legislators want a big increase in state government rent subsidies to tenants, which turn housing into political patronage and take tenants hostage.

Democrats want to forbid landlords from evicting tenants at the end of their leases without “just cause.” End-of-lease evictions undertaken so landlords can raise rents would be prohibited. This would be rent control, which never got any housing built but only destroyed the private sector’s incentive to build rental housing.

Democrats want to forbid landlords from charging more than a month’s rent for a security deposit, as if landlords shouldn’t have the right to judge how much of a deposit is necessary to protect their property against damage by tenants. 

Democrats want to restrict the rent increases that can be charged upon sale of a property — more rent control.  

Democrats want to require even smaller towns to establish “fair rent commissions” — still more rent control.

Legislation called “Towns Take the Lead” would require towns to set housing construction goals, but there would be no firm enforcement mechanism for achieving them.

Democrats want state government to increase its obstruction of federal immigration law enforcement and provide more medical insurance coverage to illegal immigrants, thus incentivizing more illegal immigration, even as state government has never made any provision for housing Connecticut’s estimated more than 100,000 immigration law violators.

The most helpful of the Democratic housing proposals may be the one that would formally authorize homeless people to live, eat, and sleep on public land. Connecticut has many destitute, addicted, and mentally ill people, and some of them panhandle and live largely out of sight in the woods or underbrush, but so far the state lacks anything like the sidewalk tenting camps of Los Angeles and Portland, Ore. Maybe that kind of visibility for the destitute and disturbed is necessary to get Connecticut thinking seriously about its housing policy, social disintegration, and declining living standards.

The only sure way to get a substantial amount of new housing in Connecticut is for state government to commission it directly and let landlords charge market-rate rents. 

Connecticut’s cities, with their populations impoverished by state welfare and education policies and their governments surviving mainly on state financial aid, are already wards of the state. They also have large tracts of decrepit industrial and residential property already served by water, sewer, gas, and power lines and public transportation — property that practically begs for redevelopment, especially mixed-use redevelopment, with commerce at street level and residences upstairs, redevelopment that doesn’t worsen suburban sprawl.

A state redevelopment authority could be authorized to purchase or condemn such properties and provide them to developers, specifying their development format and completion schedules, while leaving rents to the market so the new properties won’t become more government-engineered slums. Cities might resent their loss of control to the state redevelopment authority but then few cities are operated well enough to deserve control of state housing policy any more than suburbs deserve to control it with their exclusive zoning.

Any new middle-class housing will help bring down the cost of all housing nearby, and the cost of living generally. If Connecticut’s decentralized political system can’t get housing built, state government will have to do it.       

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

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Homelessness, mental illness invite a ‘town farm’ approach

By Chris Powell

Maybe someday housing prices in Connecticut will come way down and housing construction will go way up.

Maybe someday the state’s economy will be stronger. 

Maybe someday inflation will be repealed as federal government policy. 

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Maybe someday the state will restore standards in public education and stop graduating so many uneducated young people qualified only for menial work. 

Maybe someday the state will reform its welfare policies so it does not produce so many fatherless, neglected, demoralized, and disturbed children.

But in the meantime Connecticut has a growing population of people who are not able or inclined to fend for themselves, or to do it honestly. Homelessness and mental illness are worsening and government is not prepared to deal with them. Their burdens keep falling mainly on the cities and inner suburbs, since that’s where the shelters, public housing, least expensive private housing, and social services are.

While Governor Lamont’s administration will facilitate construction of private, multi-family housing where there is little political opposition, the governor is not inclined to support legislation that would force more housing on municipalities that don’t want it and override more of their zoning. So it may take many years before the economy, education, housing construction, and welfare policy manage on their own to reduce homelessness and mental illness. 

But these problems are urgent and should be addressed comprehensively by the whole state. For Connecticut has thousands of damaged lives needing repair.

Poverty, homelessness, and mental illness are not new in Connecticut. The state has faced them for almost three centuries. Indeed, to address them today the state might do well to look back to the policy response of olden times — the “town farm.”

Town farms were more than shelters for the homeless. They were big rooming houses operated by municipal government and situated on substantial agricultural acreage. Town farms would house and feed the indigent and mentally ill but also require them, insofar as they were able, to contribute to the production and maintenance of the farm — to earn their keep. While town farms were primitive, they could make money and teach their residents job skills and to take responsibility for themselves.

Surely government today could do better with a town farm approach than by shuffling the homeless and mentally ill among the streets and overcrowded shelters. Connecticut already has some “supportive housing” operated by social-service organizations for people recovering from drug addiction and mental illness — efficiency apartments in buildings equipped to provide medical and counseling services to tenants. The Lamont administration proposes to open hundreds more such units for people recovering from addiction.

The state might establish similar facilities that would put the homeless in efficiency apartments, give them some privacy, stability, and peace of mind, feed them, treat their ailments consistently, and provide day care for their children — on condition that the tenants work to maintain the facility or get jobs or training outside the facility, pay rent, and restore themselves.

Of course such facilities would have to be closely supervised, and the disruptive mentally ill excluded. But an enhanced sort of town farm might help rebuild lives far more than mere shelters can.

Municipalities won’t undertake such projects, lacking both the resources and inclination. State government would have to handle siting, construction, and operation of new town farms, though their operation could be delegated to capable social-service organizations.

Since supportive housing facilities have been established in some places without much controversy, maybe enhanced town farms might be established without much controversy too. But controversy would always be a risk, and rehabilitating the homeless and mentally ill will always require the governor and state legislators to spend political capital along with state money.

With a high approval rating, Governor Lamont has such capital to spend. The longstanding Democratic majorities in the General Assembly may have such capital as well. Some of it should be deployed on homelessness and mental illness, especially since winter still has weeks to run.

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

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Must nearly all Connecticut be on government’s payroll?

By Chris Powell

Are annual incomes of $250,000 a year for a couple and $100,000 for a single person not enough to support a family in Connecticut?

That’s the implication of legislation proposed by many state legislators that would pay people $600 every year for each of as many as three of their children. Along with the so-called earned income tax credits offered to the working poor by the federal government and state government, this kind of thing is starting to look like a program of guaranteed annual income.

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The original idea of earned income tax credits was to increase the incentive to work of poor people who were receiving welfare benefits. But welfare benefits for people earning more than $100,000 a year imply that poverty and inflation in Connecticut have exploded even as state and federal elected officials have been proclaiming prosperity.

This implication is strengthened by clamor in the General Assembly to require the state’s Medicaid program to provide free diapers to insured infants — and it is estimated that 40% of births in Connecticut are now to women covered by Medicaid. That is, women on welfare.

The cost of living has soared in recent years. But it has not yet occurred to elected officials that the poor might be helped most simply by stopping inflation, not by creating more welfare, which adds to inflation if it is not matched by an increase in economic production.

Poor people also might be helped still more by improving their education and work skills. But Connecticut has given up on education, having replaced it with social promotion, thereby guaranteeing that every year thousands of young people reach adulthood qualified only for menial work — and needing more welfare.

DeLAURO’S KICKBACKS: The federal government is the biggest business in the world and very lucrative for those in power.

Take Connecticut U.S. Rep. Rosa DeLauro, now serving her 34th year in Congress. When Democrats have held the majority in the House of Representatives, DeLauro has been chairman of the House Appropriations Committee. Now that Republicans hold the majority — just barely — DeLauro is the committee’s “ranking” member, the leading member of the minority party, who still may retain great influence over appropriations. 

Simultaneously DeLauro has been national finance chairwoman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee and has just been elected to another term. 

So if you want money from the government, DeLauro is a good person to befriend, and one way of befriending her is to donate money to the Democratic fundraising committee she runs. 

This is a kickback operation. DeLauro didn’t invent it but gets much credit for distributing federal money throughout Connecticut and the country for all sorts of goodies financed not by taxes but by borrowing and money creation — that is, inflation money.

Apparently someone else in the government is in charge of inflation, though DeLauro acts as if she has no idea who it is.

WE STARTED IT: Right as he is to want to stop the war between Russia and Ukraine, President Trump overdid it the other day when he accused Ukraine of starting the war. That was ridiculous, since the United States started it.

For first the U.S. helped overthrow Ukraine’s Russia-friendly regime. Then the U.S. encouraged Ukraine’s idea of joining NATO to gain military allies against Russia. Then the U.S. armed Ukraine and put spy facilities there.

This is exactly what Russia did with the revolution in Cuba in the early 1960s. The U.S. responded by invading Cuba and then blockading the island to expel Russia’s nuclear missiles there. Few Americans are aware of this. They don’t know that their country is far more of an imperial power than Russia is. 

After promising Russia, upon the reunification of Germany, that NATO would not expand eastward, the U.S. pushed NATO into the Baltic nations, right up against Russia’s border. U.S. meddling in Ukraine was the final provocation for Russia, so it attacked.

The United States owes Ukraine peace, and reparations for provoking the war with Russia.

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

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Undo corrupt deal on PURA; and UConn’s bigger scandal

By CHRIS POWELL

Governor Lamont and the leaders of the Democratic majority in the General Assembly have just made state government look pretty sleazy. 

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They made a deal to reappoint the controversial chairwoman of the Public Utilities Regulatory Commission, Marissa Gillett, fill two vacancies on the commission the governor had not wanted to fill, reclassify the commission as a “quasi-public” agency, and give one of the vacant positions to veteran state Sen. John Fonfara, D-Hartford, who would be constitutionally disqualified from the position if the commission remained a regular state agency.

While the deal will do nothing to reduce Connecticut’s high electricity prices —  that can be achieved only by increasing the state’s supply of natural gas and removing the “public benefits” charges from electric bills — it apparently will make the Democrats feel better about high prices.

But the deal is doubly an outrage. 

It’s an outrage first because it would evade the constitutional rule preventing legislators from serving simultaneously in the executive branch of government, thereby giving Fonfara a huge raise on top of his $40,000 annual salary as a senator. As a PURA commissioner he would be paid an additional salary of between $152,000 and $207,000, which would qualify him for a big state pension.

The deal is secondly an outrage because, as Connecticut’s Hearst newspapers reported last weekend, Fonfara has a longstanding personal conflict with the utilities commission. An electric company he founded, now defunct, is facing more than a million dollars in fines and penalties levied by the commission arising from the company’s failure to pay a $57,000 fee in 2023.

Fonfara plausibly disputes the fee and fine. The fee was imposed just before the senator’s company went out of business, and he says it never should have been charged because it was meant to cover costs of a billing system his company hadn’t used and couldn’t use. 

Nevertheless, the dispute creates a conflict of interest for Fonfara’s prospective service on the commission, and he should have made it public it before seeking a commissionership. 

Fonfara has some expertise in utility regulation and the electricity business but that’s not what his prospective appointment is about. It’s about lucrative patronage that would come at the expense of integrity in government. If the governor and Democratic legislative leaders knew about but concealed their knowledge of Fonfara’s conflict of interest when they decided to put him on the commission, this affair would be triply outrageous.

The PURA deal should be repudiated by its participants and different arrangements made, this time to serve the public, not the politicians.

*

Corruption isn’t the big issue in the larceny charge brought last week against a University of Connecticut professor who is alleged to have used more than $50,000 in university money to take as many as a dozen personal and vacation trips while she was supposed to be teaching. A university investigation concluded that to justify the trips she also provided misleading or false information.

Corruption happens everywhere. Instead the big issue in this latest case of misconduct in Connecticut’s higher education system is the continuing lack of financial controls. Just as nobody at the State Board of Regents for Higher Education noticed the many self-serving expense claims submitted by the board’s chief executive officer, Chancellor Terrence Cheng, until the state auditors discovered them, the UConn professor had to take many improper trips at UConn’s expense, missing classes, before the university questioned them, and then, apparently, only because of an anonymous tip.

Of course the professor has not yet been convicted of anything. But given the attitude of state government, here is a plausible scenario: The professor will be put on paid leave for a year or two during which her prosecution will crawl through court, whereupon she will be offered and accept a plea bargain in which she pleads guilty to a reduced charge — maybe littering — and repays misappropriated money out of the income from her paid leave. 

Meanwhile nothing will be done about higher education’s lack of financial controls.

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

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Hold prisons accountable; and money isn’t education

By Chris Powell

Bad stuff happens in prison. Prisoners assault each other and guards, and guards get too rough with prisoners. Not enough people are watching. Prison security makes it almost impossible for the public or journalists to watch, and secrecy breeds criminality.

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That’s why in 2022 the General Assembly and Governor Lamont heeded appeals from prisoners and their families to re-establish the office of prison ombudsman, make it independent of the Correction Department, empower it to investigate prisoner complaints, and bring some accountability to the department.

But the governor and legislature failed to appoint an ombudsman for two years, and now that he is in the office, DeVaughn L. Ward is all alone with more than 350 prisoner complaints to investigate and more sure to come. While $400,000 has been budgeted for the ombudsman, authority to hire wasn’t granted until December and no job opening has been advertised yet.

The governor doesn’t think the ombudsman’s work is important, and most people probably would agree with him, though most prisoners will be released eventually and any injustice they endure in confinement may be reflected in their behavior back in society. Indeed, most people released from prison in Connecticut are in trouble again in two or three years.

Ward would like a staff of 16 to cover Connecticut’s 10 prisons and their 10,000 inmates. He’d like to have regional offices too. That would push the office’s annual expense beyond $2 million, and it’s not going to happen.

But before Ward’s idea is dismissed completely, legislators might want to watch the Correction Department’s video recording of the fatal beating of prisoner J’Allen Jones by guards at the prison in Newtown in 2018. Jones was tied up, an irritant-soaked mask was placed on his face, and he was held down as guards beat him, seemingly even after he had been subdued. The department says Jones was handled appropriately except insofar as guards waited too long to try to revive him. His heart disease is said to have contributed to his death. 

His estate is suing the state for damages.

Maybe the beating was justified but a fatality is the kind of thing for which the Correction Department should answer to something other than itself. It won’t be surprising if the state offers Jones’ estate a financial settlement to foreclose accountability.

Connecticut recently established an inspector general’s office to conduct independent investigations of deaths caused by police. It has worked well and the same principle should apply with the Correction Department. So the prison ombudsman’s office should be given enough resources to do some serious work.

*

Hartford Mayor Arunan Arulampalam’s Blue-Ribbon Commission on Education has reported what it thinks is needed to improve the impoverished city’s horrible schools: a lot more money.

While predictable, the commission’s recommendations are reasonable. More money would compensate for the financial drain on the city’s schools caused by regional schools that remove students from the city school system. State government would pay more for “special education” students, of which Hartford and other poor cities have so many, an issue now being disputed by the legislature and the governor. There would be more state funding for students who don’t speak English, many of whom are illegal immigrants, another disproportionate burden borne by cities.

But even if state government provided all the extra money, it would make no difference to education in Hartford. For no amount of money ever makes any difference with education in the cities. More money just increases staff salaries. Education is mainly a matter of parenting, and the cities lack parents.

State government has been throwing more money at schools since the state Supreme Court’s decision in the school financing case of Horton vs. Meskill in 1977, and city schools have only gotten worse. Only better population demographics — the dispersal of poverty — could ever improve city schools.

The Hartford commission’s recommendations are worth considering only because they might allow the city to reduce its excessive property taxes and, over many years, encourage more unpoor people to live there.

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

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Psych board did its job but insanity law is crazy

By Chris Powell

Having recently shrugged off his inability to get state government employees to return to their normal workplaces, Governor Lamont may have been lucky to be traveling in India the other day when the state Psychiatric Security Review Board announced it had conditionally released a murderous cannibal back into society, proclaiming him cured of his taste for human flesh.

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Members of the Republican minority in the General Assembly exploded with exasperated questions. 

Of course the Democratic majority let the event pass without comment. But at least the Democrats’ indifference wasn’t caused by what might have been expected — the political influence of something like the Connecticut Anthropophagist Association. Such a special interest would have to work hard to become as predatory as the primary constituencies of the Democrats, the state employee and teacher unions. No, Democratic legislators ignore everything questionable in state government when their party controls the administration, which is almost always.

The Republican questions were fair: Where is the cannibal living? Does he have roommates? If so, are they aware of his past? If he is in a group home, is the staff aware? Do his neighbors know he is nearby? Who makes sure he takes his medication? How often he is to take it? What are the supervision and mental health regimens imposed on him? What safety protocols surround him?

The Psychiatric Security Review Board’s executive director, Vanessa M. Cardella, answered some of the questions. The parolee’s medicine will be administered by a visiting nurse. (He or she better be tall, muscular, and heavily armed, or accompanied by several such guards.) The state probation office will supervise him. He will wear an electronic monitoring device, be tested regularly for drug and alcohol use, and keep receiving mental health treatment. If he fails to comply, the board can send him back to Whiting Forensic Institute, Connecticut’s euphemistically named prison for the criminally insane.

Cardella said, “There is a 0% recidivism rate for violent crime for acquittees on conditional release status.”

Yes, so far, so good — or so it may seem. But many ordinary parolees violate their probation, not all crimes are violent, and psychiatric parolees may offend again short of violence and may already have done so. 

Now who wants to volunteer to be neighbor to someone acquitted by reason of insanity for murder with a side of cannibalism? 

For that matter, where do the governor and legislature find volunteers to serve on the Psychiatric Security Review Board? Those jobs may be as thankless as those of the state auditors, who at least get paid.

But there are fair questions here for legislators too.

The law distinguishes the ordinary criminal from the insane one on the presumption that the latter did not understand the wrongfulness of his actions and so shouldn’t be held responsible for them — shouldn’t be punished but just confined, comfortably enough, for the safety of society — and that he may be restored to sanity and good behavior.

While this may seem sensible and just in principle, it is not persuasive in practice when the crime is murder. For then the law’s presumption carries much greater risk. The law assigns the Psychiatric Security Review Board to measure that risk and make a judgment.

That is, state law, not the board itself, already has decided that release should be available to insane murderers judged cured. The board’s judgment on the cannibal may be mistaken but appears to have been conscientiously reached. 

The problem is that the law itself is crazy.

The best solution here may be to forbid any release of murderers acquitted by reason of insanity, allowing release only for insane people acquitted of lesser crimes, if there are any such offenders. 

The cannibal’s case provides a strong financial reason for this change in policy. For enforcing all the complicated conditions imposed on his release to protect the public probably will be far more expensive and far less reliable than keeping him at Whiting and continuing to treat him there.

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

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Cheng is still pleading poverty; and what do illegals cost?

By Chris Powell

What a silly spectacle was last week’s hearing of the General Assembly’s Appropriations Committee on the budget of the state colleges and universities system. Chancellor Terrence Cheng, whose annual salary and benefits exceed $450,000, not counting whatever he can sneak onto his expense account, again pleaded poverty on behalf of his empire.

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Sitting near him were assistants whose annual compensation far exceeds $200,000.

With federal government epidemic emergency money evaporating and Governor Lamont insisting that higher education save money, Cheng insisted, “There is not much more we can cut without cutting into bone.”

Legislators from the Republican minority snorted at that, and even a big-spending Democrat, New Haven Sen. Gary Winfield, rebuked the college administrators: “The biggest, shiniest thing that you can cut is you.” 

That is: Cut the boneheads, not the bone.

Cheng says the college system aims to eliminate management positions. But this may reduce management, of which there already is little in state government’s overly unionized environment. What needs to be reduced is payroll generally. Could the colleges and universities system not find adequate managers at, say, $150,000 a year? 

So what if course offerings had to be reduced and professors laid off? In his state budget address three weeks ago Governor Lamont noted that most students in the colleges and universities system don’t graduate, a statistic implying that half the system is unnecessary, except for the people it employs.

In any case Connecticut’s educational problem is not higher education but lower education, where nearly all students now graduate from high school even though most never master basic skills, standards having been abolished. State government doesn’t dare impose a proficiency test for graduation or promotion from grade to grade lest people discover that their Lake Wobegon impression of education in Connecticut — that everyone is above average — is actually a joke.

What if state legislators ever thought seriously about a system of higher education from which most students drop out even while its chief executive is paid close to a half-million dollars a year? What if some embarrassment ever sunk in?

Would legislators lose their reluctance to shrink the system? Or would they arrange to extend lower education’s fraudulent practices to higher education and award diplomas to everyone regardless of academic performance and even attendance? Indeed, why not just distribute high school and college diplomas with birth certificates? Connecticut wouldn’t need too many more chancellors for that.

*

How much is illegal immigration costing Connecticut?

In a television interview last week the president of the Yankee Institute, Carol Platt Liebau, charged that state government is spending more than a billion dollars annually on education, medical care, general welfare expenses, and incarceration for the state’s estimated more than 120,000 immigration law violators. The cost estimate came from an advocacy group, the Federation for American Immigration Reform.

Of course some illegal immigrants pay sales and other taxes, but because of their poverty the taxes they pay are almost certainly not coming close to offsetting their expense to the state.

Governor Lamont dismissed the billion-dollar figure as “totally fanciful” but admitted he didn’t know the cost and invited journalists to seek answers from his administration. Risking politically incorrect journalism, Mike Cerulli of WTHN-TV8 in New Haven queried the governor’s budget office and the state Education Department and predictably enough got nowhere. The budget office said it doesn’t know what illegal immigrants cost the state and just calculating the cost would be too expensive.

The annual cost must be at least several hundred millions of dollars, for that is state government’s estimate just for extending Medicaid to illegal immigrant children 16 and older. (Younger illegal immigrant children are already covered.) Because of their inability to speak English and their lack of previous education, the cost of educating such children is far higher than it is for ordinary students.

But the most important point here is that the governor and Democratic legislators simply don’t want to know, and don’t want the public to know, the cost of their policy of making Connecticut a “sanctuary state.”

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

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Open government at 50: Principle isn’t practice

By Chris Powell

Connecticut’s Freedom of Information Act, enacted in 1975, turns 50 this year, the legacy of Gov. Ella T. Grasso, who vigorously advocated it, and the Watergate scandal of the previous two years, which proclaimed the danger of secret power.

The FOI law made Connecticut a leader in accountability in government. The law created a commission to enforce it and enabled ordinary citizens to argue their own complaints at hearings without having to hire a lawyer, a triumph of democracy. Most commissioners, chosen by the governor and the General Assembly, believed in open government.

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But Grasso was probably both the state’s first and last governor to believe in open government. Indeed, the history of the FOI law since Grasso’s time has been one of gradual erosion as elected officials and special interests found that openness and accountability can get in their way and sought exemptions from the law.

The future was foretold just a few years after the law was enacted when the state legislator who presented the legislation to the House of Representatives and so was nicknamed “Mister Sunshine” was appointed town attorney for Vernon. “Mister Sunshine” refused the Journal Inquirer’s request to inspect his invoices to the town. The mayor supported his refusal, they lost at the FOI Commission, they were compelled to disclose the invoices, and their party was defeated at the next town election because of the issue.

Nine years after the law’s enactment Connecticut’s retreat from open government accelerated. In a case from Somers the Journal Inquirer had won a ruling from the FOI Commission that teacher job performance evaluations were public records that had to be disclosed like all other government employee evaluations. Within mere weeks the teacher unions induced the General Assembly to enact an exemption from the law just for them. The exemption was approved by the House of Representatives 145-3 and unanimously by the Senate. Grasso had died in office four years earlier and her lieutenant governor, having succeeded her, signed the bill reflexively.

Teachers remain the only government employees in Connecticut whose performance evaluations are exempt from disclosure. It’s not for any good reason. Most parents would like to be able to see the evaluations of their children’s teachers. The teachers got the exemption because they don’t want to be accountable for their work and are numerous and politically active, and because few legislators dare to articulate the public interest against them. That is, teachers are special — as in special interest — and while freedom of information is great in principle, practice is often something else.

So much for “public” education.

These days state government and municipal governments often defeat requests for information just by stalling them and appealing FOI commission decisions in court. Long delay can make information worthless. The commission lacks the nerve to fine lawbreakers. 

For several years now the big push for another exemption to the FOI law has come from state employee groups that don’t want addresses of government employees to be public. Even the lowliest clerk in the Agriculture Department is supposed to be in danger because his address is public. The legislature has granted address exemptions for some state employees whose work can be controversial, but the unions want everyone exempted. 

It doesn’t matter that the internet has obliterated privacy for residential addresses and that the blanket exemption the unions want will provide no practical protection. State employees want formal acknowledgment that they are special — as in special interest.

Yet the compelling reason for keeping addresses of government employees public — that accountability is possible only if an address is available to confirm the identity of an employee — is on flaming display in a current controversy.

A few weeks ago the state auditors reported that the chancellor of the Connecticut State Colleges and Universities system, Terrence Cheng, whose annual compensation is almost $500,000, was given a housing allowance of $21,000 on the understanding he would move to Connecticut. He took the money but kept living in New York. If his home address had been secret Cheng’s fraud would never have been exposed.

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

-END-

Connecticut’s sanctimony cities show we could use Elon Musk

By Chris Powell

Hysteria and sanctimony broke out in Connecticut and the country last Monday. Opponents of President Trump had dubbed it “Not My President’s Day” to protest everything his administration is doing or imagined to be doing. In Connecticut the protests were largest in three of the state’s sanctimony cities — about a thousand people in Hartford, 400 in New Haven, and 150 in New London. 

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The protesters were appalled that the president is laying off thousands of federal government employees and has deputized his pal, the billionaire Elon Musk, to examine executive agency financial records in pursuit of waste, fraud, and accountability, as if the president, as head of the executive department, shouldn’t have access to such records. Trump and Musk, the protesters shrieked, were staging a coup and planning to abolish the civil rights of Blacks, homosexuals, and transgender people. The protesters seemed to think that any disagreement with them is criminal.

The supposed persecution by Trump may come as a surprise to the most powerful member of his cabinet, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, a gay man married to another gay man with whom he has two children. But the hysterics may not know about Bessent, since news organizations have reported far less about his personal life than they did about the gay member of President Joe Biden’s cabinet, Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, whom journalism celebrated for his sexual orientation, not for his job performance.

Yes, Trump’s first few weeks back in the White House have been filled with nuttiness — like buying Greenland and Gaza, seizing the Panama Canal, and renaming the Gulf of Mexico. Yet these issues are trivial sideshows. They oppress no one.

But many people are being oppressed in the sanctimony cities, right under the noses of last Monday’s protesters, whose grievances included Trump’s replacing federal “diversity, equity, and inclusion” programs with a simple merit system for hiring.

A year ago Governor Lamont jumped aboard the DEI bandwagon by creating an Office of Equity and Inclusion within his office and appointing a director who is being paid $175,000 per year to see that state agencies do more of the hiring “outreach” that state law already required them to do. The appointment was just politically correct posturing and patronage to placate the sanctimonious left flank of the governor’s political party, and it was as ironic as last Monday’s protests.

For infinitely more could be done for diversity, equity, and inclusion, and for fairness and prosperity generally, if Connecticut could ever alleviate the longstanding racial performance gap in its schools, a gap that is worst in the sanctimony cities, where most students are from minority groups and live neglected in single-parent homes, with fewer than a quarter of them performing at grade level in reading and math and most being advanced from grade to grade anyway and graduated from high school qualified only for menial work, destined for life in the underclass.

Last September a recent graduate of Hartford Public High School sensationally confessed to the Connecticut Mirror that she remains illiterate after 12 years of education in the city. But there have been no protests about this. The sanctimony cities take it for granted that most of their students long have been and always will be sent into the world poorly educated. The governor, the General Assembly, and the political left take it for granted too. 

The state education commissioner and the Hartford school superintendent promised investigations to discover how the girl could have graduated illiterate, but there have been none.

Meanwhile New Haven’s schools have the worst chronic absenteeism rates in the state, approaching 50% of students. But no one in that sanctimony city protests that either. In the sanctimony cities, the outrage is Trump, not what Connecticut has done to itself.

DEI initiatives and protests against Trump serve only to distract from the catastrophes of policy that Connecticut won’t confront because doing so would require asking painful questions about failure. If only the state had its own Elon Musk.

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