Lamont’s posturing won’t put Connecticut ahead of Florida

By Chris Powell

One of these days Governor Lamont may show Florida a thing or two. But probably not soon.

Without explanation, Florida’s tourism internet site recently removed a section touting destinations in the state said to be particularly attractive to members of sexual minorities. This renewed complaints that the state is hostile to those minorities because of its “Don’t Say Gay” law, its refusal to let people change the sex on their driver’s licenses, its prohibition of sex-change therapy for minors, and its requiring people to use restrooms corresponding to their biological sex.

As oppression goes, this isn’t much. The “Don’t Say Gay” law only forbids school class discussions of homosexuality in third grade and below, in the reasonable belief that any sex-related discussions aren’t appropriate for younger children. 

The prohibition on changing sex designations on driver’s licenses guards against deception. 

The prohibition on sex-change therapy for minors protects them against irreversible, life-changing treatment until they are fully able to make their own decisions. (All states prohibit certain things for minors, including Connecticut.)    

Members of sexual minorities who live in Florida may disagree with these policies but apparently not enough to leave the state. Florida long has been and remains attractive to them, and their share of the population in Florida seems to equal or exceed their share of the country’s population. An independent internet site on Florida tourism lists dozens of localities considered “gay-friendly,” many with “gayborhoods,” along with dozens of attractions that might appeal particularly to them.

And supposedly backward Florida has been gaining population while supposedly progressive Connecticut has been losing it.

So having already appealed to Florida businesses to relocate to Connecticut because of Florida’s restrictive abortion law — a law that probably will be liberalized by voters in a referendum in November — Governor Lamont this month had Connecticut’s tourism office undertake an internet advertising campaign aimed at sexual minorities, emphasizing the state as “a welcoming alternative.”

Of course this campaign won’t be any more effective than was the governor’s appeal to Florida businesses to relocate to Connecticut because of abortion law. Both undertakings are just politically correct posturing by the governor, a Democrat who has been finding it harder to maintain the support of his party’s extreme left. His posturing won’t do much to keep the lefties in line either.

If only the governor could plausibly issue an appeal to Floridians, including the many who used to live in Connecticut (among them former Gov. Jodi Rell), that they should return here because of, say, the stunning new efficiency of state and municipal government, much-improved public education, reduction in taxes, and a rising standard of living.

After all, Florida’s weather isn’t that state’s only attraction; it’s not even all that good. Florida’s winter can be lovely while Connecticut shivers, shovels, slips, and crashes. But Florida’s summer can be oppressively hot, rain there can go on for days and is often torrential, hurricanes are frequent and can be catastrophic, and the state is full of mosquitoes, alligators, Burmese pythons, and cranky old people driving haphazardly to and from their doctor’s office.

Florida’s lack of a state income tax may be a bigger draw than its weather. While tax revenue from the state’s tourism industry takes much financial pressure off state government, so does Florida’s refusal to be taken over by the government class, a big difference from Connecticut. Florida’s strengthening Republican Party may help in that respect, even as Connecticut’s Republican Party and political competition in the state have nearly disappeared.

Connecticut’s natural advantages remain what they always have been. Beautiful hills, valleys, meadows, forests, rivers, streams, lakes, a long seashore, changeable but generally moderate weather, and nearness to but comfortable distance from two metropolitan areas. It is a great but gentle beauty, crowned with convenience.

That is, Connecticut is a state to be lived in, not visited. Indeed, contrary to the governor’s latest pose, the fewer tourists here, the better. Connecticut would be more wonderful still if government didn’t keep making it more expensive and thus making Florida seem better.      

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

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New Haven apologizes as cops defend themselves

By Chris Powell

Here is what Connecticut has come to. 

Last week a career criminal from New Haven wanted on a federal warrant for robbery and gun crime was cornered by police at a car wash just over the city line in West Haven. He pulled out a stolen gun and shot at the many officers trying to arrest him. Three shot back and killed him.

Whereupon New Haven Mayor Justin Elicker and New Haven Police Chief Karl Jacobsen publicly and repeatedly expressed condolences to the career criminal’s family “on behalf of the city.” The mayor even met the family at a hospital to express the condolences before doing it again at a press conference this week when the state inspector general issued a preliminary report and released body camera video vindicating the officers.

Even so, the career criminal’s daughter and about 50 others protested outside New Haven police headquarters.

No city residents protested the career criminal’s life of crime or his attempt to kill the police.

Mayor Elicker and Chief Jacobsen aren’t stupid. In repeatedly expressing condolences they were recognizing New Haven’s political and social environment — full of poverty, despair, ignorance, disrespect for law, and resentment of authority, an environment in which crime is more easily excused as a way of life, the more so now that the political party that poses as the friend of the oppressed keeps making their lives harder with high inflation and illegal immigration. (The oppressed haven’t figured it out yet.)

But how smart is Connecticut when city officials feel obliged to make excuses for basic law and order? Will the awful political and social environment of the cities ever induce state government to try to change it? Or are the cities already fulfilling state government’s real objective for them — to maintain them as concentration camps for the poor and dysfunctional and income streams for the government class ministering to them?

That’s the implication of the recent trouble with state government’s Social Equity Council, the agency established to license marijuana cultivators and retailers and distribute to distressed areas — mainly cities — the revenue raised from license sales. 

In response to complaints that the council has been arbitrary and disorganized, Governor Lamont froze the council’s money pending a review by state Comptroller Sean Scanlan. This week the comptroller’s review concluded that the council needs clearer criteria for awarding licenses and disbursing funds to help distressed areas. The General Assembly may act on the comptroller’s review next year.

Since the Social Equity Council is all just petty political patronage, it won’t do anything for distressed areas. Giving money to a few politically connected churches and social-service organizations won’t address the big problems of the cities, problems that are major responsibilities of state government. State government knows very well what those problems are and how it is failing to alleviate them.

They are all results of generational poverty caused by government policy. 

Most city children have only one parent, if that. Few have fathers in their lives. The incentives of the welfare system have made fathers seem unnecessary, at least financially, though a healthy and stable home life that avoids child neglect is exceedingly difficult without them.

Most city children don’t learn much in school. Little discipline is permitted. Many kids learn mainly that they will be promoted from grade to grade and given a high school diploma without having to learn anything. Indeed, they are promoted and graduated even if they are chronically absent. Chronic absenteeism in Connecticut is worst in New Haven’s schools, affecting 37.5% of students. Their parents, such as they are, can’t or won’t see that they get to school and take education seriously, but many get welfare benefits anyway.

As a result many kids reach adulthood uneducated, demoralized, and qualified only for menial work, drug dealing or other crime, or more welfare.

After decades of this it must be assumed that state government actually intends the result of its policies, horrible as the result is: the manufacture of generational poverty. Yet now state government claims to be pursuing “social equity.”

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

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The ‘banned books’ racket; and busway’s costs hidden

By Chris Powell

This week is what librarians and leftists in Connecticut and throughout the country call Banned Books Week. A more accurate name for it would be Submit to Authority Week.

The week is misnamed because in the United States there are no banned books at all — no books whose publication and possession are forbidden by government. Banned Books Week has been contrived by librarians and leftists to intimidate people out of criticizing certain books that librarians and school administrators have chosen for inclusion in school libraries, curriculums, and public libraries. The objective is to prevent libraries and schools from ever having to answer to anyone for their choices.

The selection of every book for a library or curriculum is always a matter of judgment. But the promoters of Banned Books Week would have the public believe that the choices made by librarians and school administrators are always right, and that anyone who questions these choices is a follower of Hitler or, worse, Donald Trump.

Some criticism of library and curriculum choices is nutty. Two great works of American literature that have helped to defeat racism — Mark Twain’s “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” and Harper Lee’s “To Kill a Mockingbird” — are sometimes targeted by people who can’t get past the occasional racist language in them. 

But these days most books whose inclusion in schools and libraries are challenged involve homosexuality and transgenderism, and these are fairly challenged at least in regard to their appropriateness for children, especially amid the mental illness that is worsening among them.

This doesn’t mean that such books should be excluded automatically but that their appropriateness should be settled by thoughtful review and discussion. Calling a book’s critics “book banners” and a book’s advocates “groomers,” as is common in these controversies, is not thoughtful.

The great irony of Banned Books Week is that as a practical matter its promoters are themselves the biggest book banners. That is, with a virtually infinite number of books in the world, librarians and school administrators reject thousands of books for every one they include. 

Of course not all books can be included in any library or curriculum. Do the choices that are made give a politically balanced view of the world and academic subjects or a politically skewed and propagandist one? 

If Banned Books Week succeeds, no one will ever know — which is the idea.

*

The once-controversial bus highway between Hartford and New Britain, CTfastrak, has been operating for 10 years, and this week Connecticut’s Hearst newspapers sought to determine if, after a construction cost of more than half a billion dollars, the busway can be considered a success.

The state Transportation Department says the highway had 2.8 million riders in 2016, its first full year of operation, reached a peak of 3.3 million riders in 2019, and then, amid the Covid-19 epidemic, fell to about 2 million riders in 2021 and has been slowly increasing since.

But the chief of the department’s Bureau of Public Transit, Ben Limmer, was unable to provide information crucial to a judgment on the project. While it stands to reason that the bus highway has reduced automobile commuting between Hartford and New Britain, the department says it has no data on that. More concerning is that the department can’t or won’t say how much each CTfastrak rider is being subsidized by state government. 

“We do what we can to make sure fares are affordable,” Limmer said. “I assume fares have not kept up with inflation, so we’re probably flat or slightly up on subsidies.”

All modes of transportation — sidewalks, streets and highways, trains, and airplanes — are subsidized by government in some way. But now that the epidemic-induced trend of working from home has greatly reduced commuting, CTfastrak is even more questionable than it was when it began.

Does the Transportation Department want to know what CTfastrak’s operating costs are and how much riders are being subsidized? It doesn’t seem to want the public to know.

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

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Ethnic pandering in politics is out of date in Connecticut

By Chris Powell

Stamford state Rep. Anabel Figueroa, a member of the city’s Board of Representatives, may be a bit of a demagogue. But is she really a hater of Jews? That’s the charge leveled against her by the Democratic City Committee, which is moving to expel her this week.

Figueroa is in trouble for a comment she made as she campaigned for renomination for state representative by the Democrats in a primary last month. She said her district, heavily Hispanic, couldn’t possibly consider electing her challenger, Jonathan Jacobson, because he’s Jewish. The context of this comment and others Figueroa made during the primary campaign seems not to have been prejudice or malice but rather ethnic entitlement and pandering — the premise that, being so Hispanic, her district just had to be represented by a fellow Hispanic, especially since its people are disproportionately poor and need the special understanding only an ethnic compatriot can provide.

Figueroa’s comments became controversial during the campaign and her district — or at least the Democrats who voted in the primary — repudiated her premise, nominating Jacobson with 63% of the vote. Religion and ethnicity may not have mattered much if at all to anyone who voted, aside from Figueroa herself.

Only Figueroa can be sure of what’s in her heart. But she didn’t say Jews should be persecuted. Instead her remarks probably were motivated by the chance to engage in old-fashioned ethnic politics. She may have thought that stuff mattered, or she may have wanted it to. 

Quite unconsciously, Connecticut long has been acquitting itself of its past in that regard. 

From the 1850s to the early 1960s the state’s politics sometimes pitted Yankee Protestants and immigrant Catholics against each other, and then Irish, Italians, and Poles against each other. Eventually the political parties tried to smooth over these conflicts by balancing their tickets ethnically and religiously. As time went on, Jews were fit in. 

This ticket balancing was a primitive but well-intended and integrating practice, if sometimes silly, as during the many years when both major parties reserved their nominations for U.S. representative at large for candidates of Polish descent. 

Blacks were invisible in state politics until the 1960s but as the civil rights movement gained during the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, their new allegiance to the Democratic Party won them a place in ticket balancing. Indeed, for the last 60 years the party has reserved its nomination for state treasurer for a Black candidate, as if no white Democrat has any mathematical ability.

With the exception of the Democratic nomination for treasurer, the ethnic obsession in state politics has faded away. But in recent years something very much like it has been making a comeback with the Democrats — their celebrating themselves for nominating the occasional gay candidate. This practice presumes dubiously that any gay person who has made it to adulthood in Connecticut must have overcome terrible challenges. It also seems to presume dubiously that minority sexual orientation may be more of a qualification for public office than experience with government and familiarity with issues. 

But of course Democrats wouldn’t celebrate candidates for their minority sexual orientation if the party didn’t think that these days almost any minority status is politically advantageous, since nearly all state residents favor equal opportunity. Connecticut is overwhelmingly libertarian on sexual orientation, having decriminalized homosexuality 53 years ago and having declined to enforce the law for decades before that.

So should Figueroa be banished from Stamford’s Democratic committee for her clumsy political opportunism? Or would that just embitter some Hispanics against the Jewish candidate who bested her? Is Figueroa’s defeat for renomination as state representative not enough of a lesson? Does she need to be denied renomination to the city’s Board of Representatives as well?

Or should Figueroa be forgiven on account of the service done to Connecticut by her humiliation — for her showing the state that contriving ethnic, racial, and religious rivalries is finished as a formula for political success?   

——

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

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There’s a better innovation; and prohibit the looting of hospitals

By Chris Powell

Connecticut’s state auditors are on a roll with their critical report about state government’s “venture capital firm,” Connecticut Innovations, which was published the other day soon after the critical audits about expensive management failures at Central Connecticut State University, the state Department of Energy and Environmental Protection, and the Correction Department.

The problem with Connecticut Innovations, the auditors say, is that the agency, which spends tens of millions of dollars investing in new companies in the state, can’t be sure that the companies have produced all the jobs they promised to produce with state government’s investment. According to the auditors, Connecticut Innovations says verifying the job numbers would require auditing the companies and the companies can’t afford it. Connecticut Innovations adds that while the state Labor Department has data about employment at the companies, it’s always out of date.

This explanation is weak. Surely without much cost the subsidized companies can quantify their employment at regular intervals and identify their employees by names, address, and hours worked. Connecticut Innovations then could do spot checks about the claimed employees. This wouldn’t be foolproof but it would be better than simply accepting the data provided by the subsidized companies as Connecticut Innovations does now.

Connecticut Innovations says it will try to figure something out, though the issue may be forgotten unless the General Assembly presses it.

The auditors’ report on Connecticut Innovations should be taken by the legislature as an invitation to reconsider the agency in its entirety. For even if the job-creation data reported to Connecticut Innovations could be verified comprehensively, it would not mean the agency’s subsidies were essential.

For the world is full of banks and investment firms that finance new businesses. Who can be sure that the jobs at companies subsidized by Connecticut Innovations couldn’t have been created anyway with private financing? Why does state government need to get into the venture capital business any more than it needs to get into any other business?

Of course a venture capital firm operated by state government can provide one thing more readily than a private venture capital firm can — political patronage for those who run the government.

In any case if Connecticut had an economic and political climate more favorable to business and wealth creation than to employment by and dependence on government, state government might not feel as compelled to play favorites and subsidize certain businesses. A better economic and political climate would be the best innovation of all.

*   

Better late than never — and in the middle of his campaign for re-election — Connecticut U.S. Sen. Chris Murphy has noticed the looting of Waterbury, Manchester Memorial, and Rockville General hospitals by the California-based investment company, Prospect Medical Holdings, which purchased them from their nonprofit operators in 2016 and began mortgaging their property and stripping their assets to pay big dividends to its investors.

This kind of thing has become a nationwide racket, and Murphy cited the Connecticut angle last week during a Senate hearing about the bankruptcy of Steward Health Care, a for-profit company that recently ran three hospitals in Massachusetts into bankruptcy.

Murphy asked: “How have we let American capitalism get so far off the rails, so unmoored from the common good, that anybody thinks it’s OK to make a billion dollars off of degrading health care for poor people in Waterbury, Connecticut?”

The answer is simple. It is less a matter of capitalist greed than government’s negligence. That is, in Connecticut and elsewhere government has allowed profit-making companies to acquire nonprofit hospitals and extract for profit the decades of public charity that built them.

Federal and state law could prohibit such transactions. So how about it, Senator, Governor Lamont, and state legislators? And Senator, how about returning the $2,500 campaign contribution you received from Prospect’s political action committee in 2017, a year after it acquired the Connecticut hospitals, a contribution reported this week by political blogger Kevin Rennie?

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

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Politically correct electricity will raise rates while failing climate

By Chris Powell

How much do Connecticut and Governor Lamont want to commit to buying a lot of politically correct electricity to reduce “global warming” before ascertaining and understanding its price? 

Not as much as they used to. Reality is catching up with political correctness in energy costs.

For Connecticut residents are angry at their sharp recent increases in electricity prices, especially since the increases were political choices by the governor and General Assembly. 

For many years the governor and legislators have chosen to hide in electric bills the costs of various social programs having nothing directly to do with the generation and distribution of electricity, including a program that requires electricity users who pay their bills to pay as well for electricity users who don’t pay for years at a time. As this is a public welfare expense it should have been covered by the state budget, where elected officials could be held accountable for it, and not hidden in electricity bills, where blame is misdirected to the electric utilities. 

Now that the soaring price of electricity has gotten people’s attention, they have discovered and resent the government’s dishonesty.

The bigger cause of the recent electricity rate increases is the commitment state government made by law in 2017 to purchase half the electrical output of the Millstone nuclear power plant to keep the plant in business. Since Millstone produces nearly half the electricity used in Connecticut, its closure would jeopardize the state’s energy security. In addition, the power Millstone produces can be portrayed as politically correct. 

That is, Millstone generates no “greenhouse gases,” just deadly radioactive waste with a half life of thousands of gubernatorial and legislative terms, waste for which the federal government has not yet gotten around to creating a depository, and whose politically incorrectness has been temporarily suspended. 

For a while the Millstone guarantee saved Connecticut electricity users a lot of money, but now other sources of electricity, especially natural gas, have fallen in price and are less expensive than nuclear. Energy prices change and state government did not prepare the public for the possibility. The Millstone guarantee may save money again before it expires in 2029, but at the moment it’s a loser.

So now Governor Lamont is backing away from Connecticut’s agreement to join Massachusetts and Rhode Island in buying a lot of electricity from offshore wind projects that aren’t operating yet and whose electricity almost certainly will be much more expensive than electricity produced any other way. Indeed, it’s questionable whether offshore wind will even work or survive the first hurricane or nor’easter that comes along.

The governor is musing about recommitting to offshore wind if Massachusetts and Rhode Island will join Connecticut’s commitment to buy power from Millstone, thereby spreading the risk of volatile energy costs. Maybe Massachusetts and Rhode Island would pay for some extra security from Millstone.

But the more electricity prices rise under the pressure of political correctness, as they will rise, the more Connecticut should question political correctness in energy. Even if one really believes that big changes in climate are manmade and not produced by the same natural factors that caused big changes many times over millions of years before the industrial age, one is obliged to believe something else before committing the state to still more expensive electricity.

That is, one is obliged to believe that anything little Connecticut does with its energy sources will make any difference to the world’s climate.

Last week the nonprofit environmentalist organization Global Energy Monitor reported that China is developing enough new coal mines to produce another 1.28 billion metric tons of that dirty fuel every year. A spokeswoman for the group noted that China’s government maintains long-term contracts guaranteeing the profitability of coal mines. Meanwhile Connecticut subsidizes what is considers “green” power.

Chinese coal is sure to erase in just a few minutes whatever savings Connecticut could achieve in “greenhouse gases” in a year, even if the state stopped using conventional energy altogether. So how much more does Connecticut want to pay just to feel politically correct about electricity?

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

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Zoning comes for a mouse; and don’t blame Facebook

By Chris Powell

A tiny cluster of low-lying rocks in Long Island Sound just off the coast of Connecticut at Groton is aptly named: Mouse Island. Robinson Crusoe was more removed from civilization, but the residents of Mouse Island’s three houses, occupying lots of barely a quarter acre each, might have considered the island a good enough getaway. For they have had to generate their own electricity, bring their own fresh water, and, to return to civilization, swim, row, or motor 500 feet to the mainland.

But The Day of New London reported last week that government has just discovered the getaway and has determined that it can’t be left alone — that it needs more rules.

In a way it’s the fault of one of the islanders themselves. He decided to renovate his windows and applied to the town for a permit. If he had done the renovation without a permit, no one would have known or had reason to care. But his request prompted Groton officials to start thinking about Mouse Island.

They first thought that the island was within the zoning jurisdiction of the town’s Noank Fire District. But a review determined that the island isn’t part of the district and that the town had long left the island without zoning, the houses having been built years before adoption of the zoning code in the 1950s.

The Noank fire district’s zoning officer said that until the recent review the district had had no cause to think about zoning on Mouse Island because nobody could remember anything ever happening there.

So now Groton will undertake to write zoning regulations for the island that will leave the homeowners some flexibility while guarding against … overdevelopment.

How silly. For nothing has happened on Mouse Island for a long time because nothing else very useful or secure can be built there. Old newspaper reports say five houses on the island were destroyed by the Great New England Hurricane of 1938, and of course big coastal storms are always possible.

But Groton now may spend thousands of dollars to write regulations to guarantee that no one will do on Mouse Island anything that no one ever was going to do or would be able to do anyway. Indeed, if the regulations are ordinary, they’ll prohibit foundries, shopping malls, stadiums, amusement parks, and airports even as island residents will still be obliged to get a permit to fix a window. That’ll teach them.

*

Connecticut Attorney General William Tong and the attorneys general of 41 other states last week imagined themselves coming to the rescue even more grandly than Groton’s zoning officials. Tong and his colleagues urged Congress to require social-media companies, like Facebook and Instagram, to post a surgeon general’s warning that social media can harm the mental health of young people.

As some of those other attorneys general do, Tong represents a state government that is actually so unconcerned about young people’s mental health that, in greedy pursuit of more tax revenue, it has legalized sports betting on the internet and, contrary to federal law, legalized marijuana as well — as long as it is bought from a licensed dealer and state tax is paid.

In recent years school officials increasingly have complained that children are coming to school “stoned” or consuming marijuana candies in school.

Last month the Hartford Courant quoted the executive director of the Connecticut Council on Problem Gambling, Diana Goode, as saying there has been a “huge demographic shift” in problem gamblers in the state. “We used to think that the problem gambler was the little old lady at the slot machine,” Goode said. “Now it’s the 20-something male betting on sports.”

Yes, social media can exploit the natural neurosis of youth. But social media are manifestations of freedom of speech, a constitutional right. If social media are so harmful to children, the attorneys general should ask Congress to outlaw the possession of internet-capable mobile phones by minors. 

Kids get mobile phones only because their parents arrange them. Parents are where responsibility lies, but no one in politics dares to acknowledge it. 

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

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Abortion extremists are pushing Connecticut far ‘beyond Roe’

By Chris Powell

Now that the issue has been returned to the states and democracy, abortion extremism has revived throughout the country. In some states this extremism aims to make abortion virtually impossible, limiting it to the earliest weeks of pregnancy, sometimes before women may realize they are pregnant. But in Connecticut the extremism goes the other way.

A few days ago Connecticut abortion extremism manifested itself at the state Department of Public Health, which held a hearing on its proposal to repeal three state regulations that pose only slight impediments to abortion, regulations that did not bother advocates of “reproductive rights” back when the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Roe v. Wade was in force. Indeed, for decades Connecticut has modeled its abortion law on the principle proclaimed by Roe — that abortion should be an individual right prior to fetal viability but subject to state regulation after, because society has an interest in the unborn when they are able to live outside the womb.

As constitutional law Roe was questionable, as even some advocates of abortion rights acknowledged, but it amounted to a political compromise that commanded majority support nationally, though not in all states.

The Supreme Court’s reversal of Roe has changed nothing in Connecticut. There is no movement here to outlaw or seriously restrict abortion, though the public probably would support legislation to require parental consent for abortions for minors, since such abortions conceal rape.

To the contrary, as shown by the health department’s proposal to repeal those three regulations, the political movement about abortion in Connecticut is, in its own words, to “go beyond Roe” — to legitimize late-term abortion, abortion of viable fetuses, in all circumstances. 

The department would repeal the regulation arising from the Roe principle that authorizes abortion in the last trimester of pregnancy only to protect the mother’s life or health. 

This regulation is actually only the pretense of concern for unborn life, since no government authority is checking on late-term abortions and since protecting a pregnant woman’s health is construed to include her mental health. In advance of childbirth it’s impossible to disprove a woman’s claim that delivering her child will drive her insane, absurd as such a claim may seem. 

But even the regulation’s pretense of concern for viable fetuses is too much for Connecticut’s abortion extremists.

Another regulation proposed for repeal requires abortion providers to try to save of life of a fetus — that is, a child — who survives an abortion. Connecticut’s abortion extremists want to erase any hint of an abortion survivor’s humanity. An infant bleeding and gasping for breath is to be coldly left to die in the presence of doctors, nurses, the law, and its own mother — barbarity.

Also proposed for repeal is the regulation that authorizes medical personnel to refuse to participate in abortions for religious reasons. As Connecticut essentially declares abortion the highest public good, all conscience is to be trampled.

The foremost advocate of repealing the regulations, state Rep. Jillian Gilchrest, D-West Hartford, leader of the abortion extremists in the General Assembly — they style themselves the Reproductive Rights Caucus — maintains that the regulation protecting the consciences of medical personnel is unnecessary because federal law already protects them. But Gilchrest would not advocate repealing the regulation if she wasn’t hoping that someday abortion extremists will gain control of the federal government, repeal the law, and let Connecticut drive anti-abortion doctors and nurses out of their profession.  

Governor Lamont told the Hartford Courant he wasn’t fully informed about the move to repeal the abortion regulations and would be looking into it. But he added perceptively, “I hope it’s not a solution looking for a problem.”  

That’s just what it is. For the only problem here is that some people think that while Connecticut is more liberal on abortion than all states except Vermont and Oregon, which have no gestational limits, the state still doesn’t exalt abortion enough. 

Does the governor agree with the barbarians? Since the health department answers to him, it will be answering for him if it decides to “go beyond Roe.”

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

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Welcome to Connecticut, home of wasted payroll

By Chris Powell

Since Connecticut state government is a big place, it will make mistakes even in the best of circumstances. But Governor Lamont and state legislators should pay much more attention to state government’s most expensive undertaking — payroll administration — and less attention to what engaged them last week — new highway signs on the state’s borders touting the state as the home of great pizza, gourmet food, college basketball, and submarines.

In July Connecticut Inside Investigator, a product of the Yankee Institute, disclosed that Central Connecticut State University had paid nearly $763,000 in back pay to a former executive, who, the state Supreme Court ruled, had been wrongly fired in 2018. The firing was prompted by the man’s arrest in an incident unrelated to his job. But he denied the charges and eventually they were dismissed.  

In August the state auditors reported a similar situation, wherein the state Department of Energy and Environmental Protection overpaid a conservation officer $109,000 during 19 months of paid administrative leave after he was charged criminally, though state regulations restrict paid administrative leaves to 30 days. The charge here was dropped too and the officer returned to work after what was effectively a year and a half of paid vacation.

Audits covering 2018 through 2020 already had faulted the department for violating paid leave rules.

Two weeks ago the auditors reported pervasive financial mismanagement at the Correction Department. The most expensive incident involved an employee who was entitled to a $3,032 payment for working holidays. Instead he got 54 bi-weekly payments of $3,032, or $161,000 more than he was owed.

The Correction Department audit also found improprieties with payments for compensatory time, overtime, workers’ compensation, and union leave, as well as raises awarded without evaluations.

Last year the auditors found that the University of Connecticut had overpaid two professors on sabbatical leave by more than $450,000 altogether. And who can forget the UConn Health Center’s having kept a professor on the payroll for five months after he had stopped showing up for work in 2018. He had been murdered by his wife but it took five months for anyone in authority to notice that he wasn’t doing his job anymore.

Two members of the state Senate’s Republican minority issued a statement about the Correction Department audit, asking if the department would try to recover the $161,000 from the improper year-and-a-half paid vacation. But even the most embarrassing audits seldom prompt any acknowledgment from legislators, and especially not from Democratic legislators, since the state administration is controlled — or, rather, often left uncontrolled — by a Democratic governor.

Connecticut Inside Investigator reported the other day that government employees in Connecticut are the most unionized government employees in the country. This is in large part because state law virtually requires their unionization and, through binding arbitration of their contracts, gives them great control over their compensation and work rules. Since their members are often the beneficiaries of the mismanagement identified by the state auditors, the unions don’t complain about it. Indeed, the great effort the unions make at election time to sustain the regime that is indifferent to such mismanagement may be why so few candidates for state office dare to question it.

But if voters ever tire of Connecticut’s rapidly increasing cost of living, this expensive mismanagement may be worth remembering at the election for the General Assembly two months hence.

* * *

IS ANYBODY HOME?: Connecticut might be safer if anyone in the chief court administrator’s office and the chief state’s attorney’s office read the newspapers or maybe just cared a little more.   

Last week the Hartford Courant reported that a Windsor man has been arrested and charged with drunken driving in four incidents in the state since last December. Other charges against him include driving under suspension and driving without insurance.

He has yet to be brought to trial and after his most recent arrest he was released on bail again. It’s not hard to imagine a deadly end to this crime spree if no one in authority thinks it’s urgent. 

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

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Baseball stadium isn’t crucial for turning Hartford around; housing is

By Chris Powell

While downtown Hartford’s Dunkin’ Park, which opened in 2017, may be the most beautiful minor-league baseball stadium in the country, it will be a long time before it can be considered a success. 

For the Hartford Courant reported the other day that city government is losing more than $3.7 million per year on the stadium, the difference between the income the stadium brings to the city — a little more than $900,000 annually — and the $4.6 million the city pays annually in interest and principal on the nearly $69 million it borrowed to build the stadium. Almost $56 million remains to be paid.

When the stadium idea was conceived a decade ago it was presented as a way of revitalizing Hartford even as city government was essentially bankrupt. Predictably enough, the project’s execution was quickly botched with a 25% cost overrun, then with the firing of the original contractor, and then with a $10 million payment to the fired contractor to settle its lawsuit against the city for damages. It was a caricature of urban public administration in Connecticut. 

So without any substantial debate or even awareness of what it was doing, the General Assembly approved Gov. Dannel P. Malloy’s legislation to have state government assume Hartford’s bonded debt of $500 million, essentially reimbursing the city for its incompetence with the stadium project and for a lot more previous incompetence. Producing big Democratic pluralities in state elections is really all the competence city governments in Connecticut need to get by.

No one now in charge of state or city government bears any responsibility for the stadium project. While the administration of Hartford’s new mayor, Arunan Arulampalam, is stuck with the payments, he and nearly everyone else in authority likes to pretend that the stadium is a big part of Hartford’s chances for revitalization. 

The present is something else. At least Hartford City Councilman Joshua Michtom acknowledged to the Courant that the stadium has yet to produce the promised economic development and property tax revenue growth. “It has not in any way that we can measure helped the city’s coffers,” Michtom says, noting that the stadium will cost the city money for another two or three decades, “a generational black eye in terms of funding necessary services.”

The big problem with Hartford and Connecticut’s other cities is that they are too full of people who need government services — that is, too full of poverty, which state government profitably manufactures in the cities with its education and welfare policies. Without those policies and the many people who haven’t learned to support themselves the government class might collapse. 

Like hospitals, museums, and concert halls, a stadium may be an attraction for a city, but probably not so much for a small one. After all, the Yard Goats, Dunkin’ Park’s tenant, play only about 70 home games per year, leaving 295 dates to fill if the park’s value is to be maximized.

The attraction most needed by Hartford and Connecticut’s other cities is market-rate, middle-class housing for people who don’t need extra government services, people who can pay their own way. Fortunately Hartford city government has started to recognize this and is acting accordingly with development plans. 

Connecticut’s housing supply is so tight that almost any sound, new middle-class housing probably can be filled by owners or renters. These days even middle-class people with children might consider city living because regional “magnet” schools allow escape from neighborhood schools overwhelmed with neglected children. 

If a middle-class influx into housing in the city reached critical mass, supermarkets and the other necessities and accoutrements of middle-class life might follow. The decline of the city might be halted or even reversed. City living used to make sense and could again. 

Of course such good things might happen in the city if welfare and education policy ever elevated the poor instead of keeping them poor and dependent on government and scaring the middle class away. But there aren’t yet many advocates for that. 

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

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