Block housing development and your taxes may go up

By Chris Powell

Blame for rising property taxes in Connecticut may be shared more broadly than most people think. It’s not just the fault of elected officials who yield to the demands of special interests, particularly the demands of government employee unions for higher wages and benefits. 

Property taxes are determined in large part by property values, and the great inflation created by the spectacular overspending and overborrowing by the Trump and Biden administrations and Congress has increased the nominal value of nearly everything, including residential property. 

Then there is the flood of illegal immigration, a Biden administration policy. The millions of illegal immigrants admitted in recent years have to live somewhere, and the federal government and state government are often subsidizing their housing, causing scarcity. Without so many illegal immigrants and government subsidies for their housing, demand would be reduced, more properties would be vacant, and residential rents, prices, and property values would fall.

There is still another cause of housing scarcity and rising property values and taxes: state and municipal policy that restricts supply, like exclusive zoning and what is called farmland preservation, a politically correct mechanism for preventing housing development. People tend not to associate these policies with rising property taxes, which homeowners pay directly and tenants pay indirectly through their rent. 

But maybe the association will be noticed after more periodic municipality-wide property revaluations like the ones New London and Norwich recently underwent.

According to The Day of New London, residential property values in the little city just rose by an average of 60% and many people are shocked by the corresponding increase in their property taxes, since commercial property values didn’t rise that much if at all.

With employment booming at submarine manufacturer Electric Boat in neighboring Groton, New London and nearby towns especially need more housing. But since the housing shortage, rising property values, and rising property taxes are statewide and national phenomena, any town could facilitate a building boom and still not knock housing values down much.

At least people should take their rising property tax bills as a reminder not to complain so much about new housing. Obstructing new housing means scarcity, and scarcity means housing prices will be bid up, taking housing taxes with them.

LEAVE IDAHO ALONE: Abortion rights are more secure in Connecticut than they are in many other states.

Having long ago incorporated into its own law the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Roe v. Wade, Connecticut leaves abortion unrestricted prior to fetal viability, and even then no one is guarding against the abortion of viable fetuses. Connecticut also allows abortions for minors without parental consent, enabling child molesters to erase the evidence of their crimes. 

Still, the abortion policies of other states have Connecticut Attorney General William Tong in a frenzy. Lately Tong has been fulminating about Idaho’s restrictive abortion law and has even had filed a brief in an Idaho case in federal court though the case has no bearing on Connecticut.

Speaking of Idaho’s law the other day, the attorney general said: “This threat and severe state abortion bans are not going away. We’re going to have to keep fighting these fights in every court in every state where patients’ lives and reproductive freedom are at risk.”

But why? Reversing Roe two years ago, the U.S. Supreme Court didn’t restrict abortion anywhere. It just returned abortion policy to the states, restoring some federalism.   

Who is Connecticut’s attorney general to seek to override democracy in Idaho? Presumably if enough of the women of Idaho wanted their state’s abortion law to be like Connecticut’s, they could mobilize to achieve it. Apparently many if not most women in Idaho want abortion restricted. 

No one has to live in Idaho, or Connecticut.

And where does the attorney general find the authority to intervene in cases having no bearing on Connecticut? State law confines the attorney general’s office to legal matters “in which the state is a party or is interested.” Abortion law in Idaho is not a state interest in Connecticut, just a partisan political one.

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

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Democrats get rid of Biden to save themselves, not the country

By CHRIS POWELL

A historian as much as a politician, Winston Churchill foresaw the outcome of events like those of the Democratic Party’s last few weeks. 

“The loyalties which center upon No. 1 are enormous,” Churchill wrote. “If he trips, he must be sustained. If he makes mistakes, they must be covered. If he sleeps, he must not be wantonly disturbed. If he is no good, he must be pole-axed.”

Over the weekend President Biden was pole-axed by the grandees of his party, most of whom had realized that the rest of the party might be pole-axed if he remained at the top of their ticket. 

Only a few Democratic leaders had the courage to express the obvious in public — that the president’s mental and physical decline was worsening, not reversing, the more he tried to regain support. But enough leaders withheld their support and thus echoed polls showing that an overwhelming majority of ordinary Democrats wanted Biden to withdraw. 

Among Connecticut’s Democratic leaders only U.S. Rep. Jim Himes was forthright and candid in urging the president to give up his campaign for renomination. Returning from what turned out to be a politically convenient vacation, Governor Lamont meekly concurred with Himes. Other members of the state’s congressional delegation and the state’s constitutional officers took no position but their lack of enthusiasm for Biden — and their lack of courage — were implied. Maybe privately they urged the president to retire.

They may be lucky if their complicity with Biden’s years of failing intellect and stamina, complicity that for some included claims that the president remained sharp and vigorous, does not become an issue in their own campaigns this year or two years from now. The essential fact is that they would not risk their political careers for the national interest in removing an incapable leader. 

But then most Democratic leaders, including most of those who called for Biden to retire, might have been glad of his re-election despite his disability. Indeed, most now will not complain about his remaining in office for another six months in his diminished condition, which is obvious to the world. (The satirical internet newspaper, The Babylon Bee, imagined the State Department sending a letter to the country’s adversaries asking them to attack only between 10 a.m. and 4 p.m. Eastern Time, when the president is said to be most alert.)

Of course in pushing Biden out Democratic leaders think the party’s chances will improve with the presidential nomination conferred on Vice President Kamala Harris. Democrats well may hope that the sleaziness of their coup soon will be forgotten by most voters.

But Harris, who arose from increasingly nutty and impoverished California, seems not much better regarded nationally than Biden and has not been vetted much more than, say, the Republican nominee for vice president, Ohio Sen. J.D. Vance, who has all of a year and a half of experience in government.

In any case Democrats seem to have forgotten that long before his senility became obvious Biden was extremely unpopular because of the record of what the Republicans now may delight in calling the “Biden-Harris administration” — a record of ruinous inflation, declining living standards, a flood of illegal immigration, a proxy war against a nuclear power, social disintegration, rising homelessness, and putting boys and men in female sports, bathrooms, and prisons.

Can Republicans and their erratic presidential nominee, Donald Trump, press these issues effectively without Biden at the top of the other ticket? And are the Republicans and Trump unaware of the fun Democrats might have with the recent Republican convention, whose final night included an incoherent rapper and a cartoonish former professional wrestler introducing Trump’s own interminable descent back into narcissism?

Have the Democrats noticed that Senator Vance told the convention “We’re done catering to Wall Street” just hours after Trump told Bloomberg News that he will consider the embodiment of Wall Street, JPMorganChase CEO Jamie Dimon, for treasury secretary? 

Have Trump and Vance noticed their contradiction? Has even Bloomberg News?  

It’s ready to be noticed, and now that Biden is out, the election may not be over anymore.

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

Municipalities should be posting their most interesting records

By Chris Powell

Greenwich First Selectman Fred Camillo is sore at people who, he says, make lots of requests for access to town records under Connecticut’s freedom-of-information law. “Some people are abusing the system,” Camillo says, and requesting town records “has been weaponized and we’re getting harassed.”

So his administration has begun posting on Greenwich’s internet site the names of all FOI requesters and the subjects of their requests.

This is perfectly legal. No one who requests access to a public record can very well object if his own request is a public record too. But Camillo’s new practice seems meant to retaliate against and embarrass requesters. It’s mistaken and almost surely will fail.

For anyone who is making FOI requests mainly to annoy town officials isn’t likely to be embarrassed in the least by publicity. To the contrary, such people probably will welcome publicity and figure that their renown will help intimidate town officials and employees in the future.

Besides, Connecticut’s FOI law now authorizes government officials to petition the Freedom of Information Commission for relief from a “vexatious requester,” a person whose requests for records are so numerous and redundant as to constitute abuse. While they are few, there are such people and the commission has taken action against some, exempting the government agency being harassed from having to respond to the requester. 

So if First Selectman Camillo really thinks any FOI requester is “abusing the system,” he should identify the abuser in a complaint to the FOI Commission, whereupon the commission may call a hearing that may be as much an inconvenience to the requester as the requester’s requests are to town officials.

There’s no harm in posting FOI requests on a town’s internet site as Greenwich is doing, but there’s not much public service in it either. Indeed, if a municipality or state agency is going to put more effort into posting records on its internet site, many records would be of far more public interest than FOI requests.

For example, municipalities could post their payrolls as state government does. Some municipal government salaries are extraordinary but overlooked. Excessive overtime for police officers and others is often a scandal.

Municipal employee job evaluations and disciplinary records should be posted too. Those records are where some big scandals are hidden. 

While teacher evaluations, alone among all government employee evaluations, long have been exempted from disclosure under state FOI law — a testament to the influence of teacher unions and the subservience of state legislators to the worst of special interests — nothing prevents municipalities from disclosing teacher evaluations voluntarily just as municipalities are required to disclose the evaluations of other employees.

With local journalism weakening, these days most municipal governments have little serious news coverage and few if any reporters inspect disciplinary records regularly. 

Posting more records about government’s own performance would show the public far more about who is really “abusing the system.” Any annoyance to government officials from this greater transparency might be offset by accountability and better management.

SLICING AWAY AT DEMOCRACY: Many people who achieve public office quickly come to realize the truth of the old saying, “To govern is to choose.” French President Charles de Gaulle clarified that governing is always “to choose among disadvantages.” Of course choosing can be a drag.

So some non-profit social-service groups want Connecticut to impose a special tax on telecommunications services whose revenue would be dedicated to social-service groups. 

But why should cell phone or internet users particularly pay for social services? There’s no causal relationship between telecommunications and social-service needs. It’s just that the social-service groups don’t want to have to compete for state government money as everybody else has to. With a dedicated tax their money would be guaranteed.

If choosing is restricted this way, over time the practice would slice away at democracy and insulate many recipients of government money. Connecticut has done enough of that already.

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

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Dodging a bullet frees Trump to become civil and serious

By Chris Powell

Responding to the attempt to assassinate his Republican challenger, Donald Trump, and the hatefulness that has infected national politics, President Biden told the nation Sunday, “It’s time to cool it down.” It would be good if Trump expressed a similar thought this week as he accepts the Republican National Convention’s presidential nomination for the third time.

Having just survived a shooting after facing criminal prosecutions that would not have been brought against him except for politics, Trump may be entitled to more rage and narcissism. Will he realize that the assassination attempt has emphasized his martyrdom to enough people and won him some sympathy so that more rage from him would be unnecessary and counterproductive, and that the election is likely his if he can indeed “cool it down”?

Polls suggest that amid high inflation, a flood of illegal immigration, another “forever” war, and ridiculous wokeness the Biden administration is widely regarded as a disaster. Last week Connecticut U.S. Rep. Jim Himes, D-4th District, urged Biden to give up renomination, Governor Lamont quietly concurred, and Connecticut’s U.S. senators, Richard Blumenthal and Chris Murphy, hinted that Biden is no longer up to his job. If even leading Democrats in solidly Democratic Connecticut can be that candid about it, the disaster is beyond obvious.

But polls also suggest that, outside the Republican base, Trump’s demeanor is a disaster. His policies may make more sense than Biden’s but his demeanor is preventing him from winning the votes he most needs, the votes in the middle. Biden’s collapse into senility at his debate with Trump on June 27 should have quickly pushed Trump into a 15-point lead, but the polls barely changed. At least prior to the assassination attempt half the country still preferred even a comatose Biden to a manic, blustering, bullying, and insulting Trump.   

Both sides have been poisoning politics, though the Democrats, panicking over Biden since the debate, have been doing it more, as by likening Trump to Hitler. Now that the camouflage long given to Biden’s mental and physical decline by the White House staff, Democratic leaders, and national news organizations has been stripped away, few people think he is capable of being president for another six months, much less another four years.

But Trump does not yet inspire much more confidence.

Trump has embodied well-deserved contempt for government and politics. But contempt is easy; governing and building consensus are hard, and Trump’s four years in power, far from revealing him as the murderous totalitarian of liberal paranoia, showed him to be mainly lazy even when his policy was correct. 

Somehow Ronald Reagan got away with running against the federal government not only when he was challenging the inept Jimmy Carter in 1980 but even when he was running for re-election in 1984, after having been in charge of the government for four years. Maybe Reagan’s good humor and cordial demeanor caused voters to overlook the irony. 

But Trump lacks good humor and cordiality, and awful as the Biden administration is, many people still may remember the personnel chaos and backbiting of the Trump administration and Trump’s own incessant angry or insulting tweets from the White House. Tweeting isn’t governing.

Has the bullet he barely dodged taught Trump anything? The country may never know what exactly was in the mind of the young man who fired it, but the country is full of people who might have rejoiced if Trump had not dodged the bullet, just as the country is full of people who might rejoice at Biden’s unnatural demise. That is an environment for civil war.

At least the assassination attempt may have taught the Democrats something. Since last weekend they have been sending wishes for a quick recovery to the man they had just been denouncing as the reincarnation of Hitler. Insincere, of course, but a welcome return to civility.    

Can Trump become civil, and serious? Or does he not want to be president again that much? 

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

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Connecticut’s higher education won’t recover until it gives more value

By CHRIS POWELL

Connecticut’s four regional state universities and its 12 community colleges are looking enviously at Massachusetts, which, after spending a lot more money, seems to be reversing the decline in enrollment at its own public institutions of higher education following nine down years. One technique used by Massachusetts has been to make attendance at community college free for people 25 and older.

Applauding Massachusetts, the chancellor of the Connecticut State Colleges and Universities system, Terrence Cheng, says, “With that type of investment, we would see similar impact here in Connecticut. There’s zero question in my mind.”  

Yet enrollment at Connecticut’s regional universities and community colleges has continued to fall even as state government has increased their appropriations for the last two years. Since 2018 enrollment at the regional universities is down 12% and down 27% at the community colleges. In response the universities and colleges system has reduced programs and raised tuition, distressing faculty and students.

But the enrollment declines are emergencies only if the universities and colleges are to be sustained for their own sake — only if they are ends in themselves and not the means to an important end. That is, increasing the productive capacity and appreciation of life by Connecticut’s residents. 

Meanwhile developments are screaming that higher education is grossly overvalued and overpriced if not often an outright racket run by higher educators.

That’s partly what the national college student loan scandal is about, with millions of former students throughout the country emerging from college carrying substantial debt only to discover themselves unqualified for or unable to find jobs enabling them to repay their loans and live comfortable lives. 

The other part of the scandal is the Biden administration’s effort to forgive student loans, whereby the debt is transferred to taxpayers generally, including people who paid their own way through college or didn’t go to college at all — electricians, plumbers, nurses, mechanics, truck drivers, cashiers, and so forth — but who nevertheless are being taxed to pay for someone else’s degree in gender studies, art history, theater, and similar pretenses of education.

Where has all the wasted money gone? It went to higher educators, and less because of the supposed great value of higher education — a myth exploded by the student loan scandal — than because educators are a huge, politically active, and influential special interest before which most elected officials cower.

Of course not all higher education is worthless, but the student loan scandal shows that on average it deserves substantial reduction. 

Public colleges and universities may not be as overpriced as private ones, but then nearly everything in government is overpriced simply because of government’s lack of accountability. Chancellor Cheng’s annual salary is a clue — $440,000, far more than the salaries of any of Connecticut’s statewide constitutional officers or members of Congress. (No, he doesn’t coach a varsity sport.)

Anyone making that kind of money should have the courage and honesty to acknowledge that Connecticut’s education problem is not higher but lower education, where most students never master their studies and so never gain an understanding of civics and their country’s history and where their proficiency declines even as more money is spent on teaching them.

As with everything else in government, the objective with higher education should be to get value from it, not just to sustain enrollments and keep it going to satisfy everyone on its payroll.

Making community college free to students in Massachusetts hasn’t made higher education there more valuable; it has just concealed the value question by transferring more of the expense to non-students. When higher education starts providing more value, enrollments will take care of themselves.

TWO BLACK COMMISSIONERS: Last week’s column about the firing of Chief Public Defender TaShun Bowden-Lewis, Connecticut’s first Black chief public defender, by the Public Defender Services Commission and her lawsuit accusing the commission of racism asserted that one of the commission’s six members is Black. Two are.   

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

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Extending medical insurance rewards illegal immigration

By Chris Powell

Connecticut’s nullification of federal immigration law proceeded this month as state government extended its welfare system’s medical insurance to illegal immigrant children by three years, from 12 and under to 15 and under. The children being added will be able to keep their state coverage until they turn 19 — and maybe, as seems likely, by the time they turn 19 Connecticut will have extended eligibility to a higher age.

Such gradualism is how Governor Lamont and the Democratic majority in the General Assembly have been handling the issue for years now. They have been maintaining both that decency requires covering all illegal immigrant children and — in contradiction — that the state can afford to cover only a few thousand more every year. This gradualism obscures the budgetary and nullification issues enough that most people don’t notice and make a fuss about them.

While the policy being pursued by state government may make political sense, it is still mistaken. Its logic is that Connecticut somehow can afford to lift all of Central America and much of the rest of the world out of poverty in the next decade, and it encourages more people to violate federal immigration law.

Advocates of extending the medical insurance to more illegal immigrant children note that even without such insurance Connecticut’s hospitals will always have to treat illegal immigrant children when they come to emergency rooms with urgent conditions, and that when such patients or their guardians don’t pay, hospitals essentially will transfer the expense to state government and patients who do pay for themselves. 

But this rationale does not acknowledge that providing medical insurance to illegal immigrant children rewards and incentivizes illegal immigration to Connecticut and that if the state did not extend the insurance, the parents or guardians of the children being covered might relocate to other states providing coverage. It’s not as if illegal immigrants in the United States have no choice but to live in Connecticut. Like everyone else they may look for the place where they are treated best.

While Governor Lamont supported the latest extension of insurance, when it took effect the other day he implied that he had some reservations about it, saying it should be accompanied by “comprehensive immigration reform.” But of course it has not been accompanied by “comprehensive immigration reform,” and the governor didn’t specify what “comprehensive immigration reform” is. 

Is it mass amnesty, making all illegal immigrants legal, as many other Democrats want? 

Is it deporting all 12 million or so illegal immigrants estimated to be in the country, the objective that has been proclaimed by presidential candidate Donald Trump without an explanation of how the logistical difficulties would be met?

Is it to continue having open borders most of the time, as advocated by Connecticut U.S. Sen. Chris Murphy via the dishonest “compromise” legislation he proposed in February with Sens. James Lankford, R-Oklahoma, and Kyrsten Sinema, the former Democrat and now nominal independent from Arizona?

In any case the millions of illegal and unvetted immigrants who have entered the country since President Biden took office are not an accident but policy, a policy of devaluing citizenship and hastening change in the country’s demographics and its democratic and secular culture. Extending medical insurance to illegal immigrants — on top of driver’s licenses and other government identification documents, housing, and food subsidies — is part of that policy. So is forbidding state and municipal police from assisting federal immigration agents, as Connecticut forbids them, thereby making itself a “sanctuary state.”

If illegal immigration is never to be simply stopped and immigration law simply enforced, the country won’t be a country anymore.

The United States long has welcomed immigration and should continue to do so. But immigration must be limited to what the country can assimilate in normal circumstances. A desperate national housing shortage, strain on hospitals, and schools overwhelmed with students who don’t speak English signify the obliviousness to illegal immigration by both the federal government and state government.

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

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By rewarding racism bunk, Connecticut will get more of it

By CHRIS POWELL

Last year former state Public Health Commissioner Renee D. Coleman-Mitchell, who is Black, induced the Lamont administration to pay her $200,000 to settle her lawsuit charging that her firing by the governor three years earlier was racist. Now former Chief Public Defender TaShun Bowden-Lewis, who is also Black, is suing for damages as well, charging that her firing this year by the Public Defender Services Commission was racist.

What’s going on here? 

Is Governor Lamont really racist? 

Are the members of the public defender commission — appointed by the governor, the chief justice, and legislative leaders — really racist too? That might seem strange, since two of the commissioners are Black, one is Puerto Rican, and two of the commissioners were appointed by the chief justice, who is Black.

State agency commissioners and agency chief executives typically serve at the pleasure of the governor or the board that appoints them. Lamont fired Coleman-Mitchell at the height of the recent virus epidemic. He seemed unhappy with her performance, as she seemed to be with his. The public defender commission fired Bowden-Lewis after many months of controversy over her abuse of her colleagues and her repeated insubordination to the commission. 

In settling her case, Coleman-Mitchell essentially repudiated her accusation of racism, agreeing with the state that the record of her separation from state government would be changed to read that she resigned in good standing, even as the settlement also forbade her from ever again seeking employment in the Public Health Department. (Two hundred thousand dollars can change many people’s stories.)

On its face Bowden-Lewis’ lawsuit is even more ridiculous than Coleman-Mitchell’s. But Coleman-Mitchell’s settlement probably invited Bowden-Lewis’ lawsuit. For government’s money is often considered nobody’s money by those who dispose it, and the money paid to Coleman-Mitchell has proclaimed the profitability of a racism accusation where politics precludes efficiency and good sense.

Together the lawsuits also have proclaimed the danger of hiring done partly or entirely in pursuit of “diversity, equity, and inclusion” and political correctness rather than competence and decency alone. “DEI,” a euphemism for the now-discredited form of racial discrimination that itself was euphemized as “affirmative action,” will, as “affirmative action” did, impugn its nominal beneficiaries, putting their competence under suspicion and then making their removal for incompetence more difficult. It will disserve everyone.

As the late newspaper columnist Charles Krauthammer wrote, racism will be over not just when people can be hired regardless of race but fired regardless of race. Connecticut state government won’t be over racism as long as it remains too timid to talk back to opportunistic accusations and instead pays small fortunes to make them go away, accepting such nuisance settlements as the cost of doing business in the P.C. age. 

HIDDEN TAXES RISE: Most people think Connecticut’s two major electric utilities, Eversource and United Illuminating, are ripping them off. That’s exactly what state government wants people to think. 

The companies no longer generate electricity but only distribute it. Customers can choose their supplier even as most still leave it to their utility to do the choosing for them. The companies make no money from this. They make their money only from distribution. 

Indeed, it’s starting to seem that state government makes more money from electricity than the utilities do.

For the Connecticut Examiner reported the other day that as of this month electricity bills in Connecticut will include the highest government-mandated charges in 20 years.

The charges, essentially hidden state taxes, pay for what are called public benefits — certain government programs and policies that state government has decided should be financed by electricity users. The Examiner says henceforth 25% of a typical Eversource customer’s electric bill and 18% of a typical UI customer’s bill will result from public benefits charges.  

State government could fund these programs and policies through regular taxes, but regular taxes can’t be blamed on someone else. Stuffing electricity bills with hidden taxes lets elected officials scapegoat the utility companies, and scapegoating is state policy.

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

A previous version of this column said one of the members of the Public Defender Services Commission is Black. Two are.

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Mansions don’t foil housing and taxing them won’t build it

By Chris Powell

Apparently you don’t have to do much thinking to run a “think tank” in Washington, or at least not a liberal “think tank.” The Connecticut Mirror reports that two such “think tanks” — the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities and the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy — have produced a study concluding that Connecticut could raise tens of millions of dollars every year to spend on reducing homelessness (or spend on something else) by imposing an extra conveyance tax on the state’s most expensive homes.

Well, duh! Connecticut could get that kind of money by raising taxes or imposing new ones on nearly anything, not just property transfers.

What is the connection between Connecticut’s desperate shortage of housing and its most expensive homes? There isn’t one. The mansions of “mansion tax” proposals aren’t why the state is short of housing and why housing prices have been rising so fast. While mansions typically occupy larger lots, Connecticut remains full of vacant land and, especially in its cities, decrepit former industrial and residential sites. The state has plenty of room for more housing. Land hogging by the wealthy is not getting in the way.

Connecticut’s housing shortage has four major causes.

First is the soaring inflation of the last few years, engineered by President Biden and Congress. This has driven up prices and mortgage rates far faster than the incomes of ordinary people. People who own residential and other substantial property, especially the wealthy, profit from inflation, but most others suffer from it.

Another cause is the flood of illegal immigration, a matter of Democratic Party policy on both the federal and state levels. It may be no coincidence that the number of illegal immigrants estimated to be living in Connecticut, more than 100,000, is close to the number of housing units the state is said to lack.   

A cause of longer duration is exclusive zoning in suburbs and rural towns, zoning that discriminates against less expensive housing, particularly apartments and condominiums. Such zoning generally has community support, since most people don’t want their neighborhoods to become more crowded, though of course their own arrival may have increased the neighborhood’s population. 

Exclusive zoning has its own cause. In some places exclusive zoning arose long ago from racism or ethnic or religious bigotry. But for many years now exclusive zoning has been sustained mainly by fear of poor people generally, a fear largely justified by the disaster inflicted on the cities, their residents, and everyone else by mistaken state and federal welfare and education policies. People don’t want the pathologies of poverty — fatherlessness, child neglect, crime, ignorance, indolence, and dependence — imported into their neighborhoods by new housing accessible to the poor. This fear has produced zoning and community opposition that now often obstruct even middle-class, owner-occupied housing.

State government has responded with a law that weakens the use of exclusive zoning against housing, but it hasn’t been very effective, and in any case inflation, declining real wages, and illegal immigration still stand in the way.

That’s why that Washington “think tank” study on raising taxes on the sale of “mansions” and a similar proposal by state Senate President Martin M. Looney, D-New Haven, to impose a punitive statewide property tax on “mansions” are so dishonest. While these ideas will raise money, there’s no guarantee that much of it will be spent to build housing. More likely the money will be used as most tax revenue in Connecticut is used — to pay the compensation of government’s own employees, the Democratic Party’s campaign army, while punitive taxes on “mansions” provide camouflage for the real objective.

Housing supply can be increased without punitive taxes on large homes — by stopping inflation, enforcing immigration law, having state government cover all extra school and police costs of new housing, and revoking the welfare and education policies that manufacture poverty. 

But that would take the fun out of blaming “mansions” for the declining living standards caused by elected officials who style themselves defenders of the poor even as they make poverty worse.

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

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Water utility purchase bill is Democratic power grab

By Chris Powell

Government ownership of utility companies can work in the public interest, at least where government wants to work in the public interest. Whether it wants to is always a fair question in Connecticut.

The General Assembly again failed the public interest the other day when it abruptly jammed a weighty bill onto its agenda for a special session that was supposed to address only a few technical matters. The weighty matter was a proposal to authorize the South Central Regional Water Authority to make a bid for Aquarion Water Co., which serves 72 municipalities, all but 13 in Connecticut. Aquarion is owned by Eversource Energy, which may sell the company to raise cash.

The bill passed easily, mainly with Democratic support. 

Connecticut has a few small municipally owned electric companies that perform well but don’t generate their own power; they just deliver power. Their success is no guarantee that government’s acquisition and operation of a major utility would work.

Many basic questions about government’s acquisition of Aquarion were not answered before the legislature approved the legislation, because the legislature didn’t even try to answer them. The bill got no public hearing and little research.

The bill’s advocates said no one should worry, because if the water authority acquired Aquarion, it would hold public hearings then, and residents of the authority’s 20 member towns could participate. 

But the new law may be seen as setting a precedent involving the whole state — government acquisition of a major utility. Settling such a substantial issue without any public participation is a bad habit of the legislature’s seemingly eternal Democratic majority, which often stuffs into unrelated bills matters that got no hearing and that, indeed, one Democrat or another wanted to sneak into law. 

One such bill, couched in vague language that only its supporters knew was meant to be construed to give unemployment benefits to strikers, passed the legislature in its recent regular session but was vetoed by Governor Lamont in large part because of the deception in which many legislators of his own party engaged.

Besides, few people in the 20 towns served by the regional water authority know much about the authority and who their representatives on its board are. But some people in those towns are familiar with their state legislators and turn to them about important state and regional issues.

In their special session a few legislators saw important issues in the water authority’s bid for Aquarion. Among them:

— Aquarion is said to be weak financially, so to keep it solvent the water authority might need to raise Aquarion’s prices for water. 

— Since the authority is a government agency, rate increases for former Aquarion customers would be exempt from regulation by the Public Utilities Regulatory Authority. 

— Under the authority, Aquarion’s property would become exempt from municipal property taxes, causing revenue losses to the authority’s member towns.

— Where would the authority get the money to purchase Aquarion? Since Eversource paid almost $1.7 billion for Aquarion in 2017 and the company is much bigger than the authority itself, the authority would need a lot of money to purchase it and could do so only by selling bonds or having state government sell bonds to raise the money.

Advocates of the legislation argued that it was urgent to act because Aquarion might be sold by Eversource to private investors at any moment. This was nonsense. 

For even under new ownership by private investors, Aquarion would remain a public utility and state government could legislate it out of business, acquiring it through eminent domain by paying its owners a fair-market price.

No, the only urgency of the Aquarion legislation seems to have been that Democratic legislative leaders saw an unexpected opportunity to make government bigger and grab more power and patronage. Sure enough, after the bill passed Mike Cerulli of CTCapitolReport.com disclosed that the former chief of staff for the state Senate’s Democratic majority, New Haven Democratic Chairman Vincent Mauro Jr., had just registered as a lobbyist for the water authority.

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

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If democracy is at stake, Connecticut Democrats won’t save it

By Chris Powell

Despite President Biden’s disastrous performance in last week’s debate with Donald Trump, Connecticut journalists could not find one leading Democrat in the state ready to ask the president to drop his campaign for re-election and let the party nominate someone presentable.

Some of those leading Connecticut Democrats say democracy will be in jeopardy if demon Trump wins, but do they really believe it is or care if it is? After all, Trump has a chance only because of the horrible record of the Biden administration and the glaring senility of the president himself. If the Democrats nominated a moderate and articulate candidate who took different policy positions, Trump’s chances would diminish.

But those leading Connecticut Democrats may figure that they have nothing at stake personally in the Biden debacle — may figure that Connecticut is so Democratic that Biden will carry the state even if he is comatose. Democrats in competitive states may be more concerned for the country as well as their own careers.

Challenging a president or governor of one’s own party takes great courage even when the incumbent’s record is as terrible as Biden’s. The chief executive may retaliate ruthlessly against those in his party who cross him. 

But such a challenge can be successful. A challenge by U.S. Sen. Eugene J. McCarthy to the Democrats’ renomination of President Lyndon B. Johnson in 1968 amid the disaster of the Vietnam war garnered so much support from ordinary Democrats in states with primaries that Johnson was induced to withdraw.

Even the war’s supporters in Congress and Johnson himself knew the war was a disaster — probably unwinnable, not worth winning, and not being fought to be won. But fearful of the president, most Democrats in Congress stayed silent. It was left to McCarthy and ordinary Democrats to show that the emperor had no clothes. Their party’s leadership was cowardly and corrupt.

Back then no one with any standing in Connecticut’s Democratic Party supported McCarthy while Johnson remained a candidate. Protecting their standing was more important to them than protecting the country. But at least back then Johnson’s supporters didn’t claim that democracy itself was at stake. 

To the contrary, back then establishment Democrats strove to prevent democracy — to prevent primary elections. 

Now the position of Connecticut’s leading Democrats is, in effect, that democracy is at risk, in large part because their presidential candidate is senile, but they can’t put themselves at risk to do something about it. 

This is a good time for Connecticut voters to reconsider their one-party state and chasten those in charge for their arrogance.

In any case Democrats frightened by general recognition of Biden’s mental decline seem to have forgotten that he is even more unpopular because of his administration’s record. A substitute Democratic nominee would not deserve election even against Trump if he ran on open borders and massive illegal and unvetted immigration; provoking Russia with a proxy war on its border; protecting Hamas; grossly inflationary federal spending; wokeness and transgenderism; assaults on free speech; and politicization of criminal justice.

In the long term those policies are more objectionable than Biden’s senility. Too bad for Connecticut that few Republicans here are challenging these policies and will have the campaign money necessary to do so, and that most of the state’s journalists think Biden’s policies are great.

MORE SCHOOLS CRASH: Add Stamford to the list of Connecticut cities whose schools are getting out of control.

Teachers at Stamford’s Turn of River Middle School say they are being abused, bullied, threatened, and even assaulted by students, and that the school administration has failed to report the assaults to the police.

The administration says it will add a third security officer to the school. That officer is needed not to protect the school against outsiders but against its own students, since under Connecticut law even the most disruptive students are almost impossible to expel, lest their feelings be hurt and the public catch sight of social disintegration.   

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

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