If ‘public benefits’ require deception, get rid of them

By CHRIS POWELL

Misconduct by its recently disgraced and departed chairwoman, Marissa Gillett, has Connecticut’s Public Utilities Regulatory Authority on the defensive. Past utility rate decisions have been put in legal jeopardy, utility companies are getting angry and aggressive, Gillett’s Democratic allies in the General Assembly have been discredited for their complicity with her power grabbing and lies, longstanding criticism by Republican legislators has been vindicated, and state government’s infamous “public benefits charges” on electricity bills are becoming a political issue again.

Blumenthal chastises merchants who are more honest than he is

There’s plenty of guilt by association to go around in Connecticut

Get real about speed limits and student suspensions

Some of those charges were recently removed by legislation with their financed transferred to state government borrowing, but most of the charges remain, comprising about 20% of customer electric bills, an estimated $1 billion annually. So at a Hartford Business Journal conference last month, a senior vice president of Connecticut’s largest electric utility, Eversource, Digaunto Chatterjee, called for removing the charges from electric bills entirely and financing their programs through the state budget.

For some time this has been the position of Republican legislators, who note that the charges function not only as a hidden tax but also as a tax on a necessity of life. But the electric companies, being heavily regulated and long having been scapegoated for Connecticut’s high electricity prices, had not been taking sides on the issue, lest they aggravate their adversaries.

Governor Lamont and most Democratic legislators are still resisting serious reform with the charges. The House chairman of the General Assembly’s Energy and Technology Committee, Rep. Jonathan Steinberg, D-Westport, says it makes little no difference how the programs financed by the charges are paid for — by footnotes on electricity bills or by regular state government appropriations and formal taxes.

Steinberg is wrong. For if the “public benefits charges” were eliminated, the programs they finance would have to start competing for appropriations along with everything else state government spends money on. They would become part of the budget process, where the items financed by the charges would get far more scrutiny from the governor, legislators, news organizations, and the public than they get now when they are buried in electric bills.

The HBJ reported last week that the “public benefits charges” consist of 63 fees that are summarized on electric bills in two line items, a format that virtually prohibits intelligent review. Of course that’s the way the governor and most Democratic legislators like it. They don’t think they would gain much politically from a billion-dollar reduction in electricity costs if it came with a billion-dollar increase in the state budget and taxes. Then they might face another billion dollars’ worth of controversy as they converted from a system where the charges and the programs they finance are hidden to a system where they would jostle against everything else government money is wanted for. Maybe in such a public process the governor and legislators would have trouble justifying some of the charges. Maybe they would feel compelled to reduce or eliminate some of the programs.

Moving the charges to the state budget would be best but it’s not the only way to increase transparency and accountability. A modest improvement might be for state government to keep the charges and their programs but to recover their costs with a formal sales tax on electricity — itemized in bold lettering at the top of all electricity bills.  

That would get people’s attention even if it failed to explain the programs being financed by the charges. 

Some of those programs may be necessary for the stability of the electrical system, but some are environmental niceties and nuttiness and some are simply welfare subsidies that are fairly resented by people who pay their own electric bills.

If the main objective of the “public benefits charges” is to pay for necessary things, they can be financed by the state budget and formal taxes. 

If the main objective of the charges is just to conceal government expenses and deceive people, nothing is worth that much and programs financed that way should be scrapped.

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

Blumenthal chastises merchants who are more honest than he is

By CHRIS POWELL

What would the holidays be in Connecticut without U.S. Sen. Richard Blumenthal warning his constituents about the perils of the season — dangerous toys, fraudulent business practices, Republicans, and the like? (Poking the Russian bear on its own doorstep has yet to make the senator’s list.)

There’s plenty of guilt by association to go around in Connecticut

Get real about speed limits and student suspensions

Eastern Connecticut State University tries to revive the ‘noble savage’ myth

Last week the senator affected alarm about merchants who advertise products available for purchase with deferred payments — “buy now, pay later” promotions. People who purchase something by agreeing to pay in the future may find when the bill comes due that their financial situation has deteriorated. Worse, the senator notes, being late with a deferred payment may trigger penalty interest charges. 

Of course anyone who has graduated from high school might suspect these risks. But then maybe the senator understands that many Connecticut high school graduates can’t read, write, and do math at a high school or even an elementary school level. 

In any case the senator overlooks an argument in favor of “buy now, pay later” purchases, an argument that members of Congress especially should understand: inflation and the decline of the value of the U.S. dollar and wages paid in dollars. Amid inflation certain goods — if not worn out, damaged, or perishable — may actually increase in value and, when payment has to be made, may be worth more than their original price.

Indeed, Blumenthal misses the great irony in his warning people against deferred payment schemes: his having been for the last 15 years an enthusiastic supporter of the federal government’s own “buy now, pay later” policy. 

For the federal government increasingly finances itself with borrowing, and its total debt now exceeds $38 trillion, an unfathomable number. 

Government debt is not necessarily bad; it can be productive. But this is a matter of degree, and in recent years the federal debt has gone wild, as indicated by the country’s recent severe inflation and the heavy burden of federal government interest payments, estimated at about a trillion dollars annually and rising.

Most of this debt is not for long-lasting capital projects that will benefit the country for decades but for ordinary operating expenses and income supports, with the interest requiring payment far into the future by people who never benefited from the debt. 

This is borrowing for current expenses, which used to be considered immoral. But in national politics today, especially among Democrats like Blumenthal, money is believed to be infinite. (Most Republicans know better without acting much better.)

Today in Congress if any Democrat sees a need, actual or merely political, he’ll put it into an appropriations bill, and, if he’s friendly enough with the ranking Democrat on the House Appropriations Committee, Connecticut Rep. Rosa DeLauro, she’ll put it into the next federal budget with no concern about the federal debt, inflation, or interest burdens.

Congressmen love this system because it lets them distribute infinite goodies, essential or not, and pay for them indirectly, not with taxes but with inflation, a disguised tax few voters understand or can fix responsibility for.

That’s why the merchants promoting deferred payments are actually more honest than the senator who is warning his constituents against them. 

Stick to a merchant’s deferred payment plan and you’ll pay only as much as you signed up to pay. But with the federal government, whose costs are increasingly financed by borrowing, debt monetization, and inflation, you pay now, later, and — since the debt is never actually repaid at all, but just keeps rising — you pay for the rest of your life as well for what you get or once got from the federal government, and for what you didn’t get but others get or used to get.

So what’s really more dangerous — the toys Blumenthal is scorning, whose small parts a 2-year-old might pull off and swallow or stick in his nose or ear, or a government that, when the kid turns 18, will welcome him into adulthood largely ignorant and unskilled but, as a taxpayer, already heavily mortgaged?

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

There’s plenty of guilt by association to go around in Connecticut

By CHRIS POWELL

Connecticut’s Democratic state chairman, Danbury Mayor Roberto Alves, thinks he has discovered the decisive disqualification for the two declared candidates for next year’s Republican nomination for governor — Greenwich state Sen. Ryan Fazio and former New Britain Mayor Erin Stewart — and presumably for any Republican seeking elective office in Connecticut.

Get real about speed limits and student suspensions

Eastern Connecticut State University tries to revive the ‘noble savage’ myth

Poet explains to Senator Murphy why others don’t side with him

It’s a slight variation of the Democratic election strategy that has been in use for the last nine years: Just keep chanting: “Trump! Trump! Trump!”

Alves’ variation on the theme is to ask Fazio and Stewart, as he did in a recent newspaper essay, whether they would still like President Trump’s endorsement, now that Trump and the Republican majority in Congress are reducing or threatening to reduce federal food and medical insurance subsidies.

Those subsidies raise an important question: Whether their excesses, which include a lot of fraud, some of which has been manifested in Connecticut, can ever be eliminated without harming the deserving poor. One incident of such fraud was publicized again last week when former Bristol Democratic state Rep. Christopher Ziogas pleaded guilty to federal corruption charges involving Medicare and Medicaid, fraud in which Governor Lamont’s former social services commissioner was implicated, soon after which she retired.

State authorities did not prosecute this fraud — federal authorities did. Indeed, it’s a fair question as to whether state government in Connecticut ever will get serious about eliminating excesses in social welfare programs without the pressure of sharply reduced appropriations.

Alves is pitching guilt by association: Trump is a cruel megalomaniac and a Republican, Fazio and Stewart are Republicans who voted for Trump, therefore Fazio and Stewart are cruel megalomaniacs, and so are all others who voted for Trump, even reluctantly, perceiving him as the lesser evil.

All’s fair in love, war, and politics, and of course in the presidential election last year Republicans campaigned against Democrats as Alves is campaigning against Republicans now. Democrats who were supporting their party’s presidential candidate, first President Biden and then Vice President Kamala Harris, were accused of endorsing rampant inflation, illegal immigration, and transgenderism. Chanting “Trump! Trump! Trump!” as Democrats did last year failed to address these issues.

As Democratic state chairman, Alves could be especially attached to the Trump-chanting strategy because it might help avoid what should be the main issue in next year’s election in Connecticut — the record of the Lamont administration as the governor seeks a third term, as well as the longer record of the Democratic administration of the state since its last Republican governor, Jodi Rell, left office 14 years ago.

Connecticut has many problems: its long economic decline relative to the rest of the country; its high cost of living, especially with housing prices; its worsening poverty; and its many scandals of mismanagement in state agencies, scandals suggesting that the governor doesn’t pay enough attention. Awful as the president may be, Trump is not responsible for these problems.

It will be good if Fazio and Stewart can articulate these issues and it will be better still if they dare to specify alternative policies, especially toward the housing shortage. While the housing legislation just enacted by the General Assembly’s Democratic majority and the governor is mainly a sympathetic pose and is not likely to get much housing built, the Republican position on the housing shortage is mainly fear of the underclass.

But if Fazio and Stewart want to play Alves’ game about Trump’s endorsement, they could ask Alves whether the governor wants the endorsement of, say, Ziogas; his former deputy budget director, Konstantinos Diamantis, also just convicted on federal corruption charges; his disgraced former chairwoman of the Public Utilities Regulatory Authority, Marissa Gillett, who quit abruptly a few weeks ago when she was caught lying extravagantly; and former university Chancellor Terrence Cheng, who was removed for exploiting his expense account but still given severance pay of nearly $500,000.

Why can’t it just be taken for granted that both major political parties are terribly flawed? Maybe then there would be time to discuss issues.

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

-END-

Get real about speed limits and student suspensions

By CHRIS POWELL

As most drivers in Connecticut have noticed, for a few years now the state’s highways have seemed full of homicidal maniacs, like the one who was arrested last week by a state trooper for going 127 miles per hour on the limited-access portion of Route 6 in Mansfield, nearly double the speed limit there.

Eastern Connecticut State University tries to revive the ‘noble savage’ myth

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Apologists for government like to attribute this kind of stuff to the Covid-19 virus epidemic, just as educators like to blame the epidemic for the persistence of chronic absenteeism in schools. At least they’re not blaming it on Donald Trump yet.

More likely the increase in misconduct like this is being caused by society’s failure to impose adequate penalties for it. Hardly anyone is sent to prison for anything anymore so the governor and state legislators can boast about a falling prison population, and neither students nor parents are penalized for chronic absenteeism from school, unless a visit from a plaintive social worker can be considered punishment.  

But police traffic data from bucolic East Lyme may suggest that between a quarter and a third of the people in town may be trying to kill someone, since they are exceeding speed limits on local roads by 10 mph or more, even near schools. East Lyme’s police chief last week told The Day of New London that if the traffic-ticketing cameras that have been proposed for the town had been in place during a recent week and a $50 fine had been levied for driving 10 mph or more over the limit, the town would have been owed $1.3 million.

More likely the problem in East Lyme and elsewhere is that speed limits are set too low in ordinary settings — judging by the fudge factor East Lyme’s chief was using, at least 10 mph too low. As numerous as homicidal maniacs seem to be these days, they surely don’t yet constitute between a quarter and a third of the population. Most people driving 10 or 15 mph above the speed limit are doing so in their own neighborhoods, for which they may be presumed to have some respect, and they think their speed is safe.

The danger with adjusting to common practice is that if 30-mph limits are raised to a more realistic 40 mph, people may take it as license to drive 50. 

So maybe the most practical solution would be to raise most speed limits by 10 mph but also enforce the higher limits rigorously with traffic cameras everywhere. 

*

A week ago Connecticut’s Hearst newspapers thought it was big news that there are racial disparities in suspensions of students in the state’s public schools. That is, Black and Hispanic students are suspended more often relative to their numbers than white students are — Blacks three times as often, Hispanics twice as often. “Special education” students are also suspended far out of proportion to their numbers.

There’s a whole industry devoted to attributing these disparities to incompetent or racist teachers and administrators or a lack of programs for troublesome or handicapped children. But there is far more likely explanation.

For poverty and fatherlessness are racially disproportionate as well, and children who live in more prosperous homes and get more parenting tend to behave and perform much better in school, regardless of the quality of their teachers and administrators and the programs available to them.

Indeed, a study assembled this year by the University of Virginia found that the achievement and behavior gaps between Black and white students, gaps that long have been especially disgraceful in Connecticut, close completely for children who are raised in intact families or whose fathers are at least heavily involved in their lives.  

That is, the achievement and behavior gaps are not about race at all but about parenting, the structure and stability of the family, an issue that, because of its political incorrectness, cannot be discussed in polite company in Connecticut, and especially not in education, where it might overthrow everything.

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

Eastern Connecticut State University tries to revive the ‘noble savage’ myth

By CHRIS POWELL

Having realized that it had been overlooking a prerequisite of political correctness in academia, Eastern Connecticut State University this month adopted a formal “land acknowledgment” that will be ceremoniously proclaimed at the start of major university events.

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It reads: “We respectfully acknowledge that the land on which Eastern Connecticut State University stands, and the broader land now known as the State of Connecticut, is the ancestral territory of the Eastern Pequot Tribal Nation, Golden Hill Paugussett Tribe, Mashantucket Pequot Tribal Nation, Mohegan Tribe, Nipmuc Tribe, and Schaghticoke Tribe, who have stewarded this land throughout the generations with great care. We honor their resilience, cultural heritage, and enduring presence. As Connecticut’s public liberal arts university, we are committed to fostering greater awareness of Indigenous histories and contemporary experiences, and to building relationships grounded in respect, reciprocity, and responsibility.”

And so the university now will perpetuate the myth and stereotype of the “noble savage”: that the Indians of old were good, one with nature, eternally peaceful, and uncorrupted by civilization, unlike the civilization that succeeded theirs, of which everyone should be ashamed.

Of course the struggle for land and sovereignty is not peculiar to Connecticut. While the struggle is fortunately concluded in the United States, it is the history of humanity and continues throughout the world. Even the “noble savages” of old, including those in what became Connecticut, struggled with each other for land and sovereignty before the European tribe came to dominate the area three centuries ago by making alliance with the Mohegans and Narragansetts to eradicate the troublesome Pequots.

The university says the Indian tribes of old “have stewarded this land throughout the generations with great care.” 

Huh? The tribes of old were mainly hunters and foragers, not industrialists. They didn’t build roads, dams, sawmills, schools, factories, and railroads. They didn’t make great advancements in medicine. They sometimes practiced slavery and polygamy. Any stewardship they performed ended centuries ago.

That is, they were people of their time and culture, as their adversaries were, and as everyone is. 

But now that some of their ultra-distant descendants have obtained lucrative state grants of exclusivity, their “stewardship” includes casinos, through which some of them have accumulated great wealth that is imagined to be reparations for wrongs done to their ultra-distant ancestors, even as their casinos nurture costly addictions to gambling, which an ever-ravenous state government happily whitewashes when it shares the profits.

Indeed, it’s unlikely that Eastern would nurture this obsession with ancestry if there wasn’t casino money in it, since ancestor worship is emphatically un-American. The Mother of Exiles says so herself from New York harbor: “Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp,” cries she with silent lips.

That is, in the civilization now operating in these parts one’s ancestry doesn’t matter any more than anyone else’s does, and everyone who has lived here a little while becomes as “indigenous” as everyone else is. Despite its many faults, the current civilization at least has greatly diminished if not quite eliminated tribalism, what with Eastern and other institutions of higher education trying to revive it with “land acknowledgments.”

Contrary to Eastern’s implication, no one today is guilty of the injustices of the distant past, and even back then there was plenty of guilt to go around. If guilt is to be imposed, the present offers injustices enough. They won’t be corrected by the politically correct posturing that is sinking higher education.

ARE THEY US?: A few days ago Connecticut got another invitation to take a good look at itself. 

State police said a pedestrian was killed on Interstate 95 in Stamford when he was struck by four cars — and the first three drivers fled the scene. Maybe the fourth would have fled as well if his car hadn’t been disabled in the collision.  

Could all the drivers really have thought that they had hit a deer or a bear, not a person? Who are these people? Are they us? 

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

Poet explains to Senator Murphy why some others don’t side with him

By CHRIS POWELL

Those six Democratic members of Congress who last week managed to provoke more hysteria from President Trump by noting that American soldiers can disobey “illegal orders” would have been far more helpful if they specified the illegal orders they fear Trump may issue.

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After all, there’s really nothing to argue here. “Illegal orders” are illegal orders. 

Trump chose to ignore the “illegal” part and misconstrue the congressmembers to be advocating disobeying his orders as commander in chief generally. Only in that sense could he accuse them of “sedition” and approvingly quote a social media post: “Hang them.”

The congressmembers should have known this would happen. Indeed, triggering Trump may have been their objective. It’s easily done.

It would have been harder for Trump to misconstrue and rage if, instead, the congressmembers challenged the president to cite any legal authority for his directing the military to kill drug-smuggling suspects in boats on the high seas as he has done lately around Venezuela and Colombia. 

The United States is not at war with those nations and there is no evidence that the people in the boats destroyed by U.S. military aircraft were military personnel. The U.S. military itself seemed to recognize as much when it repatriated two survivors of an attack instead of detaining them as prisoners of war.

It also would have been harder for Trump to misconstrue and rage if, instead, the congressmembers had asked whether his recent dispatch of an armada toward Venezuela was meant to contrive an excuse for war without a declaration of war by Congress — as President Lyndon B. Johnson contrived the so-called Gulf of Tonkin incident in 1964 to justify more U.S. military intervention in Vietnam.

Of course the Venezuelan regime is reprehensible, but does Trump intend to overthrow it without a declaration of war by Congress? The congressmembers should have asked that question as well, instead of letting the president get away with changing the subject.

But continuing his campaign to become the darling of the apoplectic wing of the Democratic Party, Connecticut U.S. Sen. Chris Murphy jumped into the fray with his own vulgar hysteria.

Citing Trump’s denunciation of the congressmembers who raised the “illegal orders” issue, Murphy said: “If you’re a person of influence in this country and you haven’t picked a side, maybe now would be the time to pick a #!@$%+# side.”

Since he comes from a state that long has seemed inclined to elect Democrats to statewide office no matter how questionable their positions, qualifications, and records, Murphy has never been compelled to reflect on how difficult it has been lately for many Americans to “pick a #!@$%+# side.” 

The essential question facing the Democratic Party since Trump’s election as president last year remains unanswered by Murphy and most other leading Democrats: Why would most voters decide to return to the presidency someone as megalomaniacal, reckless, unstable, corrupt, and cruel as Trump? 

Surely Murphy might have noticed that while Connecticut didn’t come close to giving Trump its electoral votes last year, he substantially increased his support in the state and throughout the country. So how come?

Having replaced Trump’s first administration with a Democratic administration in 2020 only to get roaring inflation, worsening poverty, open borders, incompetence, senility, and claims that civil rights require putting men into women’s sports, bathrooms, and prisons, might some people voting for president last year have concluded that they had to pick a different side even if by doing so they might doom themselves to picking a different side again in 2028?

Senator Murphy is sore to the point of vulgarity that so many people still have not yet picked his side, though, on top of the nonsense of last year’s campaign, his side now is also advocating nullification and insurrection. In Scottish dialect from a few centuries ago the poet Robert Burns might explain the senator’s problem to him:

O wad some Pow’r the giftie gie us
To see oursels as ithers see us!

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

New Haven school board is frank with public: Get lost!

By CHRIS POWELL

New Haven’s Board of Education, of which Mayor Justin Elicker is a member, says city residents should not be told how well School Superintendent Madeline Negron is doing her job.

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The New Haven Independent reported this month that the board conducted Negron’s evaluation orally and in secret in August, putting nothing in writing because a written evaluation would have become a public record while an oral evaluation could be conducted without leaving any traces.

The mayor told the Independent: “If you have a written document that’s going to be in the newspaper, it doesn’t facilitate a very honest and frank conversation and it certainly doesn’t facilitate a back-and-forth.”

So how is the public to know how the superintendent is performing? How is she to be held accountable to the public? How is the board to be held accountable?

Of course the mayor’s rationale for secrecy for the superintendent’s evaluation — to make it easier for evaluators to be frank — can be used to conceal the performance of all government employees. Indeed, teacher unions long have been so politically influential in Connecticut that 41 years ago they persuaded the General Assembly and Gov. William A. O’Neill to exempt their performance evaluations from disclosure under the state’s freedom-of-information law. No other government employees have been given such exemption, only teachers, even though teachers think their work is more important than the work of other government employees.

Mayor Elicker and New Haven school board President OrLando Yarborough agree that Superintendent Negron is doing a great job, though the mayor admits that New Haven’s schools have serious problems. But if the superintendent is doing so well, why can’t the public know how she has been evaluated? And if she’s not doing so well, isn’t that just as important for the public to know, so improvement can be demanded and measured?

State Education Commissioner Charlene M. Russell-Tucker and Governor Lamont seem not to have been asked about New Haven’s brazen repudiation of open government. But then the governor and the commissioner long have presided over the erosion of student academic performance and the general decline of standards in Connecticut’s schools.

The arrogance demonstrated by New Haven’s school board and mayor is another reminder that the biggest problem with public education in Connecticut is that it’s really not public at all.

TOO MUCH INDIFFERENCE: Can any inferences be drawn from the Connecticut voter registration data published the other day by the Connecticut Mirror?

The changes over the last five years have been small. Unaffiliated voters have remained the largest group, at 41.2% of the electorate, up from 41% in 2020. The Democratic share of the electorate has fallen by almost 2%, from 37% to 35.1%. The Republican share is up slightly from 20.4 to 21.1%. While Democrats outnumber Republicans by five to three, the larger number of unaffiliated voters sustains the possibility that, with compelling issues, a Republican might win a statewide election.

While Republicans in Connecticut don’t always seem to want to raise compelling issues, the state is full of them, like high electricity and housing prices, high taxes, the high cost of living generally, faltering public education, and low economic growth.

But more than the possibility of political competition, the voter registration data implies alienation among a large number of voters. 

Connecticut has “closed” party primaries for nominating candidates. That is, only party members can vote in a primary. But enrolling in a party requires only a voter’s desire to have the right to help choose the party’s candidates.

In municipalities whose voters lean heavily to one party or the other, primaries — not elections — are often where the real choosing of elected officials is done. But 41% of Connecticut voters want nothing to do with choosing nominees, and about a quarter of the state’s eligible adults haven’t even bothered to register to vote. The state’s sad situation is evidence of far too much political indifference.

——

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

-END-

Lamont, Tong applaud defeat of their party’s own water scheme

By CHRIS POWELL

While it’s not likely to be widely understood, there may be a profound lesson in this week’s rejection by the state Public Utilities Regulatory Authority (PURA) of the bid by the South Central Regional Water Authority to acquire Aquarion Water Co.

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The lesson is that most people involved with the issue concluded that ordinary government regulation of privately owned utilities is better than government’s direct operation of them.

The water authority is a state government agency providing water to 15 towns in the New Haven area. It was established by state law in 1977 and three years later acquired the New Haven Water Co. 

Aquarion is the biggest water utility in Connecticut, serving 60 towns and about 700,000 people, and is a subsidiary of the state’s largest electric utility, Eversource. Like Eversource, Aquarion’s rates and services are regulated by PURA. 

The big complaint against the regional water authority’s acquisition of Aquarion was that it might eliminate state government’s control over the water company — even though the water authority is itself part of state government, with the water authority’s directors appointed by representatives of the municipalities the authority serves.

As long as Aquarion is a privately owned utility, PURA will regulate it. But if a government agency acquires Aquarion, PURA’s regulation would cease and the water authority could set rates for its greatly expanded service area however it wanted.

If a government agency acquired Aquarion, municipal property taxes on the utility — revenue to the towns the company serves — would cease as well.

The regional water authority claimed that as a government agency that doesn’t have to make a profit for investors, it could serve customers less expensively than Aquarion can. But critics noted that the authority was going to pay Eversource $2.4 billion for Aquarion and that much of the purchase money would be borrowed and thus incur huge interest costs for the authority, costs the authority almost certainly would recover through higher water charges to customers. 

Most people involved with the issue came to think that if the water authority acquired Aquarion, its directors naturally would have more loyalty to the authority itself than to its customers, and that customers would be better protected by PURA. After all, PURA is often in the spotlight and is sensitive to utility customers, but the water authority board is seldom watched by anyone.

Leaders of the Republican minority in the General Assembly applauded rejection of the water authority’s bid for Aquarion. 

Governor Lamont seemed to applaud it too, noting that interest expense on the purchase money borrowed by the water authority almost surely would drive up water prices. But last year the governor signed the legislation authorizing the authority to take over Aquarion. How, last year, did the governor think the water authority would repay the borrowed purchase money?

State Attorney General William Tong’s comment on the defeat of the acquisition was strange as well.

“This deal was a costly loser for Connecticut families and PURA was right to reject it,” Tong said. “Eversource desperately wanted to offload Aquarion, and they concocted this maneuver to extract as much cash as possible by guaranteeing the new entity free rein to jack up rates. Eversource is free to find a new buyer but should understand that any new attempt to end public regulatory oversight over water bills for hundreds of thousands of Connecticut families is going to be a non-starter here.”

But Tong is a Democrat and the bill authorizing Eversource’s supposed scheme to “offload” Aquarion on the water authority was abruptly foisted on the General Assembly by his own party’s legislative leaders over Republican opposition during a special session last year. As they often do in special sessions, Democratic leaders forced the bill through without normal review and public hearing, which might have avoided a lot of wasted time. 

This high-handedness didn’t seem to bother Tong back then, and this week, like the governor, he conveniently seemed to forget where the enabling act came from.

——

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

-END-

Hospital rescues promise far higher medical costs

By CHRIS POWELL

Someone had to be found to take over Waterbury Hospital, Manchester Memorial Hospital, and Rockville General Hospital in Vernon as they wallowed in bankruptcy after being looted by their private-equity owner, Prospect Medical Holdings. Connecticut couldn’t afford to let the hospitals go out of business and leave major population centers without service. The dislocation of patients and the burdening of the remaining hospitals would have been disastrous.

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But the resolution of Prospect’s bankruptcy presents its own serious problems.

Waterbury Hospital is to be acquired by the University of Connecticut Health Center in Farmington — that is, by state government. UConn Health is also planning to acquire two other troubled hospitals, Bristol Hospital and Day Kimball Hospital in Putnam. 

Meanwhile Manchester and Rockville hospitals are to be acquired by Hartford HealthCare. 

This means a big reduction in competition in the hospital business, since UConn already holds a large share of the market between Farmington and Waterbury and Hartford HealthCare operates not just Hartford Hospital but six other hospitals in the state.

Hundreds of millions of dollars probably will have to be spent to put the former Prospect hospitals back into decent condition. But UConn Health long has run big deficits and often has turned to state government for supplemental appropriations to cover them. 

Further, while Waterbury Hospital is to be operated as a subsidiary of UConn Health, not as a state agency in its own right, the hospital’s unionized employees will strive to become de-facto state government employees with compensation increased to state-employee levels. 

So UConn Health’s acquisition of Waterbury Hospital probably will deepen the money pit UConn Health has become and create an empire of expensive political patronage unless Governor Lamont and the General Assembly want a different result and pay close attention to operations. Of course since the governor and the legislature are Democratic, their inclination will be to maximize the patronage and expense, especially since medical care is already essentially a big racket of cost shifting and camouflaging that makes it impossible for the public to assign responsibility. 

Indeed, the governor and the General Assembly have just authorized UConn Health to issue its own bonds and acquire hospitals beyond Bristol and Day Kimball, potentially creating a statewide government-operated hospital system. As the Yankee Institute’s Meghan Porfolio writes, “UConn Health can now buy hospitals, borrow money to expand them, and pass the debt to taxpayers.”

No oversight is in place for any of this. Of course there’s hardly any oversight in place for any state government operations, but the governor and legislature seem not to have given a thought to the need for oversight, even though Waterbury, Manchester, and Rockville hospitals were run into the ground in large part because state government provided so little oversight. 

While Hartford HealthCare doesn’t have state government standing behind it, it hasn’t had the chronic financial trouble UConn Health has had. But Hartford HealthCare also may come under strain as it rehabilitates the Manchester and Rockville hospitals. 

So prices to insurers and patients at all hospitals connected with these transactions are likely to rise along with the direct costs to state government from UConn Health’s expansion.

Waterbury, Manchester, and Rockville hospitals had to be kept going, and Bristol and Day Kimball hospitals must be kept going too. But the cost almost surely will be far higher than it should be and soon will be considered unavoidable when it wasn’t unavoidable at all.

NOT ENOUGH CHOICE: How strange that New York City had ranked-choice voting for its political party nominating primaries for mayor this year but not for the mayoral election itself, whose outcome might have been different if potential candidates and voters knew that ranked-choice voting would be available.

Socialist Democrat Zohran Mamdani won barely 50% of the vote in the election, even though his leading opponent was New York State’s disgraced and unlikeable former governor, Andrew Cuomo, who had been compelled to resign four years ago for sexually harassing women.

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

Wesleyan’s vegetarian plaque may become more persuasive

By CHRIS POWELL

Wesleyan University in Middletown often rivals Yale University in New Haven for nutty political correctness, and that’s how many people perceived its most recent news. A group of Wesleyan students, faculty members, and alumni has asked the university to erect a plaque outside the university’s dining hall to memorialize all the animals killed for the food eaten inside.

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Such a plaque would be a rebuke not just to meat eaters on campus but to the university itself, so it’s hard to see how Wesleyan could erect it without also taking meat off the dining hall menu and formally converting the campus to vegetarianism. Once the plaque was erected, anything less would be hypocrisy.

Such a plaque also might make the university’s priorities seem strange, what with poverty, homelessness, child neglect, and other human ills worsening throughout Connecticut, often within sight of the university.

Even so, the plaque concludes: “There will come a time when we will look back on this treatment of our fellow animals as indefensible. We will recognize that all animals feel, think, love, and strive to live — even those who do not look or behave exactly as humans do — and that their lives are as precious to them as ours are to us.”

This is not so nutty insofar as society has already conceded some of it in principle with laws against gratuitous cruelty to animals. But vegetarianism is up against all history, starting with animals themselves, many of which have no scruples against eating each other. 

In Genesis the Bible conveys divine approval for eating meat: “And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the Earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the Earth.”

Indeed, without the meat industry many animal species and breeds, being raised primarily for food, might virtually disappear. Who would go through the trouble and expense of raising beef cattle just for the sake of biodiversity?

But guilt about eating meat is not peculiar to Wesleyan. There is much ethics-based vegetarianism in Hinduism, and some American Indian tribes offered prayers of thanks to honor the animals they hunted for food, though whether this was sincere respect or just rationalization for participating in the kill is arguable. Few people ordering hamburgers have to witness the prerequisite slaughtering and butchering of the animals their meat comes from. Witnessing such spectacles in the stockyards and meat-packing factories can depress appetites.

Of course vegetarianism does not automatically confer goodness. Taking a break from plotting mass murder in November 1941, Hitler assured his dinner companions, “The future belongs to us vegetarians.” 

It’s still better that he lost the war.   

But the case for vegetarianism, or at least for greater respect for animals, is getting stronger for new reasons.

The companion animals, particularly dogs and cats, long have been famous for their sometimes uncanny ability to communicate with and protect people. But in recent years home videos posted on the internet have proven what had been mainly anecdotal — the astounding intelligence and ability to communicate with humans possessed not just by dogs and cats but even by wild animals, farm animals, and birds as well. 

Amelia Thomas, a journalist, animal scientist, and farmer in Canada, has detailed this in a fascinating new book, “What Sheep Think About the Weather: How to Listen to What Animals Are Trying to Say.” 

“There’s no us and them,” Thomas says. “Rather, infinite varieties of us.” 

Having worked a little with chimpanzees, some of whom have learned American sign language, Thomas quotes the primatologist Mary Lee Jensvold: “The more you appreciate what thinking beings they are, the more you also understand the depth of their suffering.” 

There are no chimps on the menu at Wesleyan, but if the vegetarian plaque is erected there, over time it may get harder to argue with.  

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