‘Nip’ bottle fees don’t recover their cost in litter and drunken driving

By CHRIS POWELL

Next time you come upon empty and discarded “nip” bottles — the tiny plastic containers of liquor sold in abundance at Connecticut’s liquor stores but neither returnable for deposits nor recyclable — Larry Cafero wants you to be thankful.

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Cafero, executive director of the Connecticut Wine and Spirit Wholesalers, announced the other day that the 5-cent de-facto tax on nip bottles has generated more than $19 million since it began four years ago, with the money distributed by the state to municipalities in proportion to the number of “nips” sold in each. Municipal governments are to use the money for environmental cleanup purposes.

The problem is that only a little of the money is used to recover the discarded nip bottles themselves. Such an undertaking would be extremely labor-intensive. Instead municipalities use the money to run recycling centers or other programs to reduce litter or protect the environment.

So the nip bottles keep defacing streets, parks, and the countryside, being collected only partially and put in trash cans by people who go for nature walks and are disgusted by Connecticut’s policy of letting nature be defaced so a special interest can keep making money off a product that has only pernicious effects — the strewing of unbiodegradable trash throughout the state and the facilitation of drunken driving and underage drinking.

Other than gratifying the liquor industry, there is no need for this stuff. Connecticut could forbid the sale of nip bottles, as alcoholism-riddled New Mexico does, or impose on them a cash deposit high enough to induce their buyers to return them to the liquor stores or induce everyone else to pick them up and return them for the deposits. 

Instead of a “nickel a nip” a dollar a nip might work beautifully.

But while the liquor stores use the “nickel a nip” program to pose as civic-minded, they don’t really want to reduce the litter they cause. They complain that their taking the empty nip bottles back and refunding deposits would take up too much space in their stores and require too much additional labor. The liquor stores want littering, drunken driving, and underage drinking to remain profitable for them but costly for society.

Cafero says it would be unfair to change anything about nips because liquor store owners got into their business on the presumption they could sell the products. But that’s a rationalization for prohibiting all changes involving business, changes involving taxes, pollution control, consumer protection, public safety, wages, and protections for labor. No other businesses in Connecticut have such privilege. All other businesses are always subject to new laws that change business conditions.

Besides, Connecticut’s liquor industry already enjoys outrageous privilege — state law establishing minimum prices for alcoholic beverages, a law that protects liquor stores against the ordinary competition all other businesses face. The law against price competition in liquor long has given Connecticut some of the highest liquor prices in the country. It is essentially a tax whose revenue goes not to state government but to the liquor stores and wholesalers themselves.

Why does Connecticut allow such exploitation of the public? 

It’s all special-interest politics. 

Most legislative districts have a dozen or more liquor stores profiting from this exploitation and the stores have an active trade association. With Cafero the liquor stores have hired a former legislative leader, and, if their privileges are ever threatened, store owners and their employees will show up at hearings or rallies to intimidate legislators. 

Meanwhile news organizations, in financial decline, won’t investigate and report the sordid details of the liquor business in Connecticut lest they risk losing liquor advertising, and the public, ever more impoverished by inflation and other failing government policies, seems increasingly content just to drink itself silly at home or, worse, on the road.

All this littering, drunken driving, and underage drinking should be worth a lot more to state government than $19 million in four years, or less than $4 million per year. Its cost is much higher than that and it’s nothing to celebrate.

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

Connecticut’s contradictory ideals: local control vs. equality

By CHRIS POWELL

Will Connecticut ever realize that two of what it professes to be its highest ideals of public policy, local control and equality of opportunity, are contradictions?

State government was reminded of this again the other day by another report from the Equable Institute, a nonprofit organization that seeks to improve government employee pensions. Connecticut’s state teacher retirement system, the institute notes, does much better by teachers in wealthy municipalities than those in poor ones, because teacher pensions are calculated from their salaries. Wealthy municipalities pay more so their teachers get bigger pensions. 

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Indeed, Equable says state government pays twice as much for the pensions of teachers in some wealthy municipalities than it pays for the pensions of teachers in some poor ones.

Additionally, because of the higher salaries they pay, wealthy municipalities suffer less turnover in their teaching staffs and retain better teachers longer than poor municipalities do.

Equable says the disparity in pension contributions is responsible for some of the disparity in student performance between wealthy and poor municipalities. That stands to reason, but pension disparities surely matter far less to educational results than the disparities in the household wealth of students and the amount of parenting they get. 

As usual liberals and teacher unions like to attribute all the deficiencies of public education to inadequate spending, even though Connecticut has been raising education spending steadily for almost 50 years, improving teacher salaries and pensions without improving student performance.

Per-pupil parenting has always been the main determinant of student performance, but politics prohibits addressing the parenting problem. No elected official or candidate dares to note the strong correlation between single-parent households and child neglect and abuse, student educational failure, poor physical and mental health, and general misbehavior. Acknowledging that correlation would impugn the entire welfare system and the perverse incentives it gives the poor, and it would show where so much social disintegration is coming from.

But everyone admires teachers as individuals, so finding public money for satisfying them and their unions is easy and doesn’t cause the political problems that examining the causes of poverty would.

It’s no wonder that teachers prefer to teach well-parented, well-behaved, attentive, and curious kids rather than poorly parented, ill-behaved, and indifferent or demoralized kids. It’s no wonder that teachers in impoverished cities, like police officers there, can get worn down quickly and seek to pursue their careers in municipalities with less poverty and dysfunction. This is just another aspect of the flight to the suburbs, which has been caused by government’s failure to solve poverty in the cities.

Maybe state law should arrange for all teachers to be paid directly by state government according to the same salary schedule so their pensions would be equalized. No adjustments for union contracts or individual merit could be permitted, since they would generate inequality. 

Such an egalitarian system likely would reduce salaries and pensions in wealthy and middle-class municipalities and increase them in poor ones. But of course teacher unions would never give up bargaining power over wages and benefits, not in the pursuit of equality or anything else.       

Or maybe teachers in the poorest municipalities should be paid at least $100,000 per year more than teachers in the highest-paying municipalities. They might not all be good teachers but most might deserve more money just for having to deal with so many indifferent and misbehaving students.

While that might be fairer to those teachers, who are part of the constituency the Equable Institute is trying to help, Connecticut’s long experience would still be that school spending is almost irrelevant to educational performance, and the presumption of increasing teacher salaries and pensions would still be that the job satisfaction of teachers is more important than education itself and ending generational poverty.

But even the long failure to end generational poverty isn’t the biggest problem here. The biggest problem here is simply Connecticut’s failure to care much about it. As a political matter paying off the teachers is the most we can do.

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

Most child neglect in Connecticut involves public-schooled children

By CHRIS POWELL

Abuse of children who are purportedly being home-schooled in Connecticut is an issue again. The case of a boy allegedly kept prisoner by his stepmother in his room in Waterbury for 20 years, which broke in February, has just been followed by the case of an 11-year-old girl who was allegedly killed by her family in Farmington and whose corpse was discovered in New Britain after her family moved there.

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There was inadequate checking about the boy by child protection and school authorities after he was removed from school. But court documents indicate that the girl was killed while she was still enrolled in public school, a month before her family filed notice to home-school her. According to police, the girl suffered physical abuse and malnourishment for a long time — apparently while still a public school student and while child-protection authorities were involved with her family. 

Whatever the details of the girl’s death, abused and neglected children remain a serious issue and the General Assembly and Governor Lamont should have acted on it during the legislature’s regular session this year, since part of the solution is obvious: to require home-schooled students to be presented for an annual interview with school or child-protection authorities.

But the issue is being used to mislead. For the child abuse and neglect problem is overwhelmingly a problem of children who are public-schooled.

Most home-schooled children get far more attention from their parents than most public-schooled kids do, insofar as their households have more money and can spare a parent to do the teaching instead of working full-time outside the home. Meanwhile 17% of Connecticut’s public-schooled children are chronically absent. In the cities, where poverty and parenting are worst, the rate is 25% or more.

If, for example, the 13-year-old boy who shot and killed a 15-year-old boy in New Haven a few weeks ago was home-schooled, opponents of home schooling probably would have made sure that Connecticut knew about it by now. The Hartford girl who last September disclosed to the Connecticut Mirror that she had just graduated from high school though she was illiterate wasn’t home-schooled either. She was the product of Hartford’s public schools. 

Indeed, the little standardized testing Connecticut allows in its public schools suggests that most high school graduates in the state never master what used to be considered basic English and math before they are sent into the world to fend for themselves.

There is hardly more checking on these public-schooled kids than there is checking on home-schooled kids.

The 11-year-old girl’s case provides a telling detail. Police investigation suggests that the girl’s household was full of psychosis and delusion and that her father long had abandoned her and wasn’t around to protect her.

About a third of Connecticut’s children live without a father in their home. In the cities it’s most children. Fatherlessness correlates strongly with poverty, educational failure, physical and mental illness, misbehavior, crime, and unhappiness.

Yet Connecticut hardly notices this problem. Public policy presumes that it’s less expensive just to keep throwing money at single people who have children they can’t afford and thus to subsidize childbearing outside marriage and fatherlessness. This practice and social promotion in public schools guarantee generational poverty and crime, but no one in authority dares to ask where Connecticut’s worsening poverty is coming from unless it already has been decided to blame President Trump. 

Maybe the latest case of child abuse will mistakenly prompt state government to require an annual census and interview of home-schooled children. But there probably aren’t more than a few thousand of them. 

Meanwhile there are tens of thousands of abused or neglected children in the state’s public schools, many of them soon to become seriously disadvantaged young adults. As children or young adults, many of these die prematurely every month in criminal incidents that are considered routine, the natural order of things. They are far more deserving of more child protection and yet they are not even on the state’s agenda.

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

Corrupt ex-official’s trial evokes musical comedy

By CHRIS POWELL

At his federal trial this month was Konstantinos Diamantis, who once doubled as deputy state budget director and chief of state government’s school construction office, really trying to defend himself against bribery and extortion charges, or was he actually auditioning for a revival of the Broadway musical “Fiorello”?

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The play humorously depicts the crusade against corruption that was waged nearly a century ago by New York City’s reformist mayor, Fiorello LaGuardia. Diamantis’ explanation of his work in the school construction office would have fit right in. 

According to Diamantis, he wasn’t shaking down contractors for kickbacks. No, he was charging them finder’s fees for introducing them to people who might be helpful to their companies. The contractors didn’t see it that way. Some already had pleaded guilty to paying him the bribes he demanded, understanding the payments as the condition for getting the state construction work.

Diamantis’ testimony could have been turned into another verse in “Little Tin Box,” the cleverest song from “Fiorello,” which consists of courtroom exchanges between a grand jury judge and corrupt city employees testifying before him.

Mr. X, may we ask you a question?
It’s amazing, is it not,
That the city pays you slightly less than 50 bucks a week,
Yet you’ve purchased a private yacht?

I am positive Your Honor must be joking.
Any working man can do what I have done.
For a month or two I simply gave up smoking
And I put my extra pennies one by one
Into a little tin box. …

Mr. Y, we’ve been told you don’t feel well,
And we know you’ve lost your voice.
But we wonder how you managed on the salary you make
To acquire a new Rolls-Royce.

You’re implying I’m a crook and I say no, Sir!
There is nothing in my past I care to hide.
I’ve been taking empty bottles to the grocer
And each nickel that I got was put aside
Into a little tin box. …

Mr. Z, you’re a junior official
And your income’s rather low.
Yet you’ve kept a dozen women in the very best hotels.
Would you kindly explain how so?

I can see Your Honor doesn’t pull his punches,
And it looks a trifle fishy, I’ll admit.
But for one whole week I went without my lunches
And it mounted up, Your Honor, bit by bit. …

It’s surprising that Diamantis’ jury needed a day and a half before deciding his story was suitable for musical comedy and convicting him on all 21 charges. But there won’t be much humor in the long prison sentence he’s facing.

Lately there has been a lot of sleaze if not outright corruption in state government, the consequence of longstanding one-party rule. 

Among other things, the chairwoman of the Public Utilities Regulatory Authority resigned upon being caught lying to the legislature, a court, and the public. Legislators have been caught stuffing expensive “earmarks” into the state budget to benefit nominally nonprofit organizations run by their friends. The former public college system chancellor was dismissed but is getting a year of severance worth nearly $500,000 after being caught abusing his expense account, and he is guaranteed another comfortable public college job when his severance expires.

State government is a big place and some of its denizens will always cheat and steal. While Governor Lamont is as political as any other governor he is not corrupt; he sometimes has been badly served by those he trusted. 

But it is starting to seem as if Connecticut could use its own Fiorello LaGuardia to run a perpetual grand jury investigating corruption and malfeasance in state government. Federal — not state — prosecutors investigated Diamantis, and the General Assembly still refuses to examine government operations, confident that there will always be plenty of money for the little tin box.  

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

Hamden’s leaders come out in support of open borders

By CHRIS POWELL

This month’s immigration raid at a car wash in Hamden in which seven or eight people were arrested sparked hysteria from Mayor Lauren Garrett, state legislators, municipal officials, and clergy. At a press conference they declared they don’t want immigration law enforced in town.

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Speaking of federal immigration agents, state Rep. Jorge Cabrera said, “You come for one of us, you come for all of us.”

Really? Were Cabrera and his colleagues at the press conference all in the country illegally too?

Cabrera said the people arrested in the raid “weren’t committing crimes.” 

But entering the country illegally is a violation of federal criminal law. 

“We have to decide what kind of community we’re going to be,” Cabrera said. “We have to decide what kind of state we’re going to be.”

Yes, we have to decide whether everyone admitted to the country is to be reviewed for fitness and safety or whether the country’s borders should be erased.

Mayor Garrett said, “People are living in fear because of an inhumane presidency,” adding: “Hamden proudly welcomes everyone.”

But why should people breaking immigration law have no fear of its enforcement? Does the mayor’s “everyone” really include people who are in the country illegally, even those with bad intent? 

That sure sounds like open borders.

The Rev. Jack Perkins Davidson was upset that Hamden’s police got late notice of the immigration raid but didn’t alert him and others so they could try to obstruct it. Mayor Garrett seemed to agree. She said she wished notice of the raid had been given to organizations that assist illegal immigrants — presumably so they could have been warned to scram.

People at the press conference carried signs reading: “No hate. No fear. Immigrants are welcome here.” That was to say that anyone who favors enforcing U.S. immigration law, virtually the most liberal in the world, is a hater, that illegal immigrants and legal immigrants are equally welcome in Hamden, and that the law should be disobeyed.

Indeed, it’s impossible to get such people to distinguish between legal and illegal immigration and impossible to have an honest discussion with them, probably because an honest discussion would clarify their position: that everyone who enters the country illegally and makes his way to Connecticut should be above immigration law and exempt from review for fitness. 

That position means nullification, insurrection, secession — and national suicide.

Even so, there is great cruelty in the current situation, with millions of foreigners having been lured into the country by the previous national administration’s negligence and having accepted positions as serfs — unable to vote, denied protection of employment law, living in fear of being caught, but hoping for amnesty someday.

The cruelty is unnecessary — except, of course, for the Democratic Party’s desire to use illegal immigrants to skew congressional and state legislative districting in the party’s favor. 

There has always been a simple and far less painful solution: to require employers to use the federal government’s e-Verify system to validate employment and to impose severe penalties on employers who hire illegal immigrants.

Most people who enter the country illegally do so confident that they can work “under the table.” If e-Verify was enforced nationally, with severe penalties against criminal employers, most illegal immigrants would deport themselves and most employers would stop breaking the law. 

The same policy should be implemented with schools. Federal law should prohibit schools from admitting students who cannot show proof of citizenship or authorization to be in the country. 

About 22 states participate to some extent in e-Verify. Of course Connecticut, a “sanctuary state” that pretends not to be one, does not participate. Opponents of using e-Verify may claim that it would be too difficult for many people to obtain proper identification, but that’s nonsense. Yes, it might take a little effort but obtaining proper identification is an obligation of citizenship. 

The real reason Connecticut doesn’t participate in e-Verify is because the people in charge of the state favor open borders.

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

‘This is what democracy looks like’? God help us!

By CHRIS POWELL

Participants at last Saturday’s “No Kings” rally at the state Capitol chanted smugly, “This is what democracy looks like.” Many were dressed in Halloween costumes. 

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Among the participants wearing more normal attire, state Sen. Saud Anwar, D-South Windsor, a physician, posed for a photograph as he held a sign with images of food from McDonald’s and Kentucky Fried Chicken and the legend, “Cholesterol, do your job” — an attempt to be funny with a wish for the death of President Trump.

These days Anwar is what democracy looks like too. 

There was a time when publicly appealing for the death of one’s political adversaries was considered beyond bad manners — disgraceful and anti-democratic — and, for people in politics, dangerously provocative, and there was a time when medical practitioners might have considered it a betrayal of their profession and its pledge to do no harm. Governor Lamont mildly scolded Anwar but most other Connecticut Democrats probably agree with him that Trump should be killed.

Does Anwar ascertain the politics of patients before treating them? They might want to ask.

Of course there are millions of people who would not lament Trump’s demise. That’s no moral failing. But there are still manners and the obligation of people in public life to uphold standards, and such jokes about a man who has survived two assassination attempts can only damage what’s left of civility in politics.

Long before the latest “No Kings” rallies everyone knew that many people detest Trump. Despite all the shouting, bellowing, hatefulness, and hysteria, the rallies weren’t necessary to remind the country of that; they were necessary only to keep the political opposition riled up and thinking it was doing something useful.

But the rallies failed to grasp the prerequisite for doing something useful — to realize that Trump is also what democracy looks like, with all his megalomania, recklessness, corruption, incompetence, contradiction, vulgarity, and sneering. 

Trump’s qualities were not suddenly discovered in the last election campaign. They had been on display during his first term as president. Why in the last election did the country bring those qualities back into office?

It’s probably because the last election was the most “lesser of two evils” election in living memory. The choice was between Trump and, on the other hand, open borders, unprecedented illegal immigration, soaring inflation, worsening poverty, racial preferences, political correctness, censorship, exaltation of abortion, and men in women’s sports, bathrooms, and prisons. 

Remarkably, all that stuff remains the platform of most people who attended the “No Kings” rallies. It’s as if they don’t know that while they will be able to run against Trump’s record in the next presidential election, Trump himself won’t be on the ballot again, since he is ineligible for a third term. Nor do they seem to know that Trump’s departure from the ballot may improve the chances of all candidates who oppose the platform of his adversaries.

With luck in the next election one of the major parties will suspect or at least hope that the country is tired of the shouting, bellowing, hatefulness, and hysteria and might be susceptible to something new — a presidential candidate committed to calm elucidation and debate that move people back toward civility, a candidate with the virtues of the celestial star in the old Robert Frost poem.

It asks a little of us here.
It asks of us a certain height,
So when at times the mob is swayed
To carry praise or blame too far,
We may choose something like a star
To stay our minds on and be staid.

*

CORRECTION: This column recently asserted that Connecticut’s Investment Advisory Council was established 25 years ago in response to a scandal in the state treasurer’s office. Thanks to former state Sen. James H. McLaughlin for advising that the council actually was established in 1973 and was only strengthened by legislation in 2000 following the treasurer scandal.

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

Mayor feigns dismay about city employee’s reinstatement

By CHRIS POWELL

In 2023 computer hackers stole $6 million from the New Haven school system and city government fired the system’s information technology director over it. Eventually a little more than $5 million was recovered, and the other day an arbiter ruled that the theft wasn’t the fault of the information technology director and that she must be returned to her job with back pay, which may amount to hundreds of thousands of dollars.

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Mayor Justin Elicker said he was “disappointed” by the arbiter’s decision and still believes that the firing was justified.

But the mayor can’t be too disappointed. If he really thought the employee is culpable and her reinstatement is wrong, he might be questioning the state law and the city’s contracts with its unions that give government employees the right to binding arbitration of personnel decisions and well as binding arbitration of union contracts themselves.

After all, the public elects mayors and school board members to administer the government. The public doesn’t elect arbiters. Where is the democracy in letting an unelected arbiter make personnel decisions involving enormous cost, overriding an elected official? 

Of course elected officials can be mistaken, but then who believes arbiters are always right? So why shouldn’t elected officials prevail in these matters of ordinary public administration, take the political responsibility, and let voters judge them in the next election?

The answer is that democracy in Connecticut has been gravely subverted by the control that the government employee unions have achieved over the majority political party, the Democrats. Binding arbitration for unionized municipal government employees was enacted in Connecticut in the 1970s not to advance the public interest but so elected officials could escape political responsibility for government’s biggest costs, the cost of its employees. On such a sensitive issue few elected officials wanted to be caught between the public, on one hand, and the unions on the other. 

So the General Assembly and Gov. Ella T. Grasso abdicated and put arbiters in charge of labor disagreements, and now elected municipal officials can just shrug in the face of what might seem to be expensive mistakes — like reinstatement of negligent employees or excessive wages and benefits in union contracts – and say an arbiter made them do it.

Mayor Elicker is a liberal Democrat, and if he was really “disappointed” in the arbiter’s reinstatement of the information technology director and ever acted on that disappointment by, say, proposing to restore democracy by removing arbitration provisions from city government’s contracts with unions and from state law, the city government’s unions would make sure he never got another Democratic nomination. That might disappoint him a lot more than the huge cost of that firing.

WHY GO TO SCHOOL? A report from the educational research and advocacy organization EdTrust says that while Connecticut is making progress in reducing chronic absenteeism in its schools, the state is not on track to meet its pledge to reduce chronic absenteeism by 50% from the 2021 level by 2027. The state’s target rate for chronic absenteeism is 9% but the current rate is still around 17%. In some cities it’s above 25%.

To improve attendance schools are doing a lot of begging, pleading, and social work to persuade parents and students about the importance of education, but it’s not always effective, maybe because schools contradict themselves on the point every day.

Students and their parents may be ignorant and careless but they’re not always stupid. Why should they believe the teachers, administrators, and social workers about the importance of education when they know a few things from experience?

They know, first, that students will be promoted from grade to grade and given a high school diploma even if they learn nothing. 

Second, that Connecticut will never hold parents responsible for their children’s misbehavior.

And third, that educators and state legislators care about achieving a high graduation rate only to conceal a low rate of actual education.

The result is generational poverty, and it is largely government policy.

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

Church schools might save some city kids — is that bad?

By CHRIS POWELL

Correlation is not necessarily causation, but it can give some hints, and the decline of education in Connecticut and particularly in its cities has correlated with the decline in Catholic schools and the decline in Catholicism and religion generally. Of course the church has had grave faults but it has excelled with its schools, stressing the responsibility of children to God and humanity and upholding academic and behavioral standards that public schools in Connecticut have largely abandoned.

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So it’s wonderful that the Hartford archdiocese’s new archbishop, Christopher Coyne, aims to return Catholic elementary education to the city, nine years after the city’s last Catholic school closed. The new school will start slow next year with pre-kindergarten through second grade in a building adjacent to the Cathedral of St. Joseph, and then add a new grade each year up to Grade 8. Tuition will be geared to family income, so the church likely will be doing a lot of subsidizing. With luck it will get financial help from friends of the poor and better education.

Students in church schools generally do far better than students in public schools. Critics claim that this is because church schools can choose their students, taking the well-parented and motivated while the public schools have to take everyone, particularly the neglected, indifferent, and demoralized.

This indeed explains some of the difference in performance but not all. The key distinction is that public schools in Connecticut are far more accepting of poor performance. That’s what their social promotion is about, and they persist in it even as Mississippi — once the heart of darkness — lately has gotten spectacular results from its poor minority elementary school students, results better than those Connecticut gets, by ending social promotion at third grade. Now no Mississippi student gets beyond third grade without being a competent reader.

Meanwhile Hartford awards high school diplomas to illiterates.

In any case, why should church schools be resented for helping children escape the underclass? Escaping the underclass is what society in Connecticut and much of the country long has been about, the more so as the welfare system expanded and began destroying the family, the cities, and their schools by depriving millions of households of fathers. 

Suburbs embody the escape from the underclass. That escape is largely the middle class’ pursuit of school choice.

Would it be better if no children in the city were saved than if church schools and independent public “charter schools” saved a few?

Many on the political left in Connecticut seem to think so. Teacher unions hate charter schools and have more influence with the General Assembly than any other special interest, and the legislature keeps refusing to appropriate funds for charter schools proposed in Danbury and Middletown, cities with low-performing schools and many poor children who might benefit from choice and higher standards.

The knock against those charter school proposals is that they might draw students and teachers away from those low-performing schools. Yes, that’s competition. But how is it better to lock the poor into bad schools?

Of course the real solution to the education problem and most social problems would be to elevate the underclass. That might begin by seeking the cause of Connecticut’s and the country’s worsening poverty and social disintegration.

Last month in New Haven there was another horrible example of that social disintegration: a 13-year-old shot and killed a 15-year-old. An arrest was made last week.

Mayor Justin Elicker called the incident “deeply troubling,” though many similar incidents in his city also have left him deeply troubled. “This is why,” the mayor said, “we have so many youth programs, jobs programs, and outreach workers that engage with our young people.”

Oh, yes — programs, programs, and more programs — more, it seems, than there are fathers in New Haven watching out for their children and their “baby mommas.” But the programs are at best mere remediation. The solutions lie where government in Connecticut does not yet dare go.      

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

Romance of rail travel won’t ever pay the bills in Connecticut

By CHRIS POWELL

Within living memory one could go almost anywhere in Connecticut by train or at least take a train to a station near one’s destination. 

Traveling from north to south across the state by train was much quicker than traveling east to west, the topography presenting more obstacles to east-west railroads. But it could be done. 

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Rail wasn’t as convenient as automobile travel became but it was more civilized and often even enchanting, passing through the secret spaces of nature and industry, amid hints of Connecticut’s long history — the days when little Willimantic was as busy a junction as Hartford, when presidential candidate Abraham Lincoln took the train to Norwich and Meriden, and when the factories that are now in ruins were roaring in Bridgeport and Waterbury.

The romance of the rails endures, even where the rails were torn up long ago and the old grade still provides formal or informal walking trails. Indeed, this romance supplies some of the support for sustaining what’s left of the state’s passenger railroad service — the Metro-North system from New York City through Fairfield County to New Haven and, if just barely, Danbury and Waterbury; the Hartford Line from New Haven to Springfield, Mass.; Amtrak from New York to New Haven, Hartford, and Boston; and the Shore Line East service from New Haven to New London.

But how much is the romance or the rails worth to Connecticut residents? With fares on the state’s railroads scheduled to rise 10% over the coming year, Connecticut’s Hearst newspapers found recently that romance doesn’t pay the bills. All the passenger trains operate at a loss, sometimes a huge one.

That’s no surprise. As noted by Connecticut transportation writer Jim Cameron, every passenger railroad in the United States requires government subsidy. 

The subsidy is generally understood with Metro-North, for which government pays half the price of every ticket, about $6.48. Metro-North is the busiest commuter railroad in the country and has tens of thousands of regular passengers in Connecticut, and the southwestern part of the state is so connected economically with the New York metropolitan area that it couldn’t manage without the railroad. The Connecticut Turnpike and the Merritt Parkway can’t handle more traffic, and the southwestern part of the state contributes so much to state government financially that the railroad subsidy is easy to justify.

But it’s something else with the Hartford Line and Shore Line East.

As much as the Hartford area may be glad of a better rail connection to New York via New Haven, it long has had one, while feeble, in Amtrak, the federal passenger railroad. The Hartford Line adds enormous convenience but its passenger volume is not great and probably never will be, since few people in the Hartford area commute to New York for work and working via the internet may keep reducing commuting. 

So each Hartford Line passenger is getting an astounding subsidy of $78 from state government.

As for Shore Line East, the subsidy is ridiculous: $184 per passenger. While more trains on the line might add enough convenience to gain passengers, it’s impossible to imagine that the subsidy can ever be reduced substantially. There just isn’t enough economic connection between the towns along the line.

“Mass transit” can’t come close to covering its costs where there is no mass. Metro-North works in large part because there are many local transportation options — more trains and buses — when people get off the train in New York City and northern New Jersey. But there are few local connections in New Haven and New London. One doesn’t need a car in New York or much of northern New Jersey. But it’s almost impossible to do without one in most of Connecticut.  

Of course highways are heavily subsidized by government too. But they have their own taxes, particularly on fuel, and so can pay for themselves. Unfortunately, as a practical matter Connecticut already has much more passenger rail than it will be able to afford far into the future.

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

Does Connecticut need a governor who is more than a nice guy?

By CHRIS POWELL

Polls have found that Governor Lamont is well liked, and it’s hard to recall any incident during his 6½ years as governor when he got really nasty in public. But a recent poll showed ambivalence about whether he should seek a third term next year. 

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Maybe that ambivalence indicates only the electorate’s openness to change after an officeholder’s two terms, not unhappiness with the governor. The state legislator challenging Lamont for renomination by the Democrats, Rep. Josh Elliott of Hamden, admits that he means only to push the governor even more to the left.

Since Connecticut is a Democratic state, Lamont is the favorite in the next election. But recent developments hint that he might become vulnerable politically. At least those developments show that Connecticut is not a well-run state and is not improving, and that a strong argument might be made for political change.

The state’s economy isn’t terrible but it’s not strong either and hasn’t been strong for many years. Poverty is worsening, with more people complaining they are living paycheck to paycheck as prices keep rising for food, insurance, child care, and other necessities. Demand for more welfare is going up. Most rising prices are not state government’s fault, but state government could do much more to bring electricity and energy prices down.

Last week the federal court trial of former state Rep. Konstantinos Diamantis, who became Lamont’s deputy budget director, showed that corruption was embedded in the Lamont administration. Diamantis may be acquitted of extortion and taking bribes, but contractors already have pleaded guilty to paying him kickbacks for state construction work at schools.

Republican state legislators last week called attention to the millions of dollars of political patronage stuffed into recent state budgets by Democratic legislators who arranged grants for supposedly nonprofit organizations operated by their friends. The Republicans noted that it isn’t clear what some of the nonprofits do and that some can’t even be found.

Also last week Connecticut’s Hearst newspapers reported that the vice chairwoman of Bridgeport’s Democratic City Committee, Wanda Geter-Pataky, who became notorious a year ago in the city’s latest absentee ballot scandal, is still running what appears to be a marriage broker business at City Hall for foreigners wedding U.S. citizens they don’t even know, a racket to help the foreigners evade immigration law. The racket, in which the U.S. citizen parties are paid by the foreigners and immediately separate from them, was exposed a year ago but has prompted no corrective action from state government. For when the governor keeps saying he wants “everyone to feel safe in Connecticut,” he includes illegal immigrants, the clients of Geter-Pataky’s racket, and Geter-Pataky herself.

Last week it was also reported that state government’s medical insurance costs are exploding and going far over budget in large part because Connecticut has made many illegal immigrants eligible. 

Meanwhile the governor and other Democrats keep denying that Connecticut is a “sanctuary state.”              

Every other day lately brings news about the dire condition of the hospitals in Waterbury, Manchester, and Rockville, which state government allowed to fall into the hands of a predatory private equity investment company nine years ago. Having been looted by private equity, the three hospitals are now in bankruptcy and await sale to new owners. But under Lamont and the Democratic majority in the legislature, state government has yet to prohibit for-profit companies from acquiring and looting charitable hospitals.

Last month the governor’s chairwoman of the Public Utilities Regulatory Authority got caught in a big lie to the legislature and the public and resigned abruptly. The former chancellor of the Connecticut State Colleges and Universities system, pushed aside for abusing his expense account, is enjoying a year of severance pay worth a half-million dollars. Urban education remains in collapse, with Hartford’s school system giving high school diplomas to illiterates without reprimand by the state Education Department.

At some point people might start to think Connecticut could use a governor who is more than a nice guy.

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