Chris Powell column

By Chris Powell

Hartford’s century-long descent from a prosperous hub of industry and finance to a repository of poverty can be measured in several ways, but an especially telling one was publicized the other day as the City Council decided to hire a consultant to consider having city government operate a supermarket in the city, for profit or even at a loss.

Hartford is said to have become a “food desert,” a place whose residents have to travel far to obtain fresh and nutritious food for preparation at home and so have to rely on less healthy items from neighborhood convenience stores. According to the Hartford Courant’s report on the supermarket initiative, in 1968 the city had 13 chain supermarkets and has only one today.

The idea of city government supermarkets is also being pursued in Chicago, where crime is exploding and destroying the city.

Like other businesses, supermarkets won’t operate where they can’t make money safely. They won’t operate where people don’t want or can’t afford fresh and nutritious food and where crime is common.

If, as the City Council’s initiative suggests, Hartford is, like Chicago, now so desperate that government must provide food directly to its residents, the problem goes far beyond a “food desert.” The problem is demographic collapse under the pressure of poverty, welfare policy, family dysfunction, and poor education — and government in Connecticut does not seriously examine those things.

Hartford’s government can’t be blamed much here. Cities are the product of their demographics, and their demographics are largely the product of state and federal government policy, which long has been content to concentrate poverty in the cities, to minimize its impact on the middle and upper classes, rather than eliminate it. Indeed, Hartford may be doing all it can just by facilitating construction of middle-class housing downtown, since eventually a middle-class population with enough density might attract not only supermarkets but also other businesses basic to middle-class life.

But this will be a struggle even with a proper housing policy as long as the city’s schools serve mostly disadvantaged students and remain unattractive to people who want to avoid or escape the culture of poverty.

Would Hartford operate a supermarket professionally, or would such a supermarket become another mechanism of political patronage and graft? The less profit such a supermarket would have to make, the less professional it would be.

Middle-class places don’t need government supermarkets. Middle-class places can pretty much take care of themselves. So where is state government’s plan to make Connecticut’s cities middle-class again instead of just sustaining poverty there?

*

No one needs to be a feminist to deplore the University of Connecticut’s new association with the late professional basketball star Kobe Bryant. But it would be nice if a few feminists at least took notice.

Sports apparel manufacturer Nike announced the other day that it is renewing its “Kobe” brand of basketball shoes and other items, perhaps eventually including college basketball jerseys, and that six college basketball programs will promote the brand, UConn’s among them.

A statement from UConn’s athletic department, with which university President Radenka Maric concurred, said: “We are proud partners with Nike, whose support benefits hundreds of student-athletes at UConn every day. Kobe and Gigi Bryant” — the star’s daughter, who was killed with him in a helicopter crash in 2020 — “were tremendous fans of UConn basketball, and we’re pleased to join Nike in honoring their memory in this way.”

The problem is that in 2003 Bryant was charged with raping a young woman employee of a hotel in Colorado after luring her to his room. While he insisted that their encounter was consensual, the details he admitted about it were violent and disturbing. Eventually the woman declined to testify, so the charge against Bryant was dropped, whereupon she sued him and he apologized and settled the case for what was estimated at $2.5 million.

Money apparently excuses everything, even rape and even at UConn, which ordinarily prides itself on political correctness.

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

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By Chris Powell

Don’t say Connecticut state government can’t get anything right. State Treasurer Erick Russell’s office has just corrected the spectacular ripoff exposed 20 months ago in state government’s handling of unclaimed financial assets.

Back then the Connecticut Mirror reported that over the previous two decades state government had kept hundreds of millions of dollars in unclaimed assets — uncashed checks, refunds, and forgotten insurance policies and investments left with banks, other financial companies, and utilities — without trying very hard to track down the owners.

While the state occasionally advertised the unclaimed assets, it didn’t advertise the lesser ones, and when owners did come forward, they sometimes faced onerous and discouraging paperwork. State government would liquidate the assets and use some of the money for public financing of political campaigns, recording a cash credit for owners who might show up someday. Most didn’t.

Now the treasurer’s office is looking vigorously for and finding many more owners of unclaimed assets. While the average number of people recovering assets from the unclaimed property program each year in its previous 23 fiscal years was only 16,000, in the fiscal year just ended nearly 73,000 got their assets back — a 350% increase.

Last year it was feared that most owners couldn’t be located without giving the treasurer’s office access to the tax records of individuals, which the General Assembly wouldn’t do. But the treasurer’s office discovered that most people to whom unclaimed assets belong can be found by combing commercial databases that have been available to businesses and journalists all along.

While Treasurer Russell has shown that state government can serve the public interest well when it wants to, his reform of the unclaimed property program also shows that to do the right thing government often needs the sting of journalism, which has been declining, along with literacy and civic engagement, even in supposedly educated and prosperous Connecticut. That decline was reflected last week in the low participation in some of the state’s municipal primary elections.

The reform of the unclaimed property program also undermines the claims by Connecticut’s state and municipal government employee unions that the addresses of government employees should be exempt from freedom-of-information law. Such exemptions impair accountability in government, and the success of the treasurer’s office in locating so many people from commercial databases shows that such exemptions are not likely to be very effective anyway. Like it or not, the internet age has undone much privacy.

* 

Connecticut Attorney General William Tong couldn’t have been too happy about it, but last week an investigation by his office vindicated the guerrilla journalism of Project Veritas, which last year surreptitiously video-recorded an assistant school principal in Greenwich, Jeremy Boland, saying he prevented the hiring of teachers who are Catholics and political conservatives.

When the recording was publicized, its authenticity was publicly doubted by people who detest Project Veritas’ politics and deceptive tactics, as the attorney general himself does. It was as if there is no leftist and totalitarian bias in public education like that articulated by Boland, who was put on paid leave and eventually resigned. 

Like Greenwich’s own investigation, the attorney general’s could find no evidence of the discrimination Boland claimed to have committed, nor evidence that Boland made any hiring decisions on his own. But, the attorney general added, Boland “admits that the Project Veritas recordings accurately represent his words. He maintains that he made the comments to curry favor with a woman he met on a dating app.”

How short the political left’s memory is. During the Vietnam War 50 years ago it was the left that best understood that misconduct in government sometimes can be exposed only by impolite, unconventional, or deceptive means. Back then this was conveyed perfectly by a political cartoon drawn by a great liberal, Jules Feiffer, who eventually won a Pulitzer Prize. The cartoon’s caption: “If you want lies, you go to a government press conference. If you want truth, you steal it.”

Even with the left in charge all these years later, power still corrupts.

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

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By Chris Powell

Another Democratic primary for mayor of Bridgeport was held last week, and predictably enough it produced another absentee ballot scandal. 

Once again, as with the previous primary, in 2019, Mayor Joe Ganim lost the in-person vote but prevailed overwhelmingly in the absentee ballots, narrowly winning renomination. But this time dramatic surveillance video from City Hall was liberated from police custody and delivered to the campaign of Ganim’s challenger, John Gomes, which posted it on the internet and brought it to the attention of news organizations and the state Elections Enforcement Commission.

The video appears to show a Ganim campaign worker who is a city employee leaving City Hall to make four deposits of absentee ballots in a ballot-collection box just outside the building in the early-morning darkness a week before the primary. On her fourth trip to the box she is joined by an unidentified man and directs him to do the deposit while she watches from a doorway.

A few weeks ago the Elections Enforcement Commission, with gross belatedness, made a criminal complaint against the Ganim campaign worker over her improprieties with absentee ballots in the primary four years ago.

State law restricts delivery of completed absentee ballots to people delivering or mailing their own ballots, their family members or caretakers, police officers, and election officials. 

Four years ago a court found there was substantial impropriety with absentee ballots in the primary but not enough to order a new one. Ganim’s margin of victory in this year’s primary was much smaller, so if legal action is taken, maybe the video and other evidence developed from it will be considered sufficient cause for a do-over. 

If not, the voters of Bridgeport still will be able to pass judgment on the scandal when they vote in the city’s general election in November, where Gomes will be on the ballot as a petitioning candidate challenging Ganim. Of course misconduct with absentee ballots may be a powerful temptation there too unless the elections commission sends dozens of investigators to the city in advance to interview everyone seeking or purporting to seek an absentee ballot.

*

Bridgeport, impoverished and anarchic with a city government often incompetent and corrupt, may remain that way forever since state government doesn’t much care about it, because most people outside the city don’t care about it any more than they care about Connecticut’s other impoverished cities. People may figure that politics isn’t capable of making the cities more than poverty and patronage factories serving the majority party. 

After all, having served seven years in prison for his conviction on 16 federal charges of corruption committed during his first stint as Bridgeport’s mayor, Ganim was re-elected in 2015 — a proclamation of the city’s demoralization — and everyone in authority in state government accepted him back as if nothing had happened. No one in authority pondered the demoralization or its cause, which may have involved the longstanding failure of urban policy. Nobody in authority proposed legislation disqualifying from elective office people with felony convictions for corruption.

But someone in authority should be able to articulate the danger signified for the whole state by the absentee ballot improprieties in Bridgeport. That is, the more intermediaries between voters and the casting of their votes, the more corruption.

*

Connecticut’s Constitution allows voting by absentee ballot for voters who are absent from the state or their town on Election Day, sick or physically disabled, or under religious obligation against secular activity. But next year Connecticut will hold a referendum on a proposed state constitutional amendment allowing absentee ballots to be cast just for a voter’s convenience, with no reason required.

That amendment will be a broad invitation for corruption — and completely unnecessary, since Connecticut has just authorized 14 days of in-person voting in advance of a general election, starting next year. That will be convenience without corruption. Maybe Bridgeport can’t be changed, but Connecticut can be prevented from becoming like Bridgeport.

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

By Chris Powell

Hartford’s streets long have been notorious for the disregard of traffic rules and signals, and the other night such disregard killed a city police officer, Robert Garten, and seriously injured another, Brian Kearney. According to the police account, their cruiser, its emergency lights flashing, was struck at an intersection by a car driven by an 18-year-old high school junior who had just run two red lights speeding away from a police traffic stop nearby though he wasn’t being pursued. The registration of the young man’s car reportedly had expired and the car lacked insurance.

Horrible as this mayhem was, it wasn’t really a surprise. Like Connecticut’s other cities, Hartford is also notorious for murders and shootings, fatherlessness and other child neglect, educational failure, and the rest of poverty’s pathologies — the consequences of the state’s social contract, which holds that the only thing that can be done about poverty and its pathologies is to confine them, as exclusive zoning in the suburbs does.

The General Assembly has never audited the failure of poverty policy or recognized that it prompted and sustains exclusive zoning. Neither can the connection be discussed in polite company or examined by journalism. This year the closest the legislature could come to the problem of city mayhem was to allow municipalities to install street cameras to record traffic violations and facilitate identification and prosecution of offenders.

But this week Connecticut’s Hearst newspapers got incisive comment about street cameras from the president of Hartford’s police union, Sgt. James Rutkauski, who was assisting arrangements for his colleague’s funeral.

Street cameras, Rutkauski said, will be a joke until Hartford’s courts seriously punish offending drivers. “There’s no consequences” now, Rutkauski said, and the expense of identifying and apprehending violators recorded by the cameras won’t be recovered unless courts impose fines of $1,000 or more, which they are not likely to do amid the city’s poverty. If courts imposed any serious punishment for dangerous traffic violations, the very community endangered by the mayhem would call it racist, whereupon judges, police, and prosecutors would scurry away.

*

As with much of what the legislature does, the purpose of street cameras is less to combat the problem than to let legislators impersonate relevance without risking its political consequences.

Criminal prosecutions are already so discounted in Connecticut that many crimes are committed by repeat offenders who have not been deterred by brief or suspended prison sentences and probation but whose release from or avoidance of prison is actually celebrated by the governor and legislators for reducing the prison population.  

Indeed, while the governor and legislators clamor for impeding gun ownership, two-thirds of gun charges brought in Connecticut in the last nine years were dropped, usually in plea bargaining to gain convictions on other charges.

That is, despite the political posturing, Connecticut doesn’t take gun crime seriously. So even with street cameras, how seriously will the state take running red lights in Hartford, at least if no one has been killed? Even the young man charged in the crash that killed the Hartford officer is almost sure to receive leniency because of his age, even if convicted of manslaughter. Before long his friends will see him again, and they will not be much deterred from their own reckless driving.

*

So what might Connecticut do if it ever wanted to get relevant with mayhem in the cities?

For starters, the state might ensure that the law deters in practice, not just in theory. No extremism would be necessary, since police, prosecutors, and judges can distinguish between rolling through a stop sign and running a red light.

The state might bolster its criminal-justice system so that staff shortages don’t necessitate as much discounting of crime. 

The state might require long prison time for repeat offenders.

Most of all Connecticut might audit its poverty policies and try to develop some that accomplish more than increasing government’s payroll.

After all, while Jesus said, “The poor you will always have with you,” he didn’t mean it was a great idea or a command.

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

By Chris Powell

Nothing may be more beautiful in politics than when influential but selfish special interests clash, catching squeamish elected officials in the middle, forcing them to choose sides on the basis of how much political harm each special interest could inflict on them. Choosing sides according to the public interest seldom occurs to elected officials, since they tend to equate the public interest with whatever gives them political advantage.

Such a clash was renewed in Connecticut the other day when automaker Tesla and the Mohegan Indian tribe announced that Tesla will start selling and delivering cars from a showroom on its reservation in the eastern part of the state.

This practice ordinarily would be against state law, which prohibits automakers from selling cars directly and reserves that business for manufacturer-franchised and state-licensed auto dealers. Tesla doesn’t use franchisees.

The law’s purported premise is that dealers provide better consumer protection than manufacturers would. Of course the law provides even better protection for auto dealer profitability.

But as a matter of federal law, Indian reservations have some sovereignty, and federal courts almost certainly would construe it in favor of Tesla’s arrangement with the Mohegans, which is similar to arrangements Tesla has with Indian reservations in other states.

Because of Connecticut’s law, state residents who want to buy Teslas have to leave the state, though Teslas can be viewed and leased at a Tesla showroom in Milford.

Tesla and the Connecticut Automotive Retail Association long have been tangling over the law. The General Assembly always has sided with the auto dealers, who have far more influence and thought they had won. Maybe now they have lost.

Governor Lamont and state legislators may resent the Mohegans for contravening state policy so dramatically, especially since the tribe usually portrays itself as a good partner with state government. More resentful still, the auto dealers now may propose legislation to wreck Tesla’s arrangement with the Mohegans, as by imposing a prohibitive fee on registering in Connecticut any vehicles for which there is no dealer franchise in the state.

But might car buyers in Connecticut, especially those with enough money to buy Teslas, be allowed to settle this issue for themselves?

New cars are expensive and people today tend to be attentive to their warranties. If car buyers are really so much more protected when buying from an auto dealer rather than direct from a manufacturer, the dealers association could advertise to that effect. Meanwhile Tesla could advertise why people buying directly are adequately protected. Buyers could decide for themselves.

The world wouldn’t end, and state government could worry less about protecting the auto dealers and more about protecting state residents from failing schools and sewer systems, repeat criminal offenders, street takeovers by wild juveniles, crooked state troopers, grotesque cost-overruns on government construction projects, and other problems against which people can’t protect themselves.

*

As sexual discomfort and gender dysphoria seem to be exploding among young people, a teacher is planning to open a private school in Ansonia for seventh- and eighth-graders with such conditions. It didn’t get enough enrollment to start with the current school year and it will be surprising if it succeeds.

For tuition is planned to be $20,000 per year while parents of the potential students already may face high medical bills. Transportation will be a challenge. People may be reluctant to commit to a school that may not be around for more than two years, with students risking having to transfer back to school systems they fled.

Competition in education is good but the reasons it is needed aren’t. The main justification claimed for the new school is that many young teens with sexual and gender discomfort are frequently bullied by their peers and school administrators fail to act against it. The remedy offered by the new school is essentially segregation, so no students distressed by matters of sexuality and gender will ever have to deal with students not like them, and vice-versa.

Will that solve problems or just postpone them to when they are even more traumatic?

Apparently it is too much to ask government to figure out why more young people are distressed.

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

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By CHRIS POWELL

Most people in authority who grew up in Connecticut went through elementary, middle, and high school without air-conditioning and experienced how uncomfortable classes could get when days in late spring and early fall got unseasonably warm. 

So during last week’s heat wave no one should have been surprised that temperatures in many classrooms, especially in the cities, got impossibly hot and humid and some schools closed. Whereupon many people began to wonder why Connecticut’s school air-conditioning and ventilation problem had not yet been better addressed.

A survey of the state’s schools two years ago found that about 40% had air-conditioning systems. But they have not always been working and seem to be especially troublesome in New Haven’s schools, whose students, most of whom are from impoverished households, need school the most but are the most chronically absent. They won’t be encouraged to return by sweltering classrooms.

In recent years state government has appropriated about $400 million in aid to municipalities for improving air-conditioning and ventilation in schools. But partly for bureaucratic reasons, putting the money to work has been slow, and some of the municipalities whose schools most need the improvements do not have the most competent governments.

*

For example, a few years ago the City Council in Hartford, a city on the verge of bankruptcy whose sewage system in its poorest neighborhood had broken down, decided that the city’s most urgent need was a minor-league baseball stadium. The council concluded that the sewage system could wait, along with air-conditioning and ventilation in city schools, and hurled itself into the stadium project, which soon became a disaster when the city fired the contractor. 

Another contractor built the stadium but the cost went way up and the first contractor’s lawsuit has been found to have merit and could cost the city millions more.

Astoundingly, state government quickly endorsed the City Council’s mistaken priorities, assuming most of Hartford’s long-term debt and thereby essentially reimbursing the city for the stadium and choosing against sanitation and education.

Of course Connecticut’s schools suffered during late-spring and early-fall heat waves long after air-conditioning was invented and long before the Hartford stadium debacle. Back then state government decided that hundreds of other projects were more deserving of direct appropriations and bonding. 

But maybe not all state government’s priorities were wrong at that time. For years ago, when most students in Connecticut were reliably attending school and learning, governors, state legislators, and municipal officials could have thought that a few days of schooling lost to heat waves each year were acceptable.

Not today as education in the state has been crashing even as spending has kept rising without improving learning.

*

At least under Governor Lamont the current state administration has done the most about improving school air-conditioning and ventilation, even if more needs to be done, as noted ironically last week by Kate Dias, the president of the state’s largest teachers union, the Connecticut Education Association. Dias lamented the loss of so many days of schooling during the heat wave.

That loss of school was nothing compared to the loss suffered by students in Connecticut and throughout the country since the Covid-19 virus epidemic began in 2020 and schools were closed largely under the pressure of the CEA and other teacher unions.

The epidemic was not underway long before it was noticed that young people were not much affected by the virus and that suspension of their education might harm them more than the virus. So teachers should have been declared “essential workers,” just as essential as police officers and grocery clerks. Instead government declared teachers royalty and instructed them to stay home at full pay and try to teach via the internet.

“Remote learning” was a disaster, especially for students who were already behind in their schooling. Many now are suffering behavioral problems and may never catch up. But since teachers will share the benefits of air-conditioning, they consider it more urgent than they recently considered education itself.

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

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By Chris Powell

According to state officials, Connecticut’s economy is strong. But much of the news tells a different story.

An extra $25 million in food subsidies is to be distributed this week to the families of 210,000 children in the state, on top of the recent expansion of the state’s free breakfasts and lunches to schoolchildren from poor families.

Home heating subsidies from the Connecticut Energy Assistance Program appear likely to be reduced by $1,000 per household because less money is being appropriated even as the number of qualifying households has risen to 116,000, an increase of 43% in five years.

Drug overdoses are exploding, with fatalities every day.

Mental illness is soaring among children, and student proficiency is not recovering from its collapse during the virus epidemic.

Homelessness is rising again. 

While state officials insist that crime is going down, it seems to have gotten more brazen. The other day there was a gun battle among gangsters on a street in Bridgeport, recorded on video and broadcast by a New York television station. Crime by repeat offenders is pervasive, and a scary new phenomenon has developed: riotous “street takeovers” committed by young people. Their premise seems to be that if enough people make trouble, the police will be almost powerless. So far they have been proven right.

*  

These developments do not suggest prosperity and hope. They suggest a society sinking in poverty, despair, indifference, nihilism, and a government unable to consider the causes of the problems and do more than throw money at them without solving them.

Of course inflation has been devastating living standards for the poor and middle class while delivering unearned capital gains to wealthy property owners. But no one in authority in Connecticut has asked where inflation comes from, even as state and federal elected officials tout the goodies they are distributing, goodies being financed by inflationary money creation that causes consumption to outrun production and prices to rise.

What is causing this disintegration?

The usual suspects — Donald Trump and George W. Bush — have been out of office for some time, and they were not misers but bigger spenders than their predecessors. Now that the federal debt limit has been suspended and the federal government has bestowed so much “emergency” money on the states, there is hardly any financial restraint in government.

Despite all this spending polls suggest that most people think the country is not progressing and the likely presidential candidates of the major political parties are awful. 

So could the disintegration result from something other than a lack of government spending? Could it involve worsening social alienation, declining individual morale, and eroding standards throughout society and public life?

Whatever the causes, they won’t be addressed if those in authority lack the courage to look for them.

*

Schools especially are struggling against the doleful trends, but last week the CBS Evening News rebroadcast an encouraging 2½-minute report aired last December about how Meriden’s elementary schools have substantially improved student performance in math, even in schools serving mainly children from poor households.

The Meriden plan is hardly ingenious. Indeed, people outside education might find it obvious. 

The schools have greatly increased instructional time in math by as much as a half hour a day and have divided classes into small groups in which students work with each other to solve math problems and get tutoring as their teacher circulates among groups. There is less boring lecturing from the blackboard and more student engagement with the work. The higher grades in the elementary schools now may spend 90 minutes a day on math.

That may be the formula for success: Cut the less essential stuff and spend more time on the basics.

Unfortunately Connecticut policy is moving in the opposite direction, with the General Assembly and Governor Lamont having just prescribed, by law, more time in school not on the basics but on politically correct stuff like ethnic studies — another pernicious trend.

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

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By Chris Powell

Whether the school bus drivers who lately have been striking in Meriden and Coventry are underpaid, as they complain, is largely a matter of whether qualified replacements can be hired for them at similar compensation. Since labor generally seems scarce in Connecticut, with job openings being advertised almost everywhere, replacing the strikers without raising pay and benefits may be difficult, especially since crossing a picket line is no fun and risks the usual retaliatory union thuggery.

In any case school bus drivers are essentially municipal government employees, working for a contractor performing important government service, and if they were employed directly by government, they would be compensated much better for the same work.

Why does employment directly with government in Connecticut pay so much better? 

First, perhaps, is that government is mostly a monopoly and there is little competition for the services it provides. So in most cases government can name its own price, imposed in taxes. 

Second is that state law encourages unionization of government employees and gives their unions huge advantages against what passes for public administration.  

Third is that, to preserve these advantages, government employee unions are aggressively organized politically — far more organized than any other special interest and mere taxpayers. Connecticut’s government workforce is reported to be the most unionized government workforce in the country, with 75% of state and municipal government employees belonging to a union. So a candidate for municipal or state elective office who declines to pledge obedience to the government employee unions seldom has much chance.

In contrast, only about 7% of private-sector employees in the state are unionized. Those union members are not much of a factor politically.

All this implies that private-sector workers may not be underpaid as much as the government class is overpaid.

* 

It’s easy to think of government jobs that are less important than the jobs of school bus drivers. Keeping the drivers only indirectly employed by the government, through contractors, saves taxpayers a lot of money.

It’s the same with nursing home workers. Most nursing home patients in Connecticut are government wards, their care financed by Medicaid, and nursing homes are mainly government contractors. Thus technically their employees work in the private sector, often making little more than subsistence wages with limited benefits. Some are represented by unions but attempts to raise their compensation have not been very successful. Much of the nursing home workforce is transitory, in part because the work is often unpleasant.

State government also saves taxpayers a lot of money by operating nursing homes through contractors. Nursing home and other social welfare organizations that fulfill what are essentially government’s responsibilities are always at the end of the line when government appropriates for raises. The raise money is usually exhausted by the people directly employed by the government, the politically organized, long before any reaches the nursing home and social-service workers.

*  

The cargo of school bus drivers is precious, just as the “cargo” of nursing home workers is. Thus their compensation will always be a matter of great public interest, and, whether the public realizes it or not, will always be determined by government policy — how much school boards are willing to pay bus contractors, how much the state and municipal governments give school boards, and how much the state and federal governments are willing to pay for indigent patients.

That is, while the work may look like the private sector, it’s not, and it’s all a matter of taxes. 

Taxes in Connecticut are high, especially in light of government’s many excesses and inefficiencies. Fairness would suggest economizing with the regular government workforce, diverting money to the low-paid employees of the government contractors, who lately have been clobbered by inflation even as state and municipal employees have been insulated by comfortable raises.

But to govern is to choose, and who in authority will choose fairness when the most powerful special interest is against it?

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

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By Chris Powell

Bridgeport might not be Bridgeport without irregularities, improprieties or worse in its municipal elections. Connecticut state government might not be itself if it didn’t take too long to address breaches of integrity.

So only recently did the State Elections Enforcement Commission get around to the corruption in the 2019 Democratic primary in Bridgeport. Mayor Joe Ganim, who already had gone to federal prison for corruption but had managed to get elected again, won the primary in a very close vote. Or at least Ganim won the absentee ballots by a 3-to-1 margin, just enough to offset the margin by which he lost among people who voted in person. 

Whereupon Connecticut’s Hearst newspapers discovered that many absentee ballots in the primary had been distributed and collected improperly. Some may have been cast on behalf of people who didn’t really vote at all.

While a lawsuit to nullify the result of the primary failed, the judge concluded that improprieties with the absentee ballots were substantial. Now, at last, the elections commission has asked the chief state’s attorney to consider criminal prosecution of three Ganim campaign workers who handled absentee ballots.

Prosecution so long after the primary seems unlikely. But at least the elections commission has reminded Connecticut, if only inadvertently, of something that will always be timely. That is, the more people are allowed to vote at a distance, through intermediaries, without appearing in person at a polling place and producing identification, the more corruption there will be.

This year, the General Assembly passed and Gov. Lamont signed legislation allowing voting not just on Election Day but also in the prior two weeks. Early voting will be done in person, so there’s little wrong with it except that it won’t start until the national election in 2024 and election officials will have had no experience with it, experience they should have been given in this year’s municipal elections, where participation will be small and mistakes would be much less damaging.

But the election next year will include a referendum on a state constitutional amendment to allow people to vote by absentee ballot without giving an authorized reason, like illness or absence from the state on Election Day. Most people might enjoy the convenience of voting without ever having to go to a polling place, but the “no excuse” absentee ballot amendment could Bridgeport-ize the whole state.

That is a bleak prospect, but there is hope. On Sept. 12, Bridgeport will have another Democratic primary for mayor and in November there will be the city’s general election, and both may produce still more impropriety and raise more doubts about the absentee ballot amendment.

*

TIME FOR OVERTIME: Making work pay more than welfare should be a high objective of government, and the Biden administration may deliver on it soon. For the U.S. Labor Department proposes a big increase in the number of workers who must be paid overtime for working more than 40 hours per week.

Federal rules now exempt employers from paying overtime to salaried workers paid more than $35,568 annually. The proposed rule would raise that figure to $55,068 and periodically increase it for inflation. 

Of course, Connecticut labor advocates support the proposal, and businesses oppose it. Inflation has hurt both sides badly. So state government, which long has been boasting about its supposed budget surplus while remaining full of extravagance, could ease the path to more overtime.

That is, state government could essentially reimburse businesses for some of the extra overtime expense by reducing their taxes. State government long has planned to repeal its 10% surcharge on its corporate income tax but instead this year extended the surcharge through 2025. With Connecticut lagging the country in economic growth, eliminating the surcharge is compelling. 

Unfortunately, state government has found it more compelling to keep raising the compensation of its own employees. Work always pays more for them, but not so much for those in the private sector.

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

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By Chris Powell

Hope and happy excitement bubbled up in Connecticut this week as children began a new school year, though of course children going to school for the first time were apprehensive, along with their parents, many of whom were yielding custody of their kids to outsiders for the first time. 

The luckiest children were those looking forward to their return to school, since they were already much engaged with learning and enjoying social contact with their peers, and have had well-behaved classmates and competent and caring teachers.

But this year everyone — students, parents, teachers, and school officials alike — also has reason to be apprehensive about school, since the disruption caused by the mistaken closing of schools during the epidemic is being followed by even more difficult problems.

Mental illness and misbehavior among schoolchildren were rising even before the epidemic but now have exploded. Disrespect, disruption, and violence committed by students have pushed many teachers into early retirement and have discouraged interest in teaching careers. 

Many school systems, especially in cities, cannot fill teaching jobs and other positions working directly with students and are forced to rely on temporary substitutes. Instruction will suffer for all students, especially for students with disabilities.

Chronic absenteeism among students — students missing 10% or more of their school days — has exploded as well. Last year nearly a quarter of Connecticut’s students were classified as chronically absent, and rates in some cities were around 50%. Chronic absenteeism impairs the education of all other students as well, since teachers are distracted by having to help the absentees catch up.

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Student performance in Connecticut was declining long before the epidemic clobbered it, and restoring it may take a long time. Many Connecticut students were and still are being graduated from high school without mastering English and math. While state government administers occasional proficiency tests in various grades, there are no proficiency requirements for students to advance or graduate. 

While chronic absenteeism may result mainly from the decline of parenting and the worsening of household poverty, Connecticut education officials have not yet explained how social promotion — advancing students even when they haven’t learned — gives them any incentive to go to school in the first place and gives parents any incentive to get them there. Students and parents discerned long ago that Connecticut’s schools demand little of them. 

In turn educators and elected officials might have discerned and acknowledged by now that parenting, not higher pay for educators, is the prerequisite for educational success.

Indeed, since school spending doesn’t seem to correlate with learning, the most compelling reason for raising teacher pay today is not that learning will improve but rather that teachers must to be paid more just to keep coming to work with disrespectful and disruptive students.       

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Compounding Connecticut’s longstanding failure with the basics of education are the obliviousness and political pandering of the General Assembly, which lately has required schools to include curriculums on climate change, Native American studies, Asian American and Pacific Islander studies, and financial literacy. 

This is all just for show, since there will be no requirements for students to demonstrate learning in the new subjects just as there are no requirements for students to demonstrate learning in the basics.

That is, financial literacy will be taught to students lacking literacy in English and math, and again schools will be distracted from fixing the crucial failures.

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Anyone who has ever tried to put critical questions to school officials may have sensed that public education often resents accountability to the public. Some school systems in Connecticut and throughout the country have begun concealing from parents the gender dysphoria of their own children if the children don’t want their parents to know about their gender switching in school.

Disgraceful as this lack of accountability is, it’s not education’s biggest problem. Students perform poorly and are chronically absent mainly because of a lack of accountability at home, and government lacks the courage to tell parents they’re failing their kids. 

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

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