Chris Powell column

By Chris Powell

Would the General Assembly’s rejection of Governor Lamont’s extravagant contract deal with the state employee unions have cost the state even more money?

That was the argument made by state House Speaker Matt Ritter and Hearst Connecticut Media’s columnist Dan Haar on the eve of the legislature’s vote. This argument was misleading in two respects but pursuing it illustrates the planned uncontrollability of state government’s labor costs.

The speaker and Haar noted that, by state law, the legislature’s rejection of the contract would have sent it to binding arbitration. The speaker and Haar maintained that the unions then almost certainly would have been awarded an even more favorable contract, because state government has a huge cash position at the moment, increasing its ability to pay.

Under the law, a contract arbitration award can be rejected by the legislature only once. Then it goes to a second arbitration, wherein special danger arises, since the law says the legislature cannot reject a second arbitration award.

Yes, the unions well might have done better in arbitration, since the process was designed 40 years ago as a mechanism for destroying the public’s sovereignty and since arbiters long have favored the unions.

But state government’s big cash position is not a reason for considering the new contract so affordable, for state government’s comprehensive financial position remains awful, with tens of billions of dollars in unfunded pension liabilities. State government’s current budget surplus could be entirely applied to those unfunded liabilities and barely make a dent in them.

More importantly, even in the face of a second unfavorable arbitration award the governor and legislature would not have been helpless. They still could have achieved victory for the public by changing the law to let the legislature reject arbitration awards any number of times. Better still, they could have repealed the arbitration system entirely.

The problem with binding arbitration in government is that it is profoundly undemocratic. It reduces the public interest to equality with a special interest. Employee compensation is a huge part of state and municipal government expense — the extra cost of the new state employee contract is estimated at nearly $2 billion — and the bigger the expense, the more it should be determined by ordinary democracy.

On the municipal level in Connecticut 70% or more of government expense is employee compensation, yet binding arbitration effectively removes it from ordinary democracy. Elected officials are not what they should be, the last word on how most local tax dollars are spent.

But Connecticut’s elected officials at both the state and municipal level love binding arbitration precisely because it takes them out of democracy, allowing them to duck responsibility amid the conflict between the public interest and the special interest. Binding arbitration lets elected officials shrug and tell the public they were helpless.

Many years ago Connecticut also had a system of government in which all the big financial decisions were removed from democracy and vested in an unelected authority. It was called monarchy and the colony fought a revolution against it. The state is overdue for another revolution.

Such a revolution might be accomplished with surprising simplicity and candor.

Repealing the binding arbitration law would turn the governor, state legislators, mayors, and municipal officials back into the contract arbiters they should be.

Or the cowardice of most of those elected officials could be accepted and a new law enacted to create the elected offices of state arbiter and municipal arbiter, requiring them to face the voters every two or four years and giving them the power to determine government employee union contracts. Thus contract terms would become campaign issues, political parties would nominate candidates who would side with the unions or the public, and voters would settle the matter.

All the other elected state and municipal officials still could pretend to be in charge, contending over lesser matters, while the elected arbiters spent the great bulk of the government’s money and answered for how it was spent.

Of course the unions would oppose any such reform, precisely because it would restore democracy. Their opposition would be telling.

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Chris Powell is a columnist for the Journal Inquirer in Manchester, Connecticut.

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By Chris Powell

Count on Connecticut state government to misdiagnose a problem if doing so can facilitate rewarding an influential interest group.

That is what is happening again with the student loan debt problem, as illustrated the other day by a report from the Connecticut Mirror.

The report focused on a single woman with two young children who is employed by a nonprofit organization and pursuing a master’s degree in social work at the University of Connecticut. She anticipates she will have student loan debt of $100,000 upon her graduation in May and doesn’t know how she’ll ever repay it if she sticks with social work at a nonprofit organization as she wants to do.

Rather than question the woman’s life choices and those of others in her situation, state legislators have submitted several bills addressing student loan debt. One would have state government reimburse $5,000 in debt payments every year for employees of nonprofit organizations dealing with health care or human services. The debt would have to have been incurred by attending a college in the state.

A more direct solution might result from recognizing why employees of nonprofit social-service groups in Connecticut are so stressed even without student loan debt. It is because state government finances the nonprofits so poorly even as they do most of state government’s social work for half the cost of state government’s own employees.

But why pay the nonprofit employees more if the money can be diverted to educators, a special interest comprising a big part of the army of Connecticut’s majority political party? For that’s what student loans are: a subsidy not to students but to educators.

Student loan debt is a burden only if the education for which the debt was undertaken does not enable the borrower to repay. Student loan debt may be a great investment for people pursuing highly paid careers, like medicine, engineering, science, and technology. But otherwise student loan debt is often a disaster, as millions of young people have discovered.

Many retail clerks, taxi drivers, telemarketers, waiters, and child care workers have student loan debt that, while unnecessary to their employment, is keeping them from forming families and acquiring housing.

That doesn’t mean that higher education is useless and did not give those people a greater appreciation of life. It means the cost is too high, even as educators in Connecticut tend to be highly paid themselves, far better paid than the working-class people struggling with student loan debt. That’s not fair.

Neither is student loan debt relief fair to the many people who worked and saved to pay their way through college without incurring debt. Debt relief makes them suckers, and still President Biden is considering debt relief on a national scale.

The clamor for student loan debt relief is doubly mistaken because the country’s overwhelming problem in education is not higher education but lower education, where social promotion graduates most high school students without requiring them to master high school work. That policy is also a great subsidy to educators, since their jobs are much easier when student performance doesn’t matter.

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DUMPING CASSANO?: For three decades Democrat Stephen T. Cassano has been Manchester’s most prominent political personality, serving on the town’s Board of Directors for many years, 14 of them as mayor, before moving up to the state Senate, where he has served for 12 years.

Even so, his party may deny him renomination this year though he says he is running again and will wage a primary if necessary. Some party leaders are sore that he has wrongfooted them two or three times, saying he would retire and then changing his mind after others started running to succeed him, causing them to withdraw. That was erratic of him. Cassano is also said to have lost touch with his party’s town committees. A businessman with no political record is challenging him for the Democratic nomination.

Has Cassano lost touch with his district? He has never been beaten, but in his most recent campaigns he has not finished strongly even as his district leans Democratic. Will it stay Democratic after a primary based on personalities?

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Chris Powell is a columnist for the Journal Inquirer in Manchester, Connecticut.

By Chris Powell

Now it will be for a jury to decide whether state Trooper Brian D. North is guilty of manslaughter or was justified in fatally shooting Mubarek Soulemane more than two years ago after the mentally ill 19-year-old hijacked a car at knifepoint in Norwalk and led police on a 30-mile chase before being cut off in West Haven.

Because of police body and dashboard camera video, the manslaughter charge brought last week by state Inspector General Robert J. Devlin Jr. is entirely plausible. When he was shot, Soulemane was sitting in the car with the windows up, holding a knife but not within reach of anyone. He was shot so fast after being stopped that it looks like the result of the trooper’s adrenaline and rage rather than any danger posed at that moment. No one would have been hurt by a few more seconds of restraint by the police.

But under state law the issue to be decided in court will be whether at the moment of shooting the trooper reasonably thought that his life or the lives of other officers at the scene were in immediate danger. While the inspector general concluded that this was not a reasonable thought, even jurors agreeing on that point may conclude that Soulemane bears heavy responsibility for his own death.

Indeed, jurors may sympathize with the trooper’s adrenaline and rage, no matter how much police must be trained to resist those things. Jurors also may be reluctant to wreck the trooper’s life for what they may see as an understandable mistake.

While the case against the trooper won’t be so easy to prove, at least it suggests that, thanks to police video cameras and, as Governor Lamont stressed, a new office of investigation fully independent of the police, Connecticut at last is better prepared to enforce standards and uphold accountability in police work.

But Connecticut will ignore another big issue arising from the Soulemane case: his longstanding mental illness, which was well known to his family, doctors, and police in New Haven, where he lived, and which made his untimely death predictable.

Soulemane’s family often called police to help restrain him and had taken him to Yale New Haven Hospital at least 10 times amid schizophrenic episodes. His sister told the Connecticut Mirror: “It was a constant battle: Mubarak versus schizophrenia.” His brother told the Hartford Courant he always feared that Mubarek’s life would end as it did.

Nothing worked for the young man but nothing effective was done to protect him or to protect society from him. Everyone involved with him should have sought to have him institutionalized long before he was shot to death. But policy in Connecticut is to let the chronically and disruptive mentally ill run loose rather than make room for them in mental hospitals.

This policy is an admission that government won’t seriously address mental illness even as government lately has induced mental illness everywhere with lockdowns, layoffs, work reductions, and school closings.

Another such admission came this month when the General Assembly’s Judiciary Committee approved a $9 million damage lawsuit settlement with the family of a patient at the state’s hospital for the criminally insane, Whiting Forensic Institute in Middletown. A tipster reported grotesque abuse of the patient by many hospital staff members. Surveillance video confirmed the abuse. A dozen staff members were fired and several convicted.

The settlement got little publicity even as the governor and state legislators were loudly rationalizing the extravagant new contract being given to the state employee unions. State employees were lauded for staying at work during the epidemic, as if private-sector workers didn’t stay at work too while others lost their jobs or work hours. No state employee missed a paycheck.

If Soulemane had been committed to Whiting he might still be alive today, and, even if he had been abused like the patient in this month’s damage lawsuit settlement, he too might be getting rich. Now that he is dead, in part because he was not institutionalized, his family may get rich from their own damage lawsuit against the state.

They will consider it justice. Everyone else might consider it more expensive incompetence and malfeasance in state government.

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Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years.

By Chris Powell

While Bridgeport’s troubled schools, filled with students neglected at home, perform terribly, the city’s Board of Education has put another holiday on its school calendar: Islam’s Eid al-Fitr, which marks the end of Ramadan.

The board did so in the name of diversity and religious and ethnic tolerance at the request of students from Park City Magnet School, as if students everywhere really need some noble reason to want another day off. The board didn’t even wait to find out how many city students come from families who strongly desire the holiday. The request was politically correct, and that was enough.

School systems around Connecticut have been doing or considering the same sort of thing lately, particularly with the Hindu festival of Dawali, even though the number of students observing that holiday is small.

Because of the virus epidemic Connecticut’s schools have just come through two years of great disruption in education, during which “remote learning” — schooling from home via the internet — meant no learning at all for many students. On average Connecticut students have probably lost a full year of education because of the epidemic. But the holidaymakers don’t care.

The holidaymakers may note that state law still requires municipalities to offer 180 days of school each year. But to give schools flexibility for returning to normal, the General Assembly and Governor Lamont may reduce that mandate by several days, which will mean still more school time lost.

Even if the 180-day requirement is maintained, more holidays mean more interruptions to learning.

If Connecticut took seriously the educational disaster of the last two years, the state would be urgently reducing school holidays, not increasing them. A week of schooling might be recovered by eliminating five or six lesser holidays observed by many school systems: Columbus Day or Indigenous People’s Day, Veterans Day, Martin Luther King Day, Presidents Day, Good Friday, and, in some towns, Juneteenth, when students are taught erroneously that the proclamation of the end of slavery in Texas at the conclusion of the Civil War marked the end of slavery throughout the country. (In fact slavery continued in several states for another six months until adoption of the 13th Amendment.)

Few students and families do anything special on those holidays. For nearly everyone they are just an ordinary day off.

The school holiday craze is a lot of posturing. It is anti-education, and the tolerance it displays most is tolerance of worsening student performance.

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EMERGENCY BIKE PATH: It would be hard for any municipality in Connecticut to do worse than West Haven has done with the emergency federal financial aid it has been given to compensate for the virus epidemic. A state audit has found that the city misspent more than three-quarters of the $1.1 million it received at the end of 2020.

But some malfeasance must be suspected elsewhere. For example, the other day Enfield decided to use $80,000 of its emergency federal money to extend a bicycle path.

If that was really the most urgent need in Enfield, the town would seem to be doing well. But while Enfield was making an emergency of the bike path, the state Education Department announced that the town’s schools are now among the poorest-performing in the state and designated them an “alliance district,” a sort of probation with state supervision and potentially extra state financial aid.

Spending doesn’t correlate well with student performance, but the $80,000 for the bike path might have paid for some tutoring.

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BRUNO’S BREAKDOWN: Connecticut’s Supreme Court has begun an investigation of Superior Court Judge Alice Bruno, who has not shown up for work for more than two years but has been paid $400,000 anyway. Bruno’s excuse suggests that she has had a mental breakdown and is incapable of doing her job.

That is, Bruno has declared that she needs a stress-free work environment. (Wouldn’t everybody like one?) But courts are in the business of conflict resolution, which means stress. Could Bruno really not have known this when she applied for a judgeship?

Having let the Bruno disaster continue so long, the Judicial Department itself has seemed unable to handle stress.

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Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years.

By Chris Powell

Anyone paying attention to state government last week might have been shocked by the disclosure from the state Office of Fiscal Analysis that Governor Lamont’s proposed contract with the state employee unions will raise state government’s labor expenses by nearly $2 billion over four years.

Announcing the contract six weeks ago, the governor said nothing about its likely cost. Had he even calculated the cost? Or did he care only about satisfying the state employee unions and mobilizing them for his re-election campaign and the campaigns of his fellow Democrats for the General Assembly and Congress?

Lately the governor has been boasting about cutting taxes by using state government’s ephemeral budget surplus, largely the result of billions of dollars in emergency aid from the federal government. But as Republican state legislators note, the governor’s gift to the state employee unions will cost far more than that tax relief. The gift also will weigh heavily on future administrations and legislatures, inclining them to repeal the tax relief after the election.

The contract is estimated to raise state employee compensation by as much as 15%. The governor says this largesse is needed for state government to retain and recruit skilled workers on the eve of a large wave of retirements. But that wave is expected not because employment in the private sector is so attractive for state government employees but because their own retirement benefits are so generous.

State government is not yet suffering the “Great Resignation” that affects private-sector employment. To the contrary, for two years state government employees have enjoyed complete insulation against the dislocations suffered by private-sector workers during the virus epidemic. While private-sector workers lost jobs, working hours, and income no employee of government in Connecticut did. That insulation will remain a unique and lucrative if untabulated fringe benefit.

With the new contract the governor has abandoned the public interest.

Will Democratic legislators have the courage even to question the new contract and thereby risk the loss of state employee union support? Will Republican legislators and the party’s likely candidate for governor, Bob Stefanowski, have the courage to press the contract issue throughout the upcoming campaign?

Or are the Republicans too scared of the unions as well, though they would never get the union votes anyway?

Do many Republicans even realize that the government employee unions are the majority party’s army and that the new state employee union contract is effectively a one-sided mechanism of public financing of political campaigns?

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WEST HAVEN MESS: In West Haven the incompetence and corruption of the Democratic city administration have gotten worse despite five years of supervision by the state Municipal Accountability Review Board.

Last week the MARB voted to put the city under the highest level of supervision, “Tier IV.” Three weeks earlier an audit by the state Office of Policy and Management reported that West Haven had improperly spent or failed to account properly for more than three quarters of the $1.1 million in emergency aid it received from the federal government at the end of 2020. Much of the money appears to have been embezzled by a state representative who was an aide to the City Council and who has resigned and been indicted.

But now that five years of MARB supervision have accomplished so little in West Haven, maybe the General Assembly and the governor should create an agency to supervise MARB as well.

Of course state government isn’t in such an authoritative position itself. While West Haven carries huge unfunded pension obligations, state government’s own unfunded pension obligations are far larger and make it as insolvent technically as the city is.

In any case West Haven city government and the townspeople themselves, who keep voting for incompetence and corruption, aren’t getting the point. So the legislature and the governor probably should put the city into bankruptcy, wiping its financial books clean and starting over.

That will hurt some people and be a disgrace to the city and the state, but city government and city residents need more incentive to smarten up.

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Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years.

By Chris Powell

Beautiful as Connecticut is in spring, the state will remain a target-rich environment for the political action committee whose formation was reported by the Connecticut Mirror last week: Parents Against Stupid Stuff.

After all, even as Parents Against Stupid Stuff was being announced, the state Senate voted to qualify strikers for unemployment benefits, and Senate President Pro Tem Martin M. Looney, D-New Haven, leader of the extreme left majority in the Senate, thought it was wonderful. “Workers and employers are hardly ever equal in bargaining power,” Looney said. “The scales always tilt on the side of the employer, who has greater resources.”

But somehow it doesn’t work that way when state government is the employer. Even now Mooney and his extreme-left colleagues in the General Assembly are preparing to approve another master contract with the state employee unions that will give the store away, with bonuses on top of raises totaling as much as 15%. The state law authorizing state employee union contracts to nullify freedom-of-information law will remain in force, signifying again that the power in state government’s labor relations does not rest with management — that there is no management at all because the government employee unions constitute the Democratic Party’s political army.

Parents Against Stupid Stuff has been started by an investment fund manager from Stamford, Sean Fieler, who says it will focus on issues arising from what is called the “culture war,” particularly sexually explicit curriculum material in public schools, participation of transgender athletes in female sports, and critical race theory.

Exactly how much sexually explicit material is being used in the schools and with what age groups isn’t clear, in large part because school administrations refuse to come clean about it, as they have refused in recent incidents in Enfield and Hartford.

Transgender interference in Connecticut high school girls cross-country competition was recently a national scandal, but most people, scared of being called some kind of a “phobe,” won’t summon the courage to protest it until it hampers the University of Connecticut’s women’s basketball team.

As for critical race theory, while there is no evidence that it is being taught outside of colleges, lower education in the state [ITALICS] is [END ITALICS] insinuating racial issues into what it calls “social-emotional learning,” which is displacing ordinary academic teaching.

So these are fair issues, especially in regard to what is age-appropriate for sexual topics in school. Should kindergarteners and other very young students be getting briefings on transgenderism, as has been alleged and not denied in Hartford? The controversy about Florida’s new law restricting sexual topics to Grades 4 and above — misrepresented as the “don’t say gay” law — arises from leftist demagoguery.

Fieler hopes to raise a million dollars for Parents Against Stupid Stuff to spend criticizing Governor Lamont for his position on these issues as the governor campaigns for re-election. But Lamont is not really a champion of transgenderism, critical race theory, or “social-emotional learning.” Rather, he is evasive, wanting to leave those issues to local school boards.

Lamont’s likely Republican challenger, Bob Stefanowski, seems not to want to talk about those issues any more than the governor does, though in a radio interview last week, without taking a position on policy, Stefanowski acknowledged transgenderism’s unfairness in women’s sports.

“Local option” as a policy on human rights is a dodge, and local education in Connecticut is already so full of state mandates that one more won’t violate any sacred principle.

For many decades slavery and then racial segregation were “local option” policies. Title IX of the 1972 civil rights act has been construed as prohibiting “local option” in institutional sports and requiring equal opportunity for women. The presumption has been that women must have their own sports programs because men generally are stronger and bigger and most women cannot fully compete with them.

Denying gender differences in physique and letting biological males compete against females in institutional sports, as Connecticut law requires, effectively repeals Title IX. Maybe Parents Against Stupid Stuff can give candidates the courage to acknowledge and do something about this stupidity.

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Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years.

By Chris Powell

Someday, if the governor and state legislators ever tire of coddling the state employee unions and if the president and Congress ever tire of coddling investment banks and military contractors, maybe they should note what happened recently at Silver Lane Elementary School in East Hartford.

Most of East Hartford’s students are from poor households and most have limited if any medical insurance. So a wonderful charity from Los Angeles called Vision to Learn has been visiting the town’s schools, offering students free vision screenings and eye examinations, free optometric prescriptions for those who need them — and then free prescription eyeglasses too.

Participation is up to parents, but about two-thirds of Silver Lane Elementary’s 300 students have participated in the program and three weeks ago 53 of them received their free prescription glasses.

That is, about 18% of the school’s student population needed glasses but didn’t have them, and the percentage of students in need at the school is almost certainly higher because another hundred or so students weren’t examined.

Vision to Learn’s premise is compelling: that children who can’t see well aren’t likely to learn as well as they should, that as many as a quarter of the nation’s children will need glasses while they are in school, and that without the glasses they need, poor children may be misdiagnosed with behavioral problems and leave school prematurely.

If the Silver Lane Elementary experience of unmet vision need is projected nationally and considered along with the other unmet medical needs of students from poor households, the situation should horrify.

State government is aware of the problem. The state Public Health Department finances 90 student health clinics at schools in 28 towns, and a study group including state officials and state legislators has just reported that 157 more schools in poorer municipalities very much could use clinics as well. Legislation pending in the General Assembly would appropriate $21 million for increasing or expanding school clinics. That’s nowhere near enough to address the need fully, especially since most of the clinics don’t offer vision and dental services.

Meanwhile the legislature seems ready to appropriate what is estimated at more than $300 million for raises and benefit increases for unionized state employees, though they never lost a paycheck during the virus epidemic. Meanwhile the employees of community social-service agencies remain poorly paid and underinsured as they care for the needy at half the cost of state government employees.

A bigger disgrace here may be that amid its creation and distribution of infinite money for less compelling purposes, the federal government has not resolved to finance health clinics for all school systems in the country.

The biggest disgrace may be that more than 50 years after the federal government declared a war on poverty, there is still so much of it with so many people unable or unwilling to take care of their children. What passes for liberalism now pursues more vigorously what it sees as grander causes: unrestricted abortion and transgenderism.

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COVERAGE DILEMMA: A less expensive but more difficult issue of children’s health also faces the General Assembly: whether state Medicaid insurance, known as HUSKY coverage, should be extended to more children living illegally in Connecticut.

Last year the legislature extended coverage to illegal residents 8 and younger, a strange compromise of budgeting. For except for the expense, why should 8-year-olds be covered but not children from 9 to 17?

The best arguments against extending coverage are that its cost is uncertain, that it will facilitate more violation of immigration law, and that it may draw to Connecticut more immigration lawbreakers from other states.

The best arguments for extending coverage are that sick children will be treated anyway by walking into a hospital emergency room, with the cost passed along to other patients; that Medicaid insurance will treat illness before it becomes more expensive; and basic decency.

The cost of the new state employee union contract hasn’t been fully calculated either, but the legislature will approve that one easily.

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Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years.

By Chris Powell

Even though he has decided against seeking re-election, state Treasurer Shawn Wooden has discovered a way to fix state government’s unclaimed property program, which his office supervises.

In January the Connecticut Mirror’s Andrew Brown and Kasturi Pananjad reported that during the last 20 years the program had seized $2.3 billion in the public’s forgotten assets — bank accounts, insurance policies and payments, and so forth — but had returned only 37% of the assets to their rightful owners. Eventually the assets were liquidated and used by state government — some of them to fund state government’s system of financing political campaigns like Wooden’s own.

When the Mirror exposed the scandal, the treasurer’s office first made excuses by claiming that state law prohibited advertising unclaimed properties worth $50 or less, so these items could not even be posted at the treasurer’s internet site. This claim was a lie.

Embarrassed, Wooden decided to do better. The internet list of properties was improved and now the treasurer has a great idea he has proposed as legislation. He would give the treasurer’s office access to other state agency databases so instead of relying on advertising to alert owners of unclaimed property, the treasurer’s staff would strive to locate them and return their money.

The legislation may cost state government a lot of money — more from property that won’t be confiscated anymore than from the extra work done in the treasurer’s office. But then government is supposed to serve the public more than itself.

The scandal here wasn’t the treasurer’s alone. The simple solution proposed by his legislation could have been implemented by governors, treasurers, and state legislators long before Wooden took office in 2019. Those officials were happy to continue what was essentially a lucrative but hidden tax.

Connecticut still has some of those hidden taxes, but at least this one may be repealed soon, and so for a campaign slogan Wooden will be entitled to use “Better late than never.”

Another of Connecticut’s largely hidden taxes is the one imposed on hospitals, a tax that is passed along to insurance companies and patients in the shell game of modern medicine.

Discrediting Governor Lamont’s re-election campaign claim not to have raised taxes, the Mirror’s Keith Phaneuf and Mark Pazniokas note that the Lamont administration canceled a $517 million tax cut Connecticut hospitals had been scheduled to receive.

Additionally, the Mirror reporters write, the Lamont administration’s first two-year budget raised other taxes and fees totaling $490 million, expanded items subject to the sales tax, and canceled or postponed other scheduled tax cuts, including the surcharge on corporate income.

Other tax cuts postponed or canceled under Lamont, the Mirror reports, would have benefited retired teachers, property taxpayers without dependents, and college graduates with technical degrees.

Many times over the years Connecticut taxpayers have been baited with tax cuts promised in the future and then canceled when their time arrived. The Lamont administration is not peculiar in this deceit.

But no one should believe any promise of a state tax cut unless it is legislated with virtually immediate effect, and no one should give much credit to the governor’s claim that he hasn’t raised taxes.

Quite apart from all the postponed or canceled tax cuts, two years ago the governor wanted to put tolls on Connecticut highways and just months ago sought to impose another largely hidden tax, this one on wholesale fuel purchases.

The governor fairly claims that state government is in a much better position financially than when he took office in 2019. To burnish his credentials as a moderate, he also could fairly claim, though of course he won’t, that if any other Democrat was governor, state government’s financial position would be worse.

But though he passes out goodies during his campaign, giving the impression that state government is rolling in money, a week ago his budget office warned that when emergency federal financial aid is exhausted in 2024, the state budget may face a deficit of $1.4 billion unless there are tax increases, spending cuts — or more postponements of promised tax cuts.

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Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years.

By Chris Powell

Does Hartford’s school system inform a student’s parents when it learns that the student may be dealing with gender dysphoria? That’s the important question raised by the system’s suspension of a school nurse who recently wrote on social media that school staffers keep such issues secret from parents.

The school system is working hard to avoid answering, instead obscuring the issue by accusing the nurse of misconduct. The nurse, Kathleen Cataford, who worked at the Kinsella Magnet School in Hartford, wrote on her Facebook page last month:

“As a public school nurse, I have an 11-year-old female student on puberty blockers and a dozen identifying as non-binary, all but two keeping this as a secret from their parents with the help of teachers, social workers, and school administration. … Children are introduced to this confusion in kindergarten by the school social worker who ‘teaches’ social and emotional regulation and school expectations.”

In response, Hartford Superintendent Leslie Torres-Rodriguez accused the nurse of revealing “private and personal details about a specific student” and making students “feel unwelcome.” But the nurse had identified no student by name, nor even her school, and her school has about 800 students, presumably many of them 11. If questioning school policy on gender dysphoria is to be construed as making students “feel unwelcome,” then of course the policy cannot be questioned at all, which may be the superintendent’s idea.

Last week this column put simple questions about the case to a publicist for the Hartford school system: Is what the nurse wrote true? Do school staffers necessarily report gender dysphoria issues to parents?

The publicist replied that school nurses don’t administer medicine to students. But that was not one of the questions.

Pressed, the publicist replied that school staff members encourage students to discuss their gender dysphoria with their parents. That wasn’t responsive either.

Pressed again, the publicist said Hartford school staff members dealing with a student’s gender dysphoria follow written guidance from the state Education Department. But exactly how has Hartford’s school system construed that guidance in the context of the nurse’s assertions? That is, are parents told or not? If not, why not?

The publicist again refused to answer. He also refused to facilitate a call to the superintendent so she might be questioned directly about school system policy and practice and the veracity of the nurse’s assertions.

Thus Hartford’s school administration is following the stonewalling and concealment policy that used to be followed by the state Department of Children and Families when mistakes broke into public view. Like the DCF of old, the Hartford school administration is hiding behind its children to escape accountability.

DCF covered up that way for decades but eventually it was so discredited that it had to change. The change was hastened when the General Assembly created the office of the state child advocate to investigate and report on the department’s worst failures. The department is much improved for it.

There is no similar agent of accountability for school systems in Connecticut. School boards could do the job but, as the ubiquitous policy of social promotion suggests, few boards have even one member with the wit and courage to ask critical questions. If Hartford’s Board of Education has any members curious to know whether, as that school nurse contends, the school system itself is planting gender dysphoria in the minds of kindergarteners and then helping students conceal it from their parents, such members have not come forward.

Indeed, amid their political correctness Connecticut’s news organizations are no more curious. While a few have reported that a Hartford school nurse has been suspended for “inappropriate” comments on Facebook, none has reported what the controversy is really about. To get that information Connecticut has had to turn to the London Daily Mail.

The Hartford school system’s policy of concealing crucial information from parents may not work much longer. Similar incidents of concealment and unaccountability are popping up in schools all over the country. They show why public education is really not so public at all and thus not to be trusted.

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Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years.

By Chris Powell

Legislators of both parties in the General Assembly are congratulating themselves on the bipartisan juvenile justice bill that has come out of the Judiciary Committee, and well they should. For the legislation will do no more than provide the illusion of action, and thus avoid the controversy about juvenile crime.

Lately that controversy has been mostly a matter of repeat offenders, the most infamous case being that of the 17-year-old charged with the hit-and-run killing of Henryk Gudelski in New Britain last June. Police say the teen was driving a stolen car and had been arrested 13 times in the previous 3½ years but was nevertheless free.

Who was responsible for this seeming failure of juvenile justice?

The legislation won’t provide an answer. It will leave juvenile court secret and unaccountable — unaccountable not just for offenders but also for the prosecutors, public defenders, and social workers who work there.

According to the Waterbury Republican-American, the legislation would increase from six hours to eight the time police can hold a juvenile suspect before applying to a court for a detention order or releasing the suspect to a parent or guardian. It would require quick arraignment and services for juvenile suspects. It would expand special probations for juveniles convicted of murder or first-degree manslaughter, and authorize sentences of as long as five years for juveniles convicted of murder and serious gun and sex offenses.

But few juveniles have been committing murder and rape. Nearly all repeat offenders are committing lesser crimes, especially car theft and other thievery — and the legislation would give those offenders only more electronic monitoring upon their quick release.

So it may not take the young offenders long to realize they can keep stealing cars and other things even while wearing their ankle bracelets and still incur no punishment.

Indeed, the young offenders may know this already. Last year the Republican-American reported about two juveniles charged with car theft who just laughed through their booking.

For state government’s main premise about juvenile offenders is that they must not be punished because they are already too damaged and instead must be basted and coddled with social work no matter how often it fails to reform them.

No one is clamoring to imprison teenagers for shoplifting or minor vandalism. But the repeat offenses by juveniles and adults alike that Connecticut has been suffering signify a lack of accountability — accountability for both the offenders and the officials who let them know they won’t be punished.

And there can be no accountability with juveniles until juvenile courts are as public as adult courts. Refusing to open juvenile courts to scrutiny, the legislature shows it thinks that accountability in government is more dangerous than crime.

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Not many people care much about it, but the prevailing opinion in Connecticut seems to be that sports teams should stop using Indian mascots.

Such mascots are criticized as racist and disparaging, or defended as honoring the tribes of old. But few people are fooled by the latter claim. Indians were chosen as mascots for their supposed ferocity, just like animal mascots — lions, tigers, bears, hawks, and such.

Indian mascots are not really racist, since no one defending them is really trying to oppress anyone. Rather, such mascots are most objectionable because they stereotype.

But state law on Indian mascots is nutty. First the law penalizes towns whose schools keep Indian mascots, reducing the towns’ allotments from the state fund drawn from royalties paid by the two Indian casinos in eastern Connecticut. That is, the law presumes that policy should be determined by the resentments of those tribes.

But then the law exempts towns that get an endorsement for their Indian mascots from a state- or federally-recognized tribe, as if one tribe’s endorsement makes Indian mascots tasteful everywhere again.

So to preserve their “Red Raiders” mascot, Derby’s school system has gotten an endorsement from western Connecticut’s Schaghticoke Tribe, which has only state recognition and might do almost anything to win public favor so someday it might get federal recognition and thus a casino too.

It’s all nonsense but politically correct.

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Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years.