Chris Powell column

By Chris Powell

Woody Allen movie fans might appreciate the joke Danbury’s Zoning Commission is playing on homeless people in the city and, really, on the whole state.

In Allen’s spoof of Russian novels, “Love and Death,” the comic hero at last wins the woman he adores and on their wedding night puts his arm around her in their marriage bed. She replies: “Not here.”

But if not there, where?

The Danbury News-Times reports that Pacific House, a Stamford-based organization that has been helping the homeless in Fairfield County for 20 years, has acquired a former motel building in Danbury with the help of the state Housing Department, which came up with $4.63 million to purchase the property. Pacific House has been operating it as a shelter under one of Governor Lamont’s emergency orders. But the order expires in February and last week the Zoning Commission voted 6-3 against allowing the shelter to operate permanently.

Commissioners accepted complaints that the shelter will harm the character of the neighborhood — as if homeless people roaming the city and nearby towns without the supervision and services Pacific House provides won’t risk the character of many neighborhoods.

Of course those needing shelter are problematic, but the homeless are less problematic, more successfully treated, if their treatment begins with what is called “supportive housing.” Once the trauma of having no safe place and privacy ends, sobriety and rehabilitation come easier, especially since the needed services — medical, counseling, and transportation — can be more centrally provided.

A former motel is perfect for supportive housing. Residents of such a facility may actually be less transient than the people who stayed at the motel. And while opponents of Pacific House’s Danbury facility concede the need for a shelter in the area, they offer no other location even as Pacific House’s facility is already operating.

Of course only saints want to live near people who have problems. But people with problems have to go somewhere, and it’s far better for them to go where they may be helped out of their problems than to be merely sheltered in a barracks overnight, out of the cold and damp, only to be shooed back into the cold and damp at daybreak.

When supportive housing has a responsible sponsor and state government’s support, as Pacific House’s facility in Danbury does, state law should exempt it from local zoning. So the issue in Danbury is one for the whole state and the General Assembly should address it urgently when it reconvenes in February.

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Criminal penalties aim to set standards, deter, and punish, but for offenses less than murder they are not meant to ruin lives. For most offenses forgiveness can be earned.

But former Hartford lawyer Corey Brinson is asking for more than forgiveness for his conviction for fraud, his using his former law firm to launder money for stock swindlers while taking a cut. According to the Hartford Courant, Brinson is asking to be restored to a position of honor under state government — commissioner of the Superior Court — with reinstatement of the law license he lost with his conviction.

A lawyer disciplinary committee has voted 3-1 to recommend reinstating Brinson’s law license, finding that he has rehabilitated himself after a three-year prison term. Maybe he has, but becoming a lawyer is a lot of work, and no one who becomes a lawyer has any excuse not to know that financial fraud is doubly wrong for a lawyer, an offense against the law itself as well as the privileged public office he holds.

The decision on Brinson’s reinstatement rests with a committee of Superior Court judges. There is precedent for the committee to decide either way. Decades ago Connecticut’s courts maintained that a felony conviction required a lawyer’s permanent disbarment. But in recent years standards have been lowered and felonious lawyers have been reinstated.

Such reinstatements have set bad examples. They have shown lawyers that getting caught committing a serious crime is not necessarily the end of their professional careers, and thus have removed an incentive to maintain integrity. Such reinstatements also have diminished regard for the legal profession. But then maybe the profession no longer deserves much regard.

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

By Chris Powell

Maybe it’s just a coincidence, but with his re-election campaign coming up, Governor Lamont says Connecticut may be able to afford some tax cuts, or at least a revival of a property tax credit against state income tax obligations. Some fellow Democrats in the General Assembly are receptive to the idea.

But a detailed review last week by the Connecticut Mirror’s Keith Phaneuf suggests that for a while the state really won’t be able to afford to do much more than to keep paying down its unfunded pension obligations, estimated at more than $95 billion. State government’s pension debt is nearly the highest in the country on a per-capita basis, state pension fund contributions consume 14% of state government’s General Fund, and those contributions and other “fixed costs” of state government — costs placed outside the ordinary discretion of the governor and the legislature — consume more than half the state budget, signifying a government that is on automatic pilot to oblivion.

Under the Lamont administration state government is somewhat better situated than it was a few years ago. It has a “Rainy Day Fund” of more than $3 billion, it is rolling in a few billion dollars of federal emergency assistance, the recent stock market boom has raised hopes of easing the pension debt burden, and the rate of growth in state government’s ordinary debt has been falling slowly.

But the state budget deficit is forecast to reach nearly a billion dollars in 2023, just as the emergency federal aid expires, and relying on a continued boom in the stock market is probably a bad idea. State government could double its annual pension contributions and still be grossly overindebted, and that overindebtedness is an argument for raising taxes, not cutting them, though it is an argument nobody makes.

Liberal Democrats do argue for raising taxes but not to make the pension fund sound but rather to increase spending on programs that tend not to achieve their nominal objectives, like education and welfare.

At least the governor recognizes that Connecticut’s tax burden is also nearly the highest in the country and increasing it could prove counterproductive, discouraging investment and pushing wealthy taxpaying residents out.

Of course the world won’t end if the next session of the General Assembly enacts another property tax credit as a campaign gimmick. But any such credit almost surely will prove to be only temporary, and cutting spending will remain the only way to achieve lasting tax cuts, a course that continues to seem politically impossible.

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What’s the purpose of public higher education in Connecticut — education or political propaganda?

Last week the president of the Connecticut State Colleges and Universities System, Terrence Cheng, suggested it’s the latter. He emailed a statement to staff and students expressing “shock, anger, sadness, and more” about the verdict in the Kyle Rittenhouse case in Wisconsin.

“Systems of inequity were not built in a day or a moment,” Cheng wrote. “They have been manufactured, crafted, and honed through generations of practice and reinforcement. … The work of confronting, disrupting, and dismantling such systems will not happen in a day or a single moment, as much as we wish they could be.”

Was there some educational reason that college staff and students needed to know Cheng’s opinion of the Rittenhouse case?

Had Cheng studied the trial as closely as the jury did? Or had he just developed the political rooting interest that many on the political left and right developed about the case — the left rooting against Rittenhouse because he had shot three white men rioting in purported protest of the shooting by police of a Black man, the right rooting for Rittenhouse because he purported to go to Kenosha to defend property against rioting and looting by leftists?

And what about equal time for people who approve of the verdict? Will they be invited to use the college email system to send a contrary statement to staff and students?

Of course not. For public higher education has become a system of inequity itself, a system of political propaganda. Since it employs so many leftists so extravagantly — Cheng is paid $360,000 a year — confronting, disrupting, and dismantling this system may take longer than it should.

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

By Chris Powell

With proto-Nazis and proto-Commies brawling in the streets across Weimar America, it may be more important than ever to recall Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter’s wry observation that “the safeguards of liberty have been forged in controversies involving not very nice people.”

At best Kyle Rittenhouse is a stupid and reckless kid and a gun nut who enlisted in a search for trouble and found it in Kenosha, Wisconsin, among rioters, some of them armed, who purported to be enraged by the shooting of a Black man by local police.

Carrying a military-style rifle, Rittenhouse went to Kenosha in the name of protecting property against rioters and ended up killing two of them and maiming a third, all of them white, as Rittenhouse himself is.

Rittenhouse was vigorously prosecuted but, supported by video evidence and even the testimony of a prosecution witness, he maintained that the three men he shot were attacking him, and the jury acquitted him.

Now, because the rioters Rittenhouse shot were rioting in the name of a Black man, the political left is portraying them as martyrs and Rittenhouse as a white supremacist, though there is no evidence that racial oppression was or has ever been his objective. This unfairness to Rittenhouse has prompted the political right to declare him a hero of the right of self-defense and the Second Amendment.

But there were no martyrs or heroes in the brawling in Kenosha, just idiots. When politics is stripped away, Rittenhouse’s acquittal fits the facts as the jury could have found them, and if the political left and right were not so crazed and hateful they would be looking for heroes elsewhere.

Of course that’s not likely to happen. Instead the Rittenhouse case is inspiring protests and confrontations throughout the country, including Connecticut, where a week ago a group that had been threatening to level the Amazon warehouse in Windsor because ropes resembling nooses had been found there began blocking traffic in the center of Manchester.

Blocking traffic is a good way of looking for trouble too, especially when so many people are stressed and on edge because of the lengthy virus epidemic. People protesting in the name of environmental protection lately have been blocking traffic in the United Kingdom and getting attacked by people trying to get to work.

So as the Rittenhouse verdict protesters were blocking traffic in Manchester, a car stopped in front of them and then slowly pushed through them before driving off. The protesters were able to get out of the way and no one was really hurt, but they all were indignant that their lawbreaking wasn’t appreciated but instead was resented as a provocation.

Indeed, some of them are gun nuts just like Rittenhouse and have carried and displayed guns at their previous protests, though no one has been threatening them. In Manchester last weekend they claimed to be armed as well and seemed to want to be considered heroes for not shooting at the car that had nudged them out of the way.

There is good identification of the car and if the police locate and arrest the driver maybe Manchester will be the scene of another trial to which racial implications will be falsely and opportunistically attached. As in Kenosha, MSNBC and Fox News could cover it and designate new heroes and villains, and the verdict could set off its own protests and riots.

Or maybe, realizing that there are still many more civilized ways to make a point, people could resolve to make their points without getting into each other’s faces, even if that is less dramatic and satisfying to the ego.

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NOT CRAZY OR SENILE: A national poll three years ago found that nearly half the country questioned President Trump’s mental stability and intelligence. Now another national poll has found that half the country questions President Biden’s mental fitness for his office and believes that his health is deteriorating.

Unfortunately other polls say Vice President Kamala Harris’ standing with public opinion is even worse.

So the next act of politics in Weimar America may be the restoration of Trump, unless someone soon can start a sensible third party whose platform might be simple:

Neither crazy nor senile, neither far left nor far right.

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

By Chris Powell

Democrats in Connecticut insist that there is no crime wave in the state and that concerns about crime are Republican contrivances. But it’s nice that the state’s minority party is pressing any issues at all, and Connecticut lately has had some criminal atrocities that really should be learned from, especially some involving juveniles.

One of those atrocities unfolded last week in Manchester, when a 14-year-old boy was charged with the rape and murder of a 13-year-old girl last June. News reports about the arrest discovered that state law prohibits the boy from being tried in open court and, if he is convicted, will prohibit him from being sentenced to anything more severe than 2½ years of probation, regardless of whether he is a predatory maniac or a great kid who made what the social workers may get away with calling a “mistake.”

Whatever the boy is, the secrecy of court for murder defendants under 15 years old will prevent the public from ever finding out.

Few teenagers read newspapers or pay attention to broadcast news, but they do talk to each other and so news can spread among them all the same. Thanks to the Manchester case they now may perceive that in Connecticut they are pretty much free to rape and murder until they turn 15 — may perceive that their exemption from criminal responsibility for car thefts, which they already well understand and which recently has become controversial, is actually the least of the scandal of juvenile justice here.

A spokeswoman for the social work school of thought, Illiana Pujols of the Connecticut Justice Alliance, says the state’s adult justice system isn’t made to serve children. But in its glorious secrecy, unaccountability, and exemption of young offenders from responsibility even for atrocities, is the state’s juvenile justice system made to serve the public?

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YALE RESCUES NEW HAVEN: Yale University, whose ownership of so much property in New Haven takes much of it off the city’s property tax rolls, has a new six-year deal with the city. The university will increase its annual voluntary payment to the city from the current $13.2 million to $23 million, leading to total payments of more than $135 million by the arrangement’s conclusion.

That kind of money could cover much of the city’s underfunding of its pension programs and pay lots of raises, though whether it does much for the city itself must remain to be seen.

Mayor Justin Elicker and city council members are thrilled by the deal, since the university, as a nonprofit corporation, isn’t legally required to pay taxes on its noncommercial property. But the deal really isn’t so generous.

For Yale already was suffering an embarrassment of riches, heightened by the recent stock market boom, which has boosted the university’s endowment to $42 billion. The endowment has been managed extraordinarily well, so well that the joke is that Yale is actually a hedge fund disguised as a university. Yale is so wealthy that, as National Review noted the other day, it can afford to have more employees (nearly 17,000) than students (about 12,000).

But then the university’s work is not just to teach but to be constantly striking politically correct poses to appease the political left that dominates it. Those poses now will be facilitated by a new city undertaking called the Center for Inclusive Growth, to which Yale will contribute $5 million over the next six years. The center may provide patronage jobs for growing still more political correctness in New Haven.

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BONANZA FOR EDUCATORS: U.S. Education Secretary Miguel Cardona, briefly Connecticut’s education commissioner, boasted last week of another big round of student loan forgiveness — $2 billion for 33,000 borrowers — through the Public Service Loan Forgiveness program, for which teachers and employees of nonprofits are eligible.

Some of the debtors are indeed hard-pressed but as with most student loan debt the borrowers are not the real beneficiaries of loan forgiveness. Student loan debt becomes burdensome when the education for which the debt was incurred cannot qualify the borrower for a job that pays enough both to support him and repay the debt.

That is, the real beneficiaries of student loans are employees of higher education, which is overvalued and yet made still more expensive by those loans.

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

By Chris Powell

Connecticut constantly hears clamor for more “fairness” in its various forms of taxation, but exactly what does this mean?

Of course the ultimate in fair taxation is when someone else pays, which usually means “the rich,” and this is most convenient politically when “the rich” are a minority small enough to be easily kicked around.

Since enactment of the state income tax in 1991 the conventional wisdom in Connecticut has been that taxes should be aimed more at the rich. While the rich already pay most of the money collected by the income tax, the political left complains that this isn’t enough because the rich still may pay a smaller percentage of their income than other groups, most of whose taxes are paid through state sales and energy taxes and municipal property taxes.

Connecticut’s property taxes are high by national standards, as most of the state’s taxes are, but property taxes here already may be skewed more toward wealth than generally thought. That’s because the wealthy tend to own more expensive homes and cars. Former state Sen. Len Suzio, R-Meriden, notes that on a residential square-footage basis, some wealthy suburbs have higher property tax burdens than the poor cities that have the highest nominal property tax rates.

In any case the political left in Connecticut never acts seriously on its purported concern for tax fairness. There are no proposals from the left to reduce sales, energy, and property taxes or to limit property taxes as has been done in other states. There are only proposals to raise income and energy taxes.

Indeed, the income tax was recently raised by a half percent on everyone in the name of financing a program of paid family and medical leave that most people will never use and that costs more than self-insurance without providing more benefits. Despite the recent explosion in gasoline and energy costs, in the name of environmentalism the political left still advocates raising gas taxes — the so-called Transportation Climate Initiative.

Nor are there ever any proposals from the political left to reduce the burden of taxes on the middle class and poor by economizing in state and municipal government, despite Connecticut’s nation-leading government labor costs. That’s because unionized state and municipal employees constitute the left-leaning army of Connecticut’s majority political party, the Democrats.

While he is a Democrat, Governor Lamont is reluctant to raise the income tax more than he has already helped to do with the family and medical leave program, since he is conscious of the steady emigration from Connecticut of prosperous people, particularly those entering retirement, for whom lower-taxed states are becoming more attractive, especially Florida, which has no state income tax.

The public also seems unenthusiastic about raising taxes, even on the rich, perhaps because it is hard to see what three decades of steadily rising taxes have accomplished for Connecticut. The cities are poorer and more dysfunctional, school performance has not improved, more people are dependent on government instead of self-sufficient, and nearly everything is more expensive. Raising taxes has served only the government class.

In these circumstances “fair taxation” in Connecticut means only “more.”

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DO SYRIAN LIVES MATTER?: Walk around Connecticut lately and it can almost reek of preciousness — “cage-free eggs,” “free-range chicken,” “sustainable seafood,” “diversity, equity, and inclusion,” “preferred pronouns,” “micro-aggressions,” “Black Lives Matter,” and so forth. It’s constant political correctness.

But two weeks ago The New York Times revealed that in March 2019 the U.S. Air Force dropped a 500-pound bomb on a crowd of women and children in Syria, killing at least 70, and that the Defense Department continues to conceal the atrocity.

There has been not a peep of protest in Connecticut about this — not from the state’s congressional delegation, nor from state officials or any of the groups always bleating about justice, even though U.S. forces still occupy northeastern Syria. Supposedly the occupation is meant to keep Islamic terrorism in check, though President Trump said it was also about commandeering Syria’s oil resources.

If President Biden knows that the U.S. occupation of Syria continues, he gives no more sign of it than the bleaters in Connecticut do.

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

By Chris Powell

Apparently it’s not enough for the political left in Connecticut that nearly all state and municipal government employees are officially organized by law against government’s very few actual managers assigned to implement the public interest. Last week four state employee unions brought a federal lawsuit claiming that members of the Connecticut National Guard have collective bargaining rights, though federal law makes it a felony for active-duty members of the Armed Forces to form labor organizations.

The lawsuit sees a loophole in the federal law — that it applies to National Guard members only when called to federal duty. Accordingly, the suit contends, when National Guard members act only for the state, they have the same collective-bargaining rights as state government’s civilian employees.

The objective here is to strike at the heart of the sovereignty of state government and the public. It would compromise the armed force that is the ultimate guarantor of state law and the state’s democracy. The federal law making labor organizing in the Armed Forces a felony plainly acknowledges the threat to the government’s sovereignty. But having so badly compromised the state’s sovereignty already, the government employee unions want to destroy what’s left of it.

The danger of collective bargaining for the military is already painfully clear in Connecticut because of the many difficulties enforcing discipline in the state and municipal police departments, nearly all unionized.

It recently took the state police two years to get rid of a sergeant who had gotten plastered at a retirement party and then driven away in a police vehicle, violating not only the law but also police regulations and causing a crash that injured two people. The sergeant got a lenient plea bargain and remained on the state police payroll even while serving his criminal probation.

The state police union contract continues to forbid disclosure of complaints of misconduct against troopers.

The political left equates government employees with private-sector employees, as if government employees and the government itself don’t have a higher responsibility, a responsibility to the whole people. It’s bad enough that public administration in Connecticut is already so impaired by collective bargaining. Turning state government’s own arms bearers against the government should be intolerable.

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Colchester’s new first selectman, Andreas Bisbikos, a Republican, is under fire for fulfilling a campaign promise on his first day in office. He revoked the proclamation issued by his predecessor 15 months ago that racism is a “public health crisis” in town.

Such proclamations have been issued by municipalities all over Connecticut to strike poses demanded by the political left. Bisbikos’ counter-proclamation notes that the original proclamation made its accusation of racism “without facts or data to back said assertion.” Indeed, this has been the case with nearly all such proclamations.

Of course racism is bad and racist incidents always can be found. But the proclamations claiming that racism is a public health crisis specify neither the supposedly racist policies and practices nor any racists. These proclamations mean only to intimidate — to put on the defensive anyone who might not immediately obey the racism mongers.

Connecticut and the country remain full of harmful racial disparities and policies that contribute to them. They must be addressed, and Bisbikos says his administration will do its part after reviewing the evidence. But these racism proclamations put the cart before the horse. Some even establish committees to develop evidence supporting the proclamation, the evidence being a mere afterthought to the posturing.

Maybe Colchester has wised up to the racism racket. It should be challenged everywhere.

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HOPE FOR SIKORSKY: Bridgeport can’t run itself, much less the airport it owns next door in Stratford — Sikorsky — on which the city loses a half million dollars each year. But now Governor Lamont has initiated discussions with Bridgeport about having Sikorsky operated by the Connecticut Airport Authority.

The authority has greatly improved Bradley International Airport and should be coordinating if not operating all the state’s larger airports. The Bridgeport area is full of potential and the airport is part of it.

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

By Chris Powell

Vernon School Superintendent Joseph Macary may mean well, but then so did the guy who closed the barn door after the horses got out.

The other day Macary urged Vernon’s Planning and Zoning Commission to reject a zoning regulation that would allow marijuana retailing as close as 500 feet to school property. State and federal law require “drug-free zones” of 1,500 feet around schools, the superintendent said, and maintaining that distance is necessary “to protect our children.”

Yes, God forbid if children on their way to and from school should discover that, like many other states, Connecticut has legalized marijuana and state government has even gotten into the marijuana business, regulating the drug’s potency and taxing its sales though the federal government still criminalizes it even while having lost interest in enforcing the law.

Of course despite the superintendent’s concern, kids already know marijuana is available and long had fairly easy access to it before state government recognized the futility of drug criminalization.

Indeed, for years some high school and junior high school kids have come to school intoxicated from marijuana. Many have been fooling around with alcoholic beverages as well, and most students pass a liquor store or several of them each day.

They can’t help it, since Connecticut has nearly the most liquor stores per capita in the country thanks to a state law that sharply restricts price competition in alcoholic beverages. The law was enacted and is sustained not to protect children but to protect the profitability of the liquor industry, a politically influential special interest.

Connecticut’s teenagers may not be so proficient in the academic subjects schools try to teach them, but, as is the nature of youth, many excel at discerning what they shouldn’t do and how they might do it without getting caught.

On top of merchandising marijuana Connecticut also has just legalized sports betting, so much so that there now is advertising telling people that if they have a cell phone, they also have a casino in their pocket.

Connecticut is not pushing marijuana and ever-more gambling on the public because it wants to protect children but to reduce the pressure on government to economize. Much of state government’s gambling and marijuana revenue will end up in the paychecks of school employees, and so they quickly got over the bad example gambling sets for kids and are already over the bad example marijuana sets for them too.

Superintendent Macary’s premise in complaining about Vernon’s marijuana zoning is that out of sight will also be out of mind. But Connecticut is so densely populated that almost everything is near everything else, so little can stay out of sight for long, even as “drug-free” zones don’t enforce themselves any more than “gun-free” zones do.

That’s why such distance regulations are just pious posturing by government officials who don’t want to spend or forgo more money to protect kids. More than anything else, government officials want the money.

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YES OR NO, SUSAN?: Interviewed by Dennis House last weekend for WTNH-TV8’s “This Week in Connecticut,” Lt. Gov. Susan Bysiewicz was full of talking points about how she and Governor Lamont should be re-elected next November. But Bysiewicz was unprepared for a direct question that should not have surprised her.

House asked if the Lamont administration would revive its proposal to impose tolls on Connecticut’s highways.

Bysiewicz replied: “We’ve had four bond rating increases over the past year. That hasn’t happened for more than two decades. We are having a record Rainy Day Fund and we’re anticipating a $1.2 billion surplus, which will allow us to work on tax relief, like property tax relief.”

But the question was about tolls, so House pressed. Byseiwicz replied: “There has not been support for tolls, so we’re going to focus on tax relief.”

House tried once more: Are tolls off the table? Bysiewicz said: “We are going to continue to focus on prioritizing infrastructure, and the federal government is giving us $7 billion.”

It was still a simple yes-or-no question but Bysiewicz only dissembled, raising suspicion. The next day Lamont cleaned up his running mate’s mess: All that federal money means no tolls — period.

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

By Chris Powell

Energy prices are exploding and it seems that the Biden administration wants them to as the administration impairs U.S. energy production and transmission even as it urges other countries to increase their production to rescue the United States from its own lunacy.

This policy of driving up energy prices and increasing the country’s energy dependence is reflected in the decision of the supervisor of the New England electrical grid, ISO New England, to withdraw its support for a natural gas-powered electrical generation plant long planned in Killingly. The decision seems to have been made under pressure of the Lamont administration, which thinks Connecticut can convert entirely to “green” electricity before electricity from the gas-powered facility is needed.

That belief already has been disproved by the recent increases in electricity, gasoline, and heating oil prices.

In their climate change alarmism Democrats seem indifferent to energy prices, though the price of energy strongly affects the price of nearly everything else.

But even as this alarmism is determining energy policy, retreating glaciers and warming tundra are revealing artifacts from human settlements during warming periods thousands of years ago, long before the industrial age began.

That is, the planet has gone through many warming and cooling periods that had nothing to do with human activity and everything to do with nature, like solar cycles and the precession of the Earth’s axis.

Those cycles don’t mean that industry has no effect on climate. But they suggest that crippling civilization in the name of saving it, prohibiting certain energy sources and technologies before better sources and technologies are available, may have consequences worse than a little more energy from natural gas.

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Ask anyone in Connecticut to identify Bridgeport’s urgent problems and most answers probably will involve the city’s poverty, violence, and general crime and the failure of its schools to educate their neglected children very well. Few would suggest that Bridgeport is being oppressed by climate change.

But last week Bridgeport Mayor Joe Ganim secretly flew to Scotland to attend the international conference on climate change. When the mayor’s absence from City Hall was discovered by Bridgeport’s newspaper, the Connecticut Post, Ganim insisted in a telephone call from Scotland that cities will have an important part in reaching climate policy goals.

Maybe they will, but then why did the mayor not announce his trip? Probably because the trip was less a matter of reaching climate policy goals than a matter of self-importance and announcing it would have prompted wonder and ridicule.

After all, every moment the mayor of Bridgeport devotes to climate change is a moment not spent addressing the city’s basic problems. Last week’s climate change conference drew hundreds of worthies from around the world but there was one less person worrying about Bridgeport.

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WILD CITY STREETS: Hartford’s City Council risks being accused of racism by the NAACP and civil liberties union for asking the General Assembly to authorize the city to experiment with a system of traffic cameras to catch motorists running red lights.

Hartford is notorious for violation of traffic rules, and the clamor for cameras to calm the wild streets comes from its own residents, most of whom are members of minority groups. So of course most traffic violators in the city are members of minority groups too.

The more frequent violation of traffic rules in the city probably arises in large part from the disproportionate poverty there — just as the disproportionate number of members of racial minorities in Connecticut’s courts and prisons arises from their greater poverty.

But traffic rules are for rich and poor alike to obey, just as they are for the safety of everyone. And if, as the NAACP and civil liberties union imply, poverty should be considered license for breaking traffic rules, Connecticut can kiss its cities goodbye forever.

The Hartford council’s wishful idea is not to use red-light cameras to fine violators but to remind them politely to follow the rules. When that politically correct nonsense fails, the council may realize that only tickets, arrests, and fines may work.

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

By Chris Powell

Governor Lamont remarked last week that he is thinking about property tax relief, apparently in the context of his campaign for re-election next year. Of course for decades the whole state has been thinking about property tax relief and many politicians have been prattling about it, so where is it?

For the trend of property taxes in Connecticut long has been and remains higher. At best some towns manage to hold their property tax rates steady in an occasional budget year. Then they go up again.

The governor’s idea of property tax relief is only a property tax credit against the state income tax, a tax credit that has made occasional appearances over the years when governors have wanted to strike a pose as a state election drew near, a sort of bribe for the voters. But the property tax credit isn’t really relief at all, just a replacement of a small amount of local property taxes with revenue from state taxes. The net total of taxes doesn’t change, and neither does any town’s property tax rate.

When state government’s financial circumstances get tighter, the property tax credit is reduced or eliminated.

On balance, this kind of property tax relief has been offset by state tax increases.

Some argue that this tax shifting is an improvement because state government’s tax base is much broader than municipal tax bases and so the state can tax the wealthy comprehensively. But for most people the tax shift is a wash and its only real beneficiaries are government’s employees and dependents, who get most of the money.

The longstanding failure to achieve property tax relief might seem strange, since every state budget contains appropriations for towns that are lauded as property tax relief. But most of this money is diverted to raising the compensation of unionized municipal government employees, compensation that typically consumes at least two-thirds of municipal budgets.

So there can be no property tax relief until municipalities gain control of their labor costs, and this will remain impossible while state law imposes on municipalities the binding arbitration of municipal employee union contracts.

Real property tax relief would require repealing binding arbitration or at least allowing municipalities to elect the arbiters who set contract terms. It would require towns to hold referendums on municipal property tax increases and a state law imposing a cap on municipal property tax rates.

Most of all it would require the public to wrest control of state and municipal government away from the government employee unions, which control the state’s majority political party. That’s why no Democratic governor is likely to deliver real property tax relief.

So thinking about property tax relief, as the governor says he is doing, is about as effective as thinking about a ham sandwich when someone else already has eaten it.

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For many months the governor and many Democratic state legislators have been eager to put Connecticut into what they call the Transportation Climate Initiative, or TCI, a regional arrangement to increase wholesale taxes on gasoline in the name of raising money for less-polluting forms of transportation. Advocates of the arrangement said it would not raise gas prices in Connecticut by more than 15 cents per gallon.

But now gas prices are soaring — an increase of $1.34 per gallon or 65% in the last year. The Biden administration has crippled the U.S. energy industry and inflation is raging generally and eroding living standards. So Democrats seem to be losing their enthusiasm for higher gas prices.

Support for the TCI is fading and 11 Democratic U.S. senators, including Connecticut’s Richard Blumenthal, last week urged the president to get gas prices down, possibly by releasing oil from the strategic petroleum reserve.

Gas prices particularly and inflation generally are likely to have great influence on next year’s state and congressional elections. So with Democrats in charge both in Washington and Hartford, how much of a political price are they willing to pay for their environmental posturing against carbon-based fuels?

Probably not much, in which case they will show that they never really believed what they said about the supposed emergency of climate change. That emergency will turn out to have been less urgent than the next election.

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

By Chris Powell

West Haven may be providing the perfect metaphor for government and politics in Connecticut.

The small city has been suffering from financial excess so long that since 2017 it has been operating under the supervision of the state’s Municipal Accountability Review Board. Because of a federal criminal indictment announced a few weeks ago, the city discovered that it had been looted of $636,000 of its emergency federal epidemic assistance money, allegedly embezzled by its state representative, who had been double-dipping as a salaried assistant to the City Council.

Nevertheless, Mayor Nancy Rossi’s defense against the scandal right under her nose — her obliviousness — was accepted by the voters, who narrowly re-elected her Nov. 2.

Then enterprising journalism by the Connecticut Mirror found that apart from being embezzled, some of West Haven’s emergency federal money was also spent to hire a marching band for the city’s Memorial Day parade, to buy Christmas decorations, and to purchase services from a City Council member’s company. The New Haven Register already had reported that some of the federal money was spent to pay town officials for “compensatory time.”

While the state accountability board had placed an agent at City Hall, he missed the fraud as well. So maybe the board needs to be investigated as much as city government does.

In another state such a scandal might prompt the legislature to hold hearings to investigate. But Connecticut’s state legislators have left the corruption issue to federal prosecutors, just as the state’s own prosecutors have.

Nevertheless, an estimated $4 billion more in federal money will be sent to Connecticut for highway and bridge improvements under the “infrastructure” legislation recently approved by Congress. Connecticut Rep. Rosa L. DeLauro, chairwoman of the House Appropriations Committee, says the money is all about “jobs, jobs, jobs.”

But thousands of jobs, including many highly paid jobs in manufacturing, are already open in the state and can’t be filled. Indeed, that marching band for the West Haven parade had to be imported from New York.

At least the federal infrastructure money may demolish the long-running argument for reimposing tolls on Connecticut highways. The money also may demolish the argument for joining what is called the Transportation Climate Initiative, an increase in the wholesale tax on gasoline in the name of raising money for less-polluting modes of transportation.

And if, as many members of Congress hope, their next spending bill includes a national program of paid family and medical leave, Connecticut will be able to repeal its own recently enacted program, for which the state income tax was raised by a half percent.

Federal money is considered better than state money because it can be created without taxation and thus can seem free — as long as people don’t start wondering why their fast-food hamburger and fries now cost more than $10 and gasoline more than $3 per gallon.

Whatever happens, government in Connecticut already has far more emergency federal money than it knows what to do with. That’s why some has been spent on a marching band.

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COMING OR GOING?: Governor Lamont and other dignitaries gathered Nov. 3 to celebrate the revival of Tweed New Haven Airport, which is the new East Coast hub for startup Avelo Airlines. There are great plans for Tweed — lengthening its runway to handle larger jetliners and construction of a terminal accommodating more traffic.

But Avelo is not what Connecticut really needs at Tweed. For the airline plans only flights to six cities in Florida, to which thousands of state residents relocate in the winter, often for tax purposes, the Sunshine State not taxing personal income.

Instead of more ways of sending people to Florida, Tweed and the New Haven area need flights to hub airports, like the American Airlines flights to Philadelphia and Charlotte that Tweed had until the virus epidemic devastated the travel industry.

If Tweed could recover those flights and gain flights to Chicago or Dallas, the airport would put New Haven on the national map for business development. Suddenly more people might have reason to come to Connecticut than to leave it.

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