Keith Phaneuf of CTMirror, who rather enjoys letting cats
out of bags, remarks
in a recent column that Governor Dannel Malloy will have some
leverage in his negotiations with unions next time around. These negotiations
materially affect state budgets. While it is true that the governor’s
constitutional responsibility ends with his presentation of his budgets to the
General Assembly, the Democrat dominated body has been anxious in the past to
satisfy its constituency, the most politically active part of which is state
employee union members.
In the past, the strife between Mr. Malloy and SEBAC, the union
conglomerate authorized to make deals with the governor – but not,
significantly, with Republican legislators constitutionally charged with writing and
balancing budgets-- has been something of a kabuki theater, featuring fierce, masked
players swinging wildly at each other with paper swords. After the governor
presents his budget to legislators, the budget often is reworked by legislators
and then submitted to Mr. Malloy for his signature. During his first term,
Republican leaders in the General Assembly having been sequestered, Malloy
received from the Democrat dominated General Assembly plenipotentiary powers to
make post-contract changes in the budget without bothering to resubmit the
final product to the people’s representatives for approval. Mr. Malloy on that
occasion took the political bullet for his Democratic pals in the legislature
prior to an important election.
From all appearances, Mr. Malloy, approval rating 29 percent,
appears to be readying himself to receive another political shot.
Mr. Phaneuf reports that Mr. Malloy’s budget includes “$800
million for state employee raises — an amount that far exceeds anything Malloy
set aside before and doubles the funding his staff estimated was necessary just
five months earlier.” The governor is seeking “$1.6 billion in union
concessions to close major deficits in the next two-year state budget.”
However, in order to obtain such concessions, “Connecticut may have to extend a
controversial benefits contract — guaranteeing pensions and retirement health
care to workers.”
Malloy’s stratagem reduces to rubble a position he took
during every one of his campaigns that sloughed off both his pending
responsibilities and those of the Democrat dominated General Assembly on the
felonious John Rowland, who pushed twenty year union contracts well beyond his
own gubernatorial terms in office. How bitterly Democrats during their
campaigns complained of the yoke Mr. Rowland had put about their necks. What
can we do, they sang in chorus, when Mr. Rowland and Mrs. Rell, both Republican
governors, have bound our hands in union contract tape for twenty years
out? It will and has been noted that Mr.
Malloy, in his present budget, is proposing the same Rowland era union
trade-off. Under Mr. Malloy’s kabuki plan, state employee unions are to concede
to a $1.6 billion temporary cost reduction, in return for which Mr. Malloy will push their benefits package out well
beyond the termination of present union contracts – without making any serious
attempt to reduce pension costs.
Extended contracts, everyone knows, bind future governors
to unaffordable contracts and crowds out spending that is necessary to run
state government rationally and efficiently. We know that Democrats in the
General Assembly who will sign off on the upcoming SEBAC-Malloy secret contract
negotiations appreciate this point because they have been pressing it against
Mr. Rowland and former Governor Jodi Rell relentlessly in all of their
reelection campaigns. Connecticut’s pension debt is not our fault; we inherited
these problems from previous Republican governors – whose budgets we rejiggered
to satisfy union demands.
And here is the penultimate kick in the teeth: “Most funding
for raises in the new budget,” Mr. Phaneuf reports, “is included in the Reserve
for Salary Adjustments (RSA) — a line item commonly used to cover raises that
might be awarded after the budget is adopted (emphasis mine).” When has
this happened before?
And the final kick in Connecticut’s teeth? Mr. Malloy has
proposed that municipalities absorb one third of the state’s second highest in
the nation pension debt, which necessarily will entail a) an increase in
municipal property taxes or b) severe reductions in spending that Mr. Malloy,
SEBAC and union-reliant Democratic progressives in the General Assembly are
unwilling to undertake.
One can almost see Mr. Malloy’s highly partisan chest
expanding to receive future political bullets for his party, which has not,
will not, and cannot, accept permanent union pension reforms without suffering
a severe fall-off in union votes.
Viewing the coming crack-up from the Republican side of the
political barricades, House Republican Minority leader Themis Klarides said, “Our
biggest concern, overall, is the potential extension of the current SEBAC
agreement … The whole key to our state’s future fiscal well-being is tied to
that issue, and what concessions the governor might obtain in return,” a considerable
understatement.
Pushing out contractual agreements with unions binds future
governors to unaffordable contracts and crowds out spending that in the future
must be reformed if Connecticut is to survive the winter of its discontent.
Everybody knows this, including those legislators on the left, reflexively
anxious to mollify unions, who will eagerly mortgage the futures of
Connecticut’s children, the brightest and most enterprising of whom will pull
up their roots and move to a less tax punishing state. The
fix that fixes nothing already is in, and everyone knows it.
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