Stefanowski Stirs The Pot

Archimedes' Lever

"Give me a lever long enough and a fulcrum on which to place it, and I shall move the world” -- Archimedes

Two days into the New Year, a piece written by Bob Stefanowski, What Isn’t the Matter With Hartford?, appeared in the Wall Street Journal, after which the mouth of Hell opened and belched forth fire and brimstone.

The over-reaction to Stefanowski's op-ed may be understood as a preliminary shot over the bow of a future Republican Party candidate for governor.

Stefanowski ran for governor on the Republican ticket in 2018, losing to present Governor Ned Lamont – Connecticut’s Sun King -- by a slender 3.17% of the vote, a more than respectable showing. Democrat voters outnumber Republicans in the state by a two to one margin. Since then, Stefanowski has kept his finger on the political pulse of Connecticut.

One of the damning criticisms of Stefanowski during the 2018 gubernatorial campaign was that he was a newcomer to Connecticut politics, unfamiliar with nuances in a state in which Democrats have ruled the roost for nearly a half century – especially in its cities, always reliable Democrat campaign reservations. Creaky party machinery in the state’s largest cities has made it possible for Democrats to win most elections in Connecticut, and the state now is firmly in Democrat-progressive hands.

Republican fiscal conservative and social moderates have been purged from the Connecticut all-Democrat US Congressional Delegation; the state’s General Assembly has been dominated by Democrats ever since former Republican U.S. Senator Lowell Weicker, running for governor as a Maverick, the awkward title of his biography, graced the state with an income tax, having vetoed as governor three balanced non-income tax budgets.

Stefanowski’s op-ed piece was a bit too granular for his critics, among them Luke Bronin, Mayor of Hartford, and John Larson, U.S.-Congressman-for-life in Connecticut’s 1^st District, one of the safest Democrat congressional seats in the nation.  The last time the 1^st District fell to a Republican was in 1957; Larson has occupied the seat for 22 years. The last time the Hartford mayoralty fell to a Republican was 50 years ago in 1971, when Bronin was -9 years old. Neither Bronin nor Larson has much to fear from a future potential Stefanowski gubernatorial bid. And yet their responses to Stefanowski’s op-ed were full of personal buckshot.

In classic “blame the messenger” style, Bronin accosted Stefanowski rather in the manner of a medieval lord of the manor dressing down his house staff: “I guess Bob Stefanowski wanted to remind us that he has zero understanding of Hartford or any Connecticut cities, zero passion for our state, zero experience doing the difficult work of lifting up a community — and zero chance to be governor of a state that he loves to root against.”

Larson fumed in Twitter, “Recently Bob Stefanowski wrote an op-ed in the @WSJ. I find it interesting that people who claim to have the interest of a city at heart, criticize, but never offer a solution or put a plan on paper. They tell you what they’re not for and what’s wrong, but they don’t tell you how to fix it. It’s easy to criticize, it’s much harder to come up with solutions. Those were missing from Mr. Stefanowski’s campaign plans.”

Joshua Michtom, a Democratic member of the Hartford city council, twittered, “To be clear, Hartford has a lot of problems. But Stefanowski diagnoses them all exactly backwards. He is consistently and astonishingly wrong.”

Why the over-reaction? Why the public battering? Why so intense?

The reaction should be viewed primarily as a bid for media commendation. And the media appears ready and able to accommodate the unresponsive criticisms of unchallenged politicians. The paper that printed the reactions of Bronin and Larson to Stenanowski’s charges did not think it necessary to reprint in its pages Stefanowski’s Wall Street Journal piece before the critical remarks of Bronin and others were featured in the paper, so that its readers might determine for themselves whether Stefanowski knows little of cities and therefore is incapable of “coming up with solutions” to problems that all of Stefanowski’s critics agree have persisted for decades in Hartford and other of Connecticut’s major cities.

Indeed, it would not be unreasonable to suppose Harford’s problems have persisted for decades because the city has for decades been overseen by Democrats chronically unable properly to analyze urban problems or propose workable solutions. The political solutions applied by ruling Democrats in Hartford so far have been, to quote Michtom, “consistently and astonishingly wrong.”

Does anyone suppose journalistic contumely will not in due course gush like blood from Stefanowski’s severed jugular vein? His Wall Street Journal op-ed is a place outside Connecticut’s incestuous left of center media in which it may be possible to move the political conversation beyond the usual boring rehashing in editorial and op-ed pieces of much thumbed incumbent Democrat press releases.

Nothing can be more obvious than what is needed at the moment to lift both Hartford and Connecticut from its downward spiral is a lever long enough, a fulcrum and an Archimedes.

The readers will find, immediately following, the whole of Stefanowski’s Wall Street Journal op-ed piece rendered in italics so that they may determine for themselves whether Stefanowski’s piece was occasioned by smoldering urban hatred and analytical ignorance.

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What Isn’t the Matter With Hartford?

Once famous as the insurance capital of the world, Connecticut’s capital city is falling apart.

The Hartford Courant has had a presence in Connecticut’s capital city for 250 years. Last month the paper’s owners announced that its newsroom would close for good. The Courant will continue to publish, but its reporters and editors will no longer work the phones in its downtown offices. Some journalists may consider the shift to remote work a relief. Hartford is the state’s most dangerous city and, by some measures, among the most dangerous cities in the country.

Once famous as the “insurance capital of the world,” Hartford has been in decline for 30 years. In the 1990s, Hartford’s population hemorrhage made national news. Today it is smaller still, less than 70% of what it was in 1950. Hartford’s poverty rate is one of the highest in the nation. The city is falling apart.

Even before the pandemic, WalletHub.com ranked Hartford 46th among state capitals in affordability, economic well-being, education, health and quality of life. The past nine months are unlikely to have improved that ranking.

The city spends more than $400 million annually on education ($17,260 per student) yet nearly 30% of its students don’t graduate high school on time. Only 18% of students in grades 3 through 8 test at age-appropriate levels in math, and 25% do so in reading.

Hartford has been governed almost exclusively by Democrats since 1948. The city’s sole Republican mayor during that time, Antonina Uccello, left office in 1971. Earlier this year Mayor Luke Bronin, 41, embraced the progressive mantra to “defund the police” and reduced the city’s public-safety budget by $2 million, or 6%. The spike in gun violence that followed required Mr. Bronin to ask Gov. Ned Lamont, also a Democrat, to send in the Connecticut State Police. There were more than 200 shootings in the city through the first 11 months of the year—making it Hartford’s most violent year in at least a decade.

What does Mr. Bronin think is responsible? A Connecticut Public Radio report put it bluntly: “The mayor blames the explosion of gun violence in his city on COVID-19.”

Mr. Bronin was elected in 2015 and re-elected in 2019. As a former senior official in the Obama Treasury Department, he seemed—on paper, at least—like the right man for the job of turning around a city plagued by deep and persistent fiscal problems. Hartford suffers from excessive debt levels, large amounts of tax-exempt government property, runaway pension costs, structural budget deficits, and a property-tax rate that is the highest in the state.

Instead of putting a plan in place to correct decades of fiscal mismanagement, Mr. Bronin headed to the suburbs to pitch a zany left-wing idea. Progressives call it “regionalism.” Sane people call it a tax grab.

Hartford was critical to the entire region’s success, Mr. Bronin argued, so the surrounding suburbs should share their tax revenue with the city and absorb some of its costs. This, he argued, was essential to ensuring Hartford’s fiscal stability. “You can’t be a suburb of nowhere,” he told residents of West Hartford, a separate municipality. Not surprisingly, West Hartford and other adjacent towns sent Mr. Bronin packing.

In an attempt to shake a state bailout from Gov. Dannel Malloy, Mr. Lamont’s Democratic predecessor, Mr. Bronin drew up plans for Hartford’s bankruptcy in 2017. The threat proved effective. Mr. Malloy knew that a bankrupt capital city would be a black eye for Connecticut, as Harrisburg had been for Pennsylvania in 2011, so he agreed to let Connecticut taxpayers pick up all of Hartford’s general obligation debt, about $534 million, over the next three decades.

With Hartford’s financial problems “solved,” Mr. Bronin abandoned all pretense of reform and is focused exclusively on promoting regionalism, the justification for which has lately shifted from cost savings to racial and economic equity. DesegregateCT, a new nonprofit founded by Sara Bronin—an architect, law professor, and the mayor’s wife—claims that “outdated” zoning laws make the state’s small towns unaffordable and, therefore, responsible for concentrations of urban poverty.

The horrible economic policies of the politicians—and public-employee unions—who run Connecticut’s cities evidently has nothing to do with the condition they are in.

Instead of taking zoning control away from well-managed towns across the state, Mr. Lamont should work with mayors to fix their cities’ fundamental structural problems. Bailouts may hide those problems for a while, but they’ll return eventually.

Families in Hartford and cities across Connecticut have been waiting decades for true reform. Private charities have helped fill the gaps left by weak political leaders, but fixing Connecticut’s broken cities will require difficult decisions. Short-term bailouts won’t cut it. Neither will false claims about the efficacy of regionalism or other progressive pipe dreams.

Connecticut desperately needs leaders who are willing to confront special-interest groups and reform the pensions that are crushing city budgets. Cities like Hartford need to lower taxes and reduce regulations to attract business and create jobs.

Mayors need to clean up troubled neighborhoods and address crime, invest in charter and magnet schools, and allow education funding to follow the child, giving parents the ability to choose where their kids go to school, rather than trapping them in underperforming districts.

None of this is easy. None of it is fast. And none of it is politically expedient or likely to be supported by powerful public-sector unions—which probably explains why, at least in Connecticut, none of it happens.