Connecticut Commentary: Red Notes from a Blue State

In a potentially explosive Hartford Courant story , reporter Josh Kovner discloses that no fewer than seven – possibly more – lawsuits claiming sexual harassment and workplace retaliation by UConn Health Center administrators have been filed against that part of the UCHC branch that provides mental-health and medical services to the state prison system. Two women involved in two of the cases, Mr. Kovner reports, “both seasoned clinical social workers at different high-security prisons, said that nothing an inmate ever did or said to them ever made them feel as uncomfortable and compromised as did the actions of a UConn correctional health care manager or a co-worker.” The cluster of law suits filed between mid-May and September, Mr. Kovner reports, “is the largest cluster of employment cases to hit management at Correctional Managed Health Care since the UConn Health Center first assumed the no-bid contract with the Department of Correction in the mid-1990s. The contract, now hover...

Continuing a policy of picking winners and losers, the Malloy administration has decided to throw dollars it does not have at the UConn Health Center, a losing proposition described in a news story written by reporter Chris Keating of the Hartford Courant in less than flattering terms. “ Concerning UConn's continuing fiscal problems,” Mr. Keating wrote, “a longtime Capitol insider described the health center as ‘a burning tire around the state's neck.’ “The health center has had chronic financial problems, and the legislature has bailed out the Farmington institution four times since 2000. The huge infusion of funds often comes on the last day of the legislative session, which this year is June 8.” Upon hearing that Mr. Malloy intends to spend $864 million on the health center, $136 million short of the $1 billion surplus Mr. Malloy and Democrats in the legislature furtively tucked into their budget, Republican Party Chairman Chris Healy, admittedly a partisan, said, “The...

A splendidly written and researched story in Sunday’s Harford Courant by Josh Kovner and Jon Lender , demonstrates that the state’s attorney’s general office has become a money operation more interested in cash than justice. The story calls into question a case prosecuted by Attorney General Richard Blumenthal, sometimes mentioned in press reports as a desirable Democratic candidate for governor or U.S. senator. The owners of a Brookfield quarry, Rock Acquisition Limited Partnership, convinced their property had been undervalued by two appraisers, the last hired by Blumenthal, took their case to court and were fortunate enough to have the issue decided by Superior Court Judge Barbara J. Sheedy, who was attentive to the facts of the case. Here are the facts: 1) The quarry owners questioned an appraisal of their property, taken by the state to allow the construction of a Route 7 highway bypass near Brookfield that opened last month. The owners thought their property was ...