Connecticut Commentary: Red Notes from a Blue State

No one has yet asked Ned Lamont – according to recent polls, Connecticut’s next governor – how he plans to bring the state’s public employee unions to heel. Connecticut’s unionized, tax supported UConn Health Center is now, for all practical purposes, bankrupt. “As a public institution with a large share of unionized physicians and staff,” The Hartford Courant notes in a recent story, the UConn Health Center faces “added challenges. Pension liabilities for its more than 2,300 employees increased from $1.2 billion in 2016 to an anticipated $2.3 billion this year.”

Governor Dannel Malloy, it would appear from recent news accounts, is frantically attempting to put himself right with unionized teachers. The Malloy-teacher romance hit a rough spot when a few months ago Mr. Malloy said of teachers who were resisting his pedagogical reforms, “All they have to do is show up.” Mr. Malloy meant that teacher tenure tended to protect failing teachers from any and all attempts to displace them. The Malloy pedagogical reforms were designed to overleap tenure and displace poor teachers by setting standards against which the effectiveness of teachers in the classroom could be objectively measured. Teachers falling below the set standards would be given the opportunity of taking remedial courses. After a certain point, if the inadequate teachers failed to measure up, they would be dismissed. Whole school systems were put on notice that similar standards would be employed to measure the performance of principals and superintendents.

Twice in the last 18 months, Governor Dannel Malloy has visited the Litchfield Area Business Association with a soothing message. Mentioning two devastating storms and the Sandy Hook Elementary school slaughter, Mr. Malloy told the group that Connecticut had endured “very difficult circumstances,” and yet the resilient people of Connecticut “continue to demonstrate their great charity, their great willingness to work together and pull in the same direction. And I’m very thankful for all of that.” Mr. Malloy then turned to the business at hand – the state of business in the state over which he presides as governor. Small businesses in Connecticut drive job growth, Mr. Malloy said. “Now, the area that we’re investing most of our time, at least, is small business. The bottom line is: I don’t want to be a governor who presides over years of job loss. I want to be a governor who presides over years of job gain.”

The old saying has it: You can’t beat City Hall. Municipal government is too big to beat. State government is bigger and, presumably, harder to beat. The federal government is mountainously big, On the matter of taxes, all three unbeatables tend to hunker down whenever the little guy attempts to deny any of them their daily revenue fix. In a “special session” of Connecticut’s General Assembly, usually called to tidy up legislative loose ends from the regular session, the Democratic dominated legislature this year closed what one newspaper styled in an editorial “an expensive loophole in the law that allowed tobacco shops with roll your own machines to sell professional style cigarettes at about half the cost of packaged ones.” By “expensive” the paper intended to indicate the potential loss in revenue to the state. And the “loophole?” Sensing a loss in revenue should smoke shops be permitted to sell cigarettes at half price, the tax hungry administration of Governor Da...

UConn is raising its tuition. Is anyone surprised? The surprise, if any, might be checked at the door after reading the latest edition of Ted Mann’s magnum opus covering the first year of Connecticut’s first Democratic governor in twenty years. Both Governor Dannel Malloy and the crowd of Malloyalists surrounding him are highly ambitious. They believe previous governors have been treading water. The state now has a progressive reformist at the helm who wants to “reinvent – his word – the state of Connecticut. As is the case with most modern progressives, education is a political palliative – good for what ails you; when you run out of options, boost education. Reformation, naturally, is costly, but politically popular. In the hands of Mr. Malloy and the Democratic legislature, any reform of education is likely to advance the interests of teachers at the expense of taxpayers. Jonathan Pelto, himself an ardent liberal, reminds us that Mr. Malloy pointedly did not extend his “Share...

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...

Two reliable economic forecasters, Goldman Sachs and Macroeconomic Advisors, have downgraded their previous economic forecasts, according to The New York Times : “Two months ago, Goldman Sachs projected that the economy would grow at a 4 percent annual rate in the quarter ending in June. The company now expects the government to report no more than 2 percent growth when data for the second quarter is released in a few weeks. “Macroeconomic Advisers, a research firm, projected 3.5 percent growth back in April and is now down to just 2.1 percent for this quarter.” Chief United States economist at Goldman Sachs Jan Hatzius, peering through clouded skies, said he could not rule out yet another recession: “We’re still a reasonable way off from that,” he said. “But I’m not as confident as I would like to be.” Connecticut is in the grip of a long hard recession. During the state’s last soft recession, it took about ten years to recover jobs lost, and this was at a time when the fede...

Both Republican governors John Rowland and Jodi Rell used to refer to themselves as “firewalls,” usually after they had compromised with Democratic leaders in the General Assembly to pass budgets that present Governor Dannel Malloy has often characterized as bags of tricks and treats. Mr. Malloy has insisted that his budget, still being hammered out by his agents and representatives of unions, is, on the other hand, transparent and honest-- a good thing. No tricks or treats there. No smoke, no mirrors, the sort of budget one might expect from a governor wearing a white hat who is not the plaything of special interests. The firewall disappeared altogether after Mr. Malloy became governor. The Rell-Rowland firewall was not fireproof. Had it been so, Connecticut’s bottom budget line could not have tripled within the space of three governors, and the state would not now rank first in the nation in per capita debt. It would not be losing jobs to New Jersey and New York and Massachusetts. ...

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...

The Whistleblower Trap Priscilla Dickman, all 5 foot 2 of her, has been wiggling on former Attorney General Richard Blumenthal’s torture rack for six agonizing years. The end in sight keeps disappearing over the horizon whenever her case comes to a decision point. Ms. Dickman, a union steward when she was in the employ of the UConn Heath Center (UCHC), all 110 pounds of her, is still fighting for what most of us would consider decent justice, but it eludes her whenever she stretches out her hand to grasp it. Not that she is dispirited, not at all. She has been conducting the civil side of her case pro se (by her self) and in the intervening six years has cast serious doubt on the proposition that a fool has himself for a lawyer. The criminal and civil side of her case is being handled by John Geida of Embry Neuser, while Norm Pattis is handling Ms. Dickman’s habeas charge of innocence. Early on in Ms. Dickman’s ordeal, she was represented for a number of years by union lawyers who ...