With the official arrival of summer, it feels like time for some short-attention-span commentary:
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Like hay fever, watching party primary rivals vigorously agreeing with each other is a seasonal affliction. Once we reach mid-August and the electoral field is set, the pitch to the ideological base fades and the rush to the center begins. The focus shifts to partisan bashing, which is a better spectator sport.
Still, primary season does provide an early look at which special interest groups need to be circling their forces for a defensive stand. This cycle, that would seem to be public employee unions and mid-level bureaucrats.
Candidate after candidate is calling for concessions and reform, particularly in the area of public pensions. Look for some loud howling and likely some job actions. Nobody likes to be told they are overpaid.
The drama unfolding in New Britain may serve as a canary in the coal mine. There the school board rejected concessions offered by the teachers union as short-term fixes cloaked in a plan that makes matters worse downstream. There was a time when public officials would have made that trade, reasoning the crisis would come on somebody else’s watch. But perhaps that kind of thinking is finally receding.
Similarly, the Service Employees International Union is using the nursing home pay dispute as a testing ground for its media tactics ahead of a larger fight over state employee pay and benefits. While the 5,500 nursing home workers aren’t state employees, their pay comes from the same now empty public trough. The parallels are too many to ignore.
There also seems near universal agreement that there are too many state agencies performing similar tasks. Cooler heads could see a wave of consolidation that turns out a crop of department heads, deputies, counsels and HR folks in the interest of cutting overhead, not services.
Whether the change comes from a Democrat or a Republican, the state’s fiscal mess says quite loudly: Bring it on.
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The Legislature’s stay in Hartford was mercifully short and surprisingly well reasoned. Governor Rell was overruled on six vetoes, several of which seemed like Rell auditioning for a new career playing Don Quixote.
She vetoed a major transportation bill because she objected to a bit of pork involving rebuilding a parking garage in Stamford. Some senators agreed with her but the House vote was 138-0. Similarly, she had whacked a major environmental bill because she felt a proposed transfer station in Newtown was too close to a watershed. Wrong, the Legislature said, by a unanimous vote.
Both are highly principled stands and likely wise objections. But raising them in a veto was simply bad theater. The place to make those arguments effectively is much earlier in the process.
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There’s some serious business being done in a federal court in Bridgeport. Members of the Quinnipiac University women’s volleyball team are suing over the university’s decision to kill their program in favor of starting a competitive cheer team. Cheering isn’t a sport, they contend.
This isn’t exactly what the framers of Title IX had in mind 38 years ago when they set out to even the playing field for women in collegiate athletics at a time when a disproportionate amount of funding was going to men’s programs. But it is a sign of our litigious times.
Perhaps a better course would have been to figure out a market-based solution that draws fans. It worked for UConn women’s basketball, which today is a shining example of what can be done.
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And finally, what in the world was Eddie Perez thinking in leaving the city of Hartford twisting in the wind for more than a week? He has every right to maintain his innocence and launch an appeal. But there was no good reason not to resign immediately after the guilty verdict. The city has lost a massive amount of time and forward momentum as the corruption drama played out. Adding another week waiting on Perez seems like adding insult to injury. Hartford deserved better.
