In an era of shock and awe, Governor Malloy’s ‘Plan B’ budget is stunning for its transparency.
The devastation is so uneven, so far off the principal of ‘shared sacrifice’ and so unworkable as to be dismissed as just bargaining histrionics.
Take, for example, the howls from agricultural exporters who recognized that if the state shuts the single inspection station in New Haven, 40 percent of their business — the share that exports represent — is imperiled. So much for increasing the state’s exports. Maybe closing that station makes sense, but only when an alternative is evident and the shock-and-awe approach of the Malloy team makes no effort to outline a workable substitute.
How about leveling the Department of Education? Is shutting all 17 vocational schools and laying off 80 percent of the department’s staff a plausible scenario or a warning shot in the general direction of people like Rep. Roberta Willis, the Democrat who disagreed with Malloy’s plan to fold the state university system and the community colleges together? What’s Plan B for these students? The goal is clearly to frighten, not to develop sound, cost-cutting policy.
Are we really going to shut off funds to fight insects carrying West Nile virus or set loose thousands of felons? How about tossing a hand grenade into municipal government finance just days before the start of their fiscal years? Or turning the key on the state library?
Talking about all of these things does share the fear and that’s really the game plan here. But it’s a shameful commentary on the level of our political discourse. Rather than posturing, we need to get to substantive policy discussions about how to operate this state with fewer resources, the same calculation the private sector has been wrestling with for years.
Let’s get serious and move on to ‘Plan C’ as quickly as possible. The folks leading state employee unions are not dumb. They can tell the prevailing wind is not in their favor. Maybe they can’t give up $2 billion, but they can and will cough up something substantial. When they do, we can start back filling the budget.
Yes, some of that process is likely to be painful. But at least it will be real. Don’t throw out a set of trial balloons. Tell us what you think will work best and let’s start discussing those options.
Time is now short. Please, spare us the orchestrated drama of ‘Plan B’ and get on with the kind of budget debate taxpayers have every right to expect.
Be careful with ISO
State Sen. John Fonfara seems to have found an ally in his quest to extract the state from the regional electricity purchasing system that he feels is a key factor in keeping Connecticut energy costs high.
Dan Esty, the state’s new environmental and energy czar, supports a fresh look at the system that artificially rewards owners of the Millstone nuclear plant while artificially gouging Connecticut energy buyers.
But in the world of energy, nothing is ever as easy as it seems. While the pricing scheme clearly is flawed, it still might be better than the alternative. And the reward for tampering with the pricing model may be relatively small. The real gain would come from confronting the underlying problem — we consume much more power than we produce and the high costs are in the transmission of power into the state.
Nobody wants a potential hazard or an eyesore in their backyard. But at some point we’re going to need to recognize that the price of denial is just too high.
We’re rooting for Fonfara and Esty to find a better way. But let’s proceed cautiously here lest we make a bad situation worse.
