🔒The infrastructure investment fraud

Some commentators may have missed the snarling irony of the moment. Gov. Dannel Malloy will soon approve the Democratic Party budget, the most progressive budget in state history and Connecticut's second most expensive budget in state history.

The current budget provides “$436 million in sales tax receipts over the next two years to stabilize transportation finances and back a major infrastructure overhaul,” according to a story in CTMirror incongruously titled “Proposed state budget diverts most new transportation dollars.” The much neglected story was filed two days before the Malloy-Sharkey-Looney budget was finally passed in an Emergency Certification (E-Cert) measure.

The government of Connecticut is authorized by statute to bypass during emergencies the usual legislative process. The familiar process involves such unavoidable detours as public hearings, the presentation of bills to legislators called upon to vote for or against them, and a certain amount of leisure to consider legislation and offer amendments; in short, what we were once taught to call in civic high school classes — when there were such rigorous offerings in high school — the rudiments of democratic government.

The term “emergency” calls to mind the kinds of floods now rampaging through Texas. That is the kind of emergency Connecticut legislators imagined when they wrote the E-Cert bill; floods, destructive snow storms, brimstone blasts from an angry Republican God. A budget that fails to pass the legislature by a set date does not qualify as an “emergency” by any stretch of the word, especially since budget sessions are easily extended beyond their past-due dates.

So then, why did Democrats — who have dominated the state legislature since 1965 — package the budget as an E-Cert bill? The answer to the question is simple: Democrats in the General Assembly did not want hearings or debates from the party of opposition. They wanted to marginalize their political opponents, and they had the political heft to do it. During his first budget, democrat (note the small “d”) Malloy shut Republicans — who represent a little less than half of the voting public — out of the budget process. The autocratic Democrat now has repeated his performance of 2011. The one-party state, when it has seized power, lusts after efficiency — not democracy.

It wants to make trains run on time. It wants to repair and in part reinvent Connecticut's crumbling infrastructure. Autocrats in a real democracy would be thrown out on their ears for having a) convinced the general public that a 30-year, $100 billion expenditure on infrastructure repair is necessary to the future prosperity of the state; b) pressed Democrats in the legislature to provide funding for the project and then, as the CTMirror story notes:

“While the tentative state budget deal technically dedicates $436 million in sales tax receipts over the next two years to stabilize transportation finances and back a major infrastructure overhaul, that same spending plan effectively diverts more than 85 percent of those funds for non-transportation programs.

“At the same time the receipts are assigned to transportation, another $371 million in general fund resources normally earmarked for transportation would stay in the general fund — which is facing big deficits in the coming biennium.”

Shall we pause over these delicious paragraphs and consider: Following the passage of the Democratic Party budget, which was hustled through the Democrat-dominated General Assembly at the close of a legislative session in an E-Cert bill that brooked no debate, no amendments, no careful deliberation, Malloy will sign a measure that diverts to the general fund more than 85 percent of monies that were to be put into an untouchable lockbox for the governor's bread-and-circus infrastructure repair program. And an additional $371 million earmarked for the same purpose will remain in the progressive Democratic Party's slush fund, where most lockbox dedicated funds end up to patch holes in budgets created by destitute General Assembly Democrats.

Is that not a delicious piece of political knavery? The fraud is glaringly immense.

However, it will not be long before the evident fraud is forgotten. One expects that even Connecticut's unitary-tax whipped Big Three — Travelers, Aetna, and General Electric — their eyes fixed on the exit signs, will make necessary accommodations without reducing their campaign contributions to the progressive Democrats in Connecticut's executive, judicial, and legislative three ring circus.

Don Pesci is a writer who lives in Vernon. Contact him at donpesci@att.net.