Chris Powell: Designed to prohibit housing affordability
MANCHESTER, Conn.
Perhaps taking a hint from socialist Democrat Zohran Mamdani's successful campaign for mayor of New York City, whose slogan was “A city we can afford," politicians in both parties in Connecticut are taking “affordability" for their own platforms.
Some Connecticut Democrats, including Gov. Ned Lamont, have even attributed their party's success in this month's municipal elections to a supposed commitment to affordability. This is laughable. Far more votes were probably pushed toward the Democrats by the political chaos in Washington than by any achievement in “affordability" in Connecticut, though the six-week partial shutdown of the federal government was an entirely Democratic stunt, not President Trump's doing.
Yes, Connecticut's Democratic state administration hasn't raised taxes much lately, but municipal property taxes still go up because state law and policy determine much of how municipalities spend their money. These days there's not much difference between state and municipal finance.
Greenwich state Sen. Ryan Fazio, a candidate for the Republican nomination for governor next year, pressed the “affordability" theme in response to Lamont's declaration of candidacy for a third term.
“Governor Lamont's first eight years in office," Fazio said, “have seen Connecticut's electricity rates rise to the third-highest in the nation, and our economic growth plummet to fourth worst in the country. Families are struggling to make ends meet, while people and jobs are leaving our state. … I am running for governor to make our state more affordable and safe and create opportunities for all."
Connecticut's increasing unaffordability has been caused to a great extent by the explosion of federal spending and debt, for which the state's members of Congress, all Democrats, share responsibility.
But much of Connecticut's unaffordability is also caused by the state's own law and policy. Indeed, state law and policy virtually prohibit affordability by preventing ordinary efficiency in government, and affordability will never be achieved if this isn't spelled out.
For example, Connecticut didn't enact collective bargaining for government employees and binding arbitration for their union contracts in pursuit of affordability. Collective bargaining and binding arbitration for government employees had the effect of driving up government's costs, relieving elected officials of difficult responsibility, and sustaining a powerful special interest that serves as the army of the majority party, the Democrats.
These laws forbid ordinary democratic control and accountability in public administration.
Connecticut didn't enact its minimum budget requirement for school systems in pursuit of affordability. The minimum budget requirement, which virtually prohibits economizing in school systems even if student enrollment falls substantially, was enacted to ensure that any financial savings in schools would be transferred to school employees, particularly teachers, rather than refunded to taxpayers.
Nor did Connecticut enact its “public benefits charges" -- essentially taxes on electricity -- to make life in the state more affordable but to conceal the costs of welfare and “green" energy programs in electricity bills so people would blame the electric utilities for electricity's high cost, though the utilities, at the command of state law, stopped generating electricity years ago and now only distribute it.
At least Republican state legislators, a small minority in the General Assembly, recently made an issue of the “public benefits charges" and the majority Democrats found them hard to defend, so some were removed from electric bills. But they were not eliminated. Instead state government now is paying for the “public benefits" with bond money, which will cost state residents even more in the long run.
The “public benefits charges" were an easy target. The special interests dependent on them, welfare recipients and self-styled environmentalists, are not so influential. But collective bargaining and binding arbitration for state and local government employees have huge special-interest constituencies, as does the minimum budget requirement for schools.
Those anti-affordability laws are far more expensive than the “public benefits charges," and no politician is likely to criticize them, though there will be little affordability in the state until they are repealed or reduced in scope.
Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years (CPowell@cox.net).
Chris Powell: Build housing without sprawl; are schools sanctuaries for illegals?
MANCHESTER, Conn.
Supposedly there was going to be a special session of the Connecticut General Assembly in the fall to arrange a compromise on the housing legislation passed by liberal Democratic legislators during this year's regular session but vetoed by Gov. Ned Lamont. Fall is here but neither the governor nor the legislature has issued such a call. It's not clear what's happening.
But in a commentary the other day the Yankee Institute's Meghan Portfolio argued that a special session would not be good for democracy. “Special sessions often operate in the shadows," she wrote. “Bills frequently don't appear until the very day of the vote, sometimes only hours before. Towns, taxpayers, and even rank-and-file legislators are left in the dark. This isn't policymaking. It's ambush politics."
Indeed, special-session legislation can get written by a few leaders without public participation and review. Only after its enactment are the “rats’’ in the legislation discovered -- provisions that never would have been approved if adequately publicized.
Connecticut's housing shortage is an urgent problem, the biggest factor in the state's outrageously high cost of living. But the thrust of the vetoed legislation -- reducing the obstructive influence of suburban zoning and imposing more rent control -- was never going to get much housing built quickly. Mainly the legislation would have let liberals feel better about themselves even as it made them hypocrites on environmental protection.
Many towns that have used zoning to exclude the middle and lower classes don't have the infrastructure necessary for higher-density housing -- water, sewer, and electrical systems, wide roads, and school capacity.
Of course their exclusive zoning was meant to keep things that way. But tearing up the countryside with more suburban sprawl to spite the bigoted snobs will have more disadvantages than it's worth when there is a much faster and more efficient way to build housing.
Connecticut's cities and inner suburbs are full of abandoned industrial property, decrepit tenements, and vacant or half-empty shopping centers. Many are eyesores. Additionally, much office space in the cities is vacant. All these properties are already served by the necessary infrastructure and redeveloping it as housing would do no environmental damage. Most of their neighbors might be glad if something shiny and new replaced the eyesores.
This is where Connecticut's urgent housing effort should concentrate, and that effort should be managed by a state housing development board, empowered to condemn decrepit or underused properties, take others by eminent domain, and option the properties to developers for market-rate housing, with the options withdrawn if developers fail to make quick progress.
A state whose leaders seem to think that the state government has enough money to buy the Connecticut Sun WNBA basketball team, when the state already has two nationally ranked public university teams, should have no trouble finding the money to build thousands of units of housing in a hurry. Or the state could skip the basketball team purchase and just build the housing instead.
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Governor Lamont is right to want federal immigration agents to stop wearing masks and to start wearing badges and clothing identifying them as government agents when they make arrests. Masked and unidentified and looking like gangsters, the agents invite getting shot or stabbed by their targets or bystanders. Connecticut U.S. Rep. John B. Larson has introduced legislation in Congress to stop the gangsterism.
But the governor recently went far beyond the sensible. He held a press conference with school superintendents to discourage immigration agents from making arrests at schools, though there seem to have been no such arrests in Connecticut. The governor said he wants everyone to “feel safe" in school.
Why should people “feel safe" anywhere in the country if their presence is illegal? Why should immigration law not apply inside a school? If, as the governor, state Atty. Gen. William Tong, and many state legislators keep insisting -- that Connecticut is not a “sanctuary state" -- what would the governor make schools if not a sanctuary?
Of course journalists spared the governor the trouble of explaining. When obvious questions are politically incorrect, they can't be asked.
Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years (CPowell@cox.net).